Cognitive Interfund Transfer

Yes, it's a half an hour, but it's worth it.

Check it out if you haven't...The National Education Technology Plan, Transforming American Education: Learning Powered by Technology, calls for applying the advanced technologies used in our daily personal and professional lives to our entire education system to improve student learning, accelerate and scale up the adoption of effective practices, and use data and information for continuous improvement.

This is the report published by the Wisconsin School Administrators' Alliance in the summer of 2010 (I think). Check out the part on A Visionary Tale on page 9. Hat-tip to Mary Bowen-Eggebraaten for forwarding this piece on to me.

Very nice. AND, as the report indicates, leadership and community need to be included. This means you need the school board to play a role. They are the conduit to the community. Public education has been down the transformation road before. In some ways we are not inventing anything new here. John Dewey championed experiential learning as the public education system developed a century ago. Progressive educators tried in the 1930s and 1960s to introduce experiential learning into the system. The grammar of schooling, the deep structure, the notion of "real school" all pull the system back into the status quo. We need to remain cognizant of these dynamics and consider how to address them if we want to see the promise of the ideas contained in this report become a reality. You have to connect the ideas outlined in this report to the notion of collective impact. I think this idea is key to seeing a different outcome: http://www.ssireview.org/articles/entry/2197/

I want to be clear: I am a supporter of the ideas contained in the Wisconsin Vision report. I also want to be sure we take a realists view of how to make it happen. I do not want to see this effort and the ideas of CESAs 1 and 6, wind up in the history books like past transformation efforts.

For those of you that are big fans of Knowledgeworks, this is the British version. The British version of the Dept. of Ed projects six scenarios that entail different societal values and different approaches to life and education. 

A tale of interactiveness and engagement. 

Here, Friedman analyzes Duncan's new approaches to federally initiated school reform. His last point, however, is very thought provoking. 

For those of you who would like to get more technical with blogging, website management, and cross posting to optimize readership, McLeod has assembled a great group of chrome extensions.

And David Warlick hits it again. 

Scott McLeod notes that this article is a "must read."

I know that there are a number of Ipad users out there. Let me know if any of these apps are worthwhile. 

As most of you already know, I am a huge Malcolm Gladwell fan. Here is a summary of Gladwell on education through the lens of an Alan November education consultant. Enjoy. 

Michael Wesch has very similar comments, calling our classrooms today, "Death by Power Point." 

More on Sugata Mitra, the "Whole in the Wall" TED guy.

Want a 21st Century, technologically blended environment in your school? Directions are right here. 

This is an example of an online book, which has been created (a bit tongue in cheek) to educate people about the potentials, trends, and recent developments of the web and about browsers. This is great for people still acquiring the basic understanding/conception of the internet.

TED.com commentary: From rockets to stock markets, many of humanity's most thrilling creations are powered by math. So why do kids lose interest in it? Conrad Wolfram says the part of math we teach -- calculation by hand -- isn't just tedious, it's mostly irrelevant to real mathematics and the real world. He presents his radical idea: teaching kids math through computer programming.

For those of us at the WASDA Leadership and Visioning Workshop, the 1:1 initiative was talked about a lot, not to mention the TED video from Sugata Mitra (Hole in the Wall). 

Jeff Utecht is quickly becoming my favorite blogger. Here, he has included articles, blog posts, videos, and research that have him thinking, and thinking big. 

I can think of five educationally geared ways that I can use the hacks contained in this article if youtube was freed from our filtering system. Do you have any ideas? 

Appreciated this site and immediately sent it out to our administrators. We're active users of YouTube in Hudson.

Welcome, Mary!

This is very important in the 1:1 initiative because with this, any document on the google apps for ed suite can be edited from a phone with a data plan.