Cognitive Interfund Transfer

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.

the overall strategy for technology in the home is the same from birth to high school graduation: match their developmental level, and make sure they understand whatever medium they are using from the inside out: who made this, how does it work, and what does it want from me?

Adding a digital device to the classroom without a fundamental change in the culture of teaching and learning will not lead to significant improvement. Unless clear goals across the curriculum—such as the use of math to solve real problems—are articulated at the outset, one-to-one computing becomes “spray and pray.”

Let’s drop the phrase “one-to-one” and refer instead to “one-to- world.”

The more important questions revolve around the design of the culture of teaching and learning. For example, how much responsibility of learning can we shift to our students (see Who Owns the Learning by Alan November)? How can we build capacity for all of our teachers to share best practices with colleagues in their school and around the world? How can we engage parents in new ways? (See @livefromroom5 on Twitter.) How can we give students authentic work from around the world to prepare each of them to expand their personal boundaries of what they can accomplish?

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.

Secretary Duncan said, U.S. educational reform policy is motivated by a belief that the U.S. educational system is particularly failing disadvantaged children. Yet an analysis of international test score levels and trends shows that in important ways disadvantaged U.S. children perform better, relative to children in comparable nations, than do middle-class and advantaged children. More careful analysis of these levels and trends may lead policymakers to reconsider their assumption that almost all improvement efforts should be directed to the education of disadvantaged children and few such efforts to the education of middle-class and advantaged children

A re-estimated U.S. average PISA score that adjusted for a student population in the United States that is more disadvantaged than populations in otherwise similar post-industrial countries, and for the over-sampling of students from the most-disadvantaged schools in a recent U.S. international assessment sample, finds that the U.S. average score in both reading and mathematics would be higher than official reports indicate (in the case of mathematics, substantially higher).

Disadvantaged and lower-middle-class U.S. students perform better (and in most cases, substantially better) than comparable students in similar post-industrial countries in reading. In math, disadvantaged and lower-middle-class U.S. students perform about the same as comparable students in similar post-industrial countries.