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But those schools and classrooms that have embraced mobile devices have seen them as a catalyst for change in teaching, learning, and assessment, says Julie Evans, the chief executive officer of the Irvine, Calif.-based Project Tomorrow, a national education nonprofit group that promotes technology use in the classroom. "The access of having a [mobile] device in your hand changes the way that classroom environment feels," she says. "Students are walking around with the devices, doing things to get them out of the structured environment of the traditional school."

there have been four fundamental changes in information technology since humans learned to speak.

Somewhere, around 4000 BC, humans learned to write.

codex replaced the scroll sometime soon after the beginning of the Christian era.

Calling on and sharing research and best practices will be crucial to district’s messaging. If tablets are the chosen devices, a district must be prepared to provide technologies for students to create, multi-task, store and produce robust results/activities in addition to what they will do on the limited functionality tablets…and they need to honestly share this need and solutions to provide additional device support. There is a much bigger picture and quality impact on education with authentic one-to-one implementations. It has to be about core vision, beliefs and strategies that complement what’s needed for learning and producing in the 21st century. It is not as simple as buying a cool tool. We can all have cool tools and have the same old, same old education system resulting in the same old, same old results.

 What do administrators, teachers, parents/guardians, etc., need to know and do differently in this changed state?

o transform teaching and learning to a student centered, personalized instructional setting, there are key components—project plan elements—that have to be addressed to be successful.  Leaders need to know, understand and guide the ‘change’ process. A 360 degree professional learning program must be embedded for all stakeholders. Teachers who will need to change their practices from adult-centered, static systems to student driven, experiential operations require time, guidance and learning communities to ensure the shift of practice. And overarching policies must direct the practices.

ecause what our students need to learn is changing, because our understanding of how learning works is changing, because the technology which enhances learning is changing.

“THE biggest myth is that if we save all the poor kids, we will destroy the planet,” says Hans Rosling

that it no longer makes sense to consider the world as divided between developing and industrialised countries; and that people everywhere respond similarly to increasing levels of wealth and health, with higher material aspirations and smaller families.

The best measure of political stability of a country, he believes, is whether fertility rates are falling, because that indicates that women are being educated and basic health services are being provided.

But it's not about the tools. It's not about layering expensive technology on top of the traditional curriculum. Instead, 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, the web requires us to reconsider the ecology of schools, not just the technologies we use in them. We must start long-term, broad, inclusive conversations about what teaching, learning, and being educated mean in light of the new technologies we now have available to us. Just like business, politics, journalism, music, and a host of other long-standing institutions that the web has rocked at their foundations, education will be and is being changed. To understand the implications fully, we need to start with the questions that focus on our students—and not just on the stuff.

If teachers are to help students change their incorrect beliefs, they first need to know what those are.

Knowledge of student misconceptions is a critical tool for science teachers. It can help teachers to decide which demonstration to do in class, and to start the lesson by asking students to predict what’s going to happen. If a teacher doesn’t have this special kind of knowledge, though, it’s nearly impossible to change students’ ideas.

But here are the solutions that this challenge brings to mind. Eliminate paper from the budget and remove all copiers and computer printers from schools and the central office (with exceptions of essential need). “On this date, everything goes digital.” Create a professional development plan where all faculty and staff learn to teach themselves within a networked, digital, and info-abundant environment — it’s about Learning-Literacy. Although workshops would not completely disappear, the goal would be a culture where casual, daily, and self-directed professional development is engaged, shared, and celebrated — everyday! Then extend the learning-literacy workshops to the greater adult community. Establish a group, representing teachers, staff, administration, students, and community. Invite a “guru” or two to speak to the group about the “Why” of transforming education.  Video or broadcast the speeches to the larger community via local access, etc. The group will then write a document that describes the skills, knowledge, appreciations and attitudes of the person who graduates from their schools — a description of their goal graduate. The ongoing work of writing this document will be available to the larger community for comment and suggestion. The resulting piece will remain fluidly adaptable. Teachers, school administrators, and support staff will work in appropriately assembled into overlapping teams to retool their curricula toward assuring the skills, knowledge, appreciations and attitudes of the district’s goal graduate. Classroom curricula will evolve based on changing conditions and resources. To help keep abreast of conditions, teachers and support staff will shadow someone in the community for one day at least once a year and debrief with their teams identifying the skills and knowledge they saw contributing to success, and adapt their curricula appropriately.

The district budget will be re-written to exclude all items that do not directly contribute to the goal graduate or to supporting the institution(s) that contribute to the goal graduate. Part of that budget will be the assurance that all faculty, staff, and students have convenient access to networked, digital, and abundant information and that access will be at least 1 to 1. A learning environment or platform will be selected such as Moodle, though I use that example only as a means of description. The platform will have elements of course management system, social network and distributive portfolio. The goal of the platform will be to empower learning, facilitate assessment, and exhibit earned knowledge and skills to the community via student (and teacher) published information products that are imaginative, participatory and reflect today’s prevailing information landscape. Expand the district’s and the community’s notions of assessment to include data mining, but also formal and informal teacher, peer, and community evaluation of student produced digital products. Encourage (or require) teachers to produce imaginative information products that share their learning either related or unrelated to what they teach.  Also establish learning events where teachers and staff perform TED, or TELL (Teachers Expressing Leadership in Learning) presentations about their passions in learning to community audiences. Recognize that change doesn’t end and facilitate continued adapting of all plans and documents. No more five-year plans. Everything is timelined to the goal graduate.

n the pursuit of these new learning environments we find ourselves asking those wonderfully fundamental questions: What are “the basics” and “basic literacy skills” today? How might our students best learn them? How are schools/classrooms/desks/subjects/schedules/teachers necessary to this learning process, and how are they not? And these are the best kinds of questions, because their best answers are just more questions. And so we find ourselves exactly where any great learner would want to be, on a quest, asking question after question after question.

nd here is the issue that I pose in Now You See It, the one that keeps me up at night:   how do you prepare kids for an increasingly indefinite, rapidly changing job world, in an era of high-speed technological change and global competitiveness, where what is required for success is (I’m quoting the first set of problems the bubble test is not intended to address) is:  “intellectual dexterity, higher order thinking, associational thinking, problem solving, collaborative thinking, complex analysis, the ability to apply learning to other problems, complexity and causality that do not have one right answer”

  What would be amazing is if we could solve the problems of variability and efficiency with a peer-driven system that actually motivates and rewards real learning.  What would be equally amazing is if we could find a system that solves variability and efficiency and, at the same time, supports learning communities (for informal learning), teachers (in the classroom), and workforce trainers (in the workplace) who strive for complex, ongoing, lifelong, connected collaborative learning.  

The bubble test solves the problem of variability and efficiency.   The profound problem of education that remains, once the issue of variability and efficiency is solved.  If we find a better solution to variability and efficiency than the bubble test, we can then concentrate on the real learning objective of school:  how best to prepare our kids to thrive in the life that they will lead once they are no longer in school.