allowing students to pursue their interests in the context of the curriculum
Teachers must be colearners with kids, expert at asking great, open-ended
questions and modeling the learning process required to answer those questions.
Teachers should be master learners in the classroom
developing the skills and dispositions necessary for them to learn whatever they
need to learn whenever they need to learn it? That means rethinking classrooms
to focus on individual passions, inquiry, creation, sharing, patient problem
solving, and innovation
start with the questions that focus on our students
Instead of helping our students become "college ready," we might be better off
making them "learning ready," prepared for any opportunity that might present
itself down the road
With access, and with a full set of skills and literacies to use this access
well, we now have the power to create our own education in any number of ways
manage, analyze, and synthesize multiple streams of simultaneous information
Some, like Stanford professor Howard Rheingold, believe that technology now
requires an attention literacy—the ability to exert some degree of mental
control over our use of technology rather than simply being distracted by it—for
users to be productive. Professor Henry Jenkins at the Massachusetts Institute
of Technology (MIT) advocates for transmedia literacy, which
includes networking and performance skills that take advantage of this
connected, audience-rich moment.
it's about addressing the new needs of modern learners in entirely new ways. And
once we understand that it's about learning, our questions reframe
themselves in terms of the ecological shifts we need to make: What do we mean by
learning? What does it mean to be literate in a networked, connected world? What
does it mean to be educated? What do students need to know and be able to do to
be successful in their futures? Educators must lead inclusive conversations in
their communities around such questions to better inform decisions about
technology and change
Right now, we should be asking ourselves not just how to do school better, but
how to do it decidedly differently
Learning is now truly participatory in real-world contexts. The transformation
occurs in that participation, that connection with other learners outside school
walls with whom we can converse, create, and publish authentic, meaningful,
beautiful work
what do we do as schools become just one of many places in both the real and
virtual world where our students can get an education?
Welcome to what portends to be the messiest, most upheaval-filled 10 years in
education that any of us has ever seen. Resistance, as they say, is futile
"Putting technology first-simply adding a layer of expensive tools on top of the traditional curriculum-does nothing to address the new needs of modern learners."