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Nigel Coutts

Moving past the days of the old school yard - The Learner's Way - 30 views

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    Society confronts educational change in an odd, entirely counter intuitive manner. On one hand we acknowledge that education can and should do a better job of preparing our children for the future while on the other we cling to the models of education that we knew. This led educational writer Will Richardson to state that 'the biggest barrier to rethinking schooling in response to the changing worldscape is our own experience in schools'. Our understandings of what school should be like and our imaginings of what school could be like are so clouded by this experience that even the best evidence for change is overlooked or mistrusted.
Roland Gesthuizen

Technology as "Hamburger Helper" - Rick Hess Straight Up - Education Week - 32 views

  • technology is a powerful tool for driving productivity and quality, in schooling as elsewhere; the problem is not with the technology, but with how we've used it.
  • regard technology as the means to the end you'd like to achieve, rather than an end in itself
  • 99 percent of the time, the biggest impact of technology is optimizing familiar tasks and routines--freeing up talent, time, and dollars for better uses
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    "Technology can be a powerful lever for rethinking schools and systems. But it's the rethinking that matters, not the technology. Technology provides tools to help solve problems smarter, deliver knowledge, support students, extend and deepen instruction, and refashion cost structures. Unfortunately, too many educators, industry shills, and technology enthusiasts seem to imagine that the technology itself will be a difference maker."
anonymous

Technology in Schools Faces Questions on Value - NYTimes.com - 70 views

  • When it comes to showing results, he said, “We better put up or shut up.”
  • Critics counter that, absent clear proof, schools are being motivated by a blind faith in technology and an overemphasis on digital skills — like using PowerPoint and multimedia tools — at the expense of math, reading and writing fundamentals. They say the technology advocates have it backward when they press to upgrade first and ask questions later.
  • how the district was innovating.
  • ...24 more annotations...
  • district was innovating
  • there is no good way to quantify those achievements — putting them in a tough spot with voters deciding whether to bankroll this approach again
  • “We’ve jumped on bandwagons for different eras without knowing fully what we’re doing. This might just be the new bandwagon,” he said. “I hope not.”
  • $46.3 million for laptops, classroom projectors, networking gear and other technology for teachers and administrators.
  • If we know something works
  • it is hard to separate the effect of the laptops from the effect of the teacher training
  • The high-level analyses that sum up these various studies, not surprisingly, give researchers pause about whether big investments in technology make sense.
  • Good teachers, he said, can make good use of computers, while bad teachers won’t, and they and their students could wind up becoming distracted by the technology.
    • anonymous
       
      yep - so where does leadership come in?
  • “It’s not the stuff that counts — it’s what you do with it that matters.”
  • “Test scores are the same, but look at all the other things students are doing: learning to use the Internet to research, learning to organize their work, learning to use professional writing tools, learning to collaborate with others.”
  • that computers can distract and not instruct.
  • “They’re inundated with 24/7 media, so they expect it,”
  • The 30 students in the classroom held wireless clickers into which they punched their answers. Seconds later, a pie chart appeared on the screen: 23 percent answered “True,” 70 percent “False,” and 6 percent didn’t know.
  • rofessor Cuban at Stanford argues that keeping children engaged requires an environment of constant novelty, which cannot be sustained.
  • engagement is a “fluffy
  • term” that can slide past critical analysis.
  • creating an impetus to rethink education entirely
    • Steve Ransom
       
      Like teaching powerpoint is "rethinking education". Right.
  • guide on the side.
  • Professor Cuban at Stanford
  • But she loves the fact that her two children, a fourth-grader and first-grader, are learning technology, including PowerPoint
  • “There is a connection between the physical hand on the paper and the words on the page,” she said. “It’s intimate.”
  • Mr. Share bases his buying decisions on two main factors: what his teachers tell him they need, and his experience. For instance, he said he resisted getting the interactive whiteboards sold as Smart Boards until, one day in 2008, he saw a teacher trying to mimic the product with a jury-rigged projector setup. “It was an ‘Aha!’ moment,” he said, leading him to buy Smart Boards, made by a company called Smart Technologies.
  • This is big business.
  • “Do we really need technology to learn?” she said. “It’s a very valid time to ask the question, right before this goes on the ballot.”
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    Shallow (still important) analysis of the major issues regarding technology integration in schools.
Doug Saunders

XQ: Rethink - YouTube - 16 views

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    "Our high school system is frozen in time. It's time to rethink the model and truly innovate for America's future."
Glenn Hervieux

Edu Change & Advocacy: Is High School Ready For A Major Makeover? Think 'Yes' In A Big Way - 29 views

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    "As learners, we are sometimes challenged (not often enough fortunately) to think big.  We are able to ask the question 'what if' when looking at a challenge.  We are tasked with redesigning, recreating, reimagining or rethinking the entire thing.  Maybe these are more 22nd century ideas. Well, when it comes to our high school system and overall student experience, here are my suggestions:" (Get ready for some out of the box ideas)
Nigel Coutts

Rethinking Time to see Education as a Lifelong Journey - Lessons from Blueback - The Le... - 8 views

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    Blueback is a beautiful metaphor for life and particularly of the life we live in schools. When looked at close up, with an eye on the details, the experience of school is one of passing and recurring cycles. When looked at from a distance, with an eye on the whole, there are elements of constancy, the throughlines which bring meaning to our experience and which have as their consequence the residuals of education. 
Brianna Crowley

Education Week: It's Time for a New Kind of High School - 29 views

  • We need to tear apart the school day, the high school timetable, the school year, the four-year diploma. We need to rethink credit- and diploma-awarding authority, which need not be the sole purview of the high school.
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    Food for thought on Educational Reform, however, not a great amount of practical first steps. Similarly, I am skeptical of some of the suggestions that private industry can do education better than public-provided. 
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    I am currently in private education, although I have taught in both. I believe that the school I am at is highly effective in their schooling, but could benefit from these reforms. That being said, I am not sold on the idea that private is better than public, especially as a universal idea ( ie All private education is better than public education). On th other hand I do see it being easier for private education to take on some of these challenges for reform.
trisha_poole

Death to high school English - Education - Salon.com - 128 views

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    Death to high school EnglishMy college students don't understand commas, far less how to write an essay. Is it time to rethink how we teach?
Matt Renwick

Student Engagement and Closing the Opportunity Gap - Reading By Example - 44 views

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    How do we rethink schools today in order to prepare students for an unknown tomorrow?
Christopher Lee

Why I Like Prezi - 0 views

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    Why I Like Prezi In my life, I have given a *lot* of presentations. In high school, they were presentations on group projects. In university, they were presentations on research projects. At Google, they're presentations on how to use our APIs. When I first started giving presentations, I used Powerpoint, like everyone else. But I kept thinking there must be a better way, and I experimented with other options - flash interfaces, interactive Javascript apps. Then I discovered Prezi, and it has become my presentation tool of choice. Prezi is an online tool for creating presentations - but it's not just a Powerpoint clone, like the Zoho or Google offering. When you first create a Prezi, you're greeted with a blank canvas and a small toolbox. You can write text, insert images, and draw arrows. You can draw frames (visible or hidden) around bits of content, and then you can define a path from one frame to the next frame. That path is your presentation. It's like being able to draw your thoughts on a whiteboard, and then instructing a camera where to go and what to zoom into. It's a simple idea, but I love it. Here's why: It forces me to "shape" my presentation. A slide deck is always linear in form, with no obvious structure of ideas inside of it. Each of my Prezis has a structure, and each structure is different. The structure is visual, but it supports a conceptual structure. One structure might be 3 main ideas, with rows of ideas for each one. Another might be 1 main idea, with a circular branching of subideas. Having a structure helps me to have more of a point to my presentations, and to realize the core ideas of them. It makes it easy to go from brainstorming stage to presentation stage, all in the same tool. I can write a bunch of thoughts, insert some images, and easily move them around, cluster them, re-order them, etc. I can figure out the structure of my presentation by looking at what I have laid out, and seeing how they fit together. Some people do this
Debra Why

Education Week Teacher: Redefining Instruction With Technology: Five Essential Steps - 95 views

  • This was the wrong approach: To truly change how my classroom worked, I needed a technology-based redefinition of my practice.
  • Break down to rebuild.
  • By setting aside my pre-conceived notions of how my classroom "should" look, sound, and feel, I was able to transform my practice from the ground up.
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  • I also asked myself the question: "What can I do with these devices that would be impossible to do without them?" In other words, I was hoping to create new teaching methods rather than just replacing old ones.
  • I redesigned my classroom practice around the goals, with iPads as the infrastructure.
  • Redefine with a goal in mind
  • Get more app for your money.
  • student-creation apps
  • Embrace failure
  • By creating a safe, open environment and by being clear that this endeavor is as foreign to you as it is to them, you encourage risk taking—and greater achievements.
  • Enjoy the results, reflect towards the future. A
  • I saw students become active agents in their own learning—because they now had choices about the methods that worked best for them. Kids who’d professed to hate school were now eager to engage in the classroom. One student wrote in her daily reflection, "[iPads] make me want to come to school every day because I know that Ms. Magiera has a lesson just for me."
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    Info on how to rethink how to use iPads to the best utilization
Maureen Greenbaum

L3D Philosophy - 36 views

  • uture is not out there to be "discovered": It has to be invented and designed.
  • Learning is a process of knowledge construction, not of knowledge recording or absorption. Learning is knowledge-dependent; people use their existing knowledge to construct new knowledge. Learning is highly tuned to the situation in which it takes place. Learning needs to account for distributed cognition requiring knowledge in the head to combined with knowledge in the world. Learning is affected as much by motivational issues as by cognitive issues.
  • previous notions of a divided lifetime-education followed by work-are no longer tenable.
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  • Professional activity has become so knowledge-intensive and fluid in content that learning has become an integral and inseparable part of "adult" work activities.
  • require educational tools and environments whose primary aim is to help cultivate the desire to learn and create, and not to simply communicate subject matter divorced from meaningful and personalized activity.
  • information technologies have been used to mechanize old ways of doing business‹rather than fundamentally rethinking the underlying work processes and promoting new ways to create artifacts and knowledge.
  • current uses of technology in education: it is used as an add-on to existing practices rather than a catalyst for fundamentally rethinking what education should be about in the next century
  • important challenge is that the ?ld basic skillsº such as reading, writing, and arithmetic, once acquired, were relevant for the duration of a human life; modern ?asic skillsº (tied to rapidly changing technologies) will change over time.
  • We need computational environments to support "new" frameworks for education such as lifelong learning, integration of working and learning, learning on demand, authentic problems, self-directed learning, information contextualized to the task at hand, (intrinsic) motivation, collaborative learning, and organizational learning.
  • Instructionist approaches are not changed by the fact that information is disseminated by an intelligent tutoring system.
  • technology should provide ways to "say the 'right' thing at the 'right' time in the 'right' way
  • ubstantial empirical evidence that the chief impediments to learning are not cognitive. It is not that students cannot learn; it is that they are not well motivated to learn.
  • Most of what any individual "knows" today is not in her or his head, but is out in the world (e.g., in other human heads or embedded in media).
  • Lifelong learning is a continuous engagement in acquiring and applying knowledge and skills in the context of authentic, self-directed problems.
  • challenge of whether we can create learning environments in which learners work hard, not because they have to, but because they want to. We need to alter the perception that serious learning has to be unpleasant rather than personally meaningful, empowering, engaging, and even fun.
  • making information relevant to the task at hand, providing challenges matched to current skills, creating communities (among peers, over the net), and providing access to real practitioners and experts.
  • What "basic skills" are required in a world in which occupational knowledge and skills become obsolete in years rather than decades?
  • problem solving in the real world includes problem framing calls into question the practice of asking students to solve mostly given problems.
  • How can schools (which currently rely on closed-book exams, the solving of given problems, and so forth) be changed so that learners are prepared to function in environments requiring collaboration, creativity, problem framing, and distributed cognition?
  • reduce the gap between school and workplace learning
  • teachers should see themselves not as truth-tellers and oracles, but as coaches, facilitators, learners, and mentors engaging with learners
Amber Bridge

It's Time To Rethink Our Use Of Technology In Schools - 113 views

  • Exchange: swapping traditional ways of doing things with ICT Enrich: engaging learners with a richer mix of media Enhance: encouraging deeper learning through the use of ICT Extend: encouraging students to take their learning further Empower: giving students control over their own learning
thebda

Finland schools: Subjects scrapped and replaced with 'topics' as country reforms its ed... - 45 views

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    "We really need a rethinking of education and a redesigning of our system, so it prepares our children for the future with the skills that are needed for today and tomorrow"
Cammy Torgenrud

Factory Schools? A Debate | Redu: Rethink / Reform / Rebuild Education - 38 views

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    Great post by Steve Hargadon, explaining why educational technologists may lead the way to effective alternatives - decentralization, differentiation, transformation in schooling.
anonymous

ideasLAB - exploring new possibilities - 43 views

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    The Virtual Pedagogies model is a really accessible instructional model for leaders and teachers to think about their current practice and what they need to rethink for the digital classroom
Louisa Guest

Education Rethink: 11 Reasons Teachers Aren't Using Technology #edchat #edtech - 51 views

    • Louisa Guest
       
      If any of these reasons resonate with you, please let's make time for a chat and work together to overcome them
  • Fear:
  • Low Self-Efficacy:
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  • What they lacked was a belief in their own ability to create tech-integrated lessons.
  • Testing
  • Consumerism
  • reading is viewed culturally as educational while all things techie tend to be viewed culturally as entertainment.
  • Lack of Leadership
  • Inconsistent Paradigms
  • Personal Experience:
  • If teachers themselves have never used these tools in their free time and schools haven't used these in professional development, the tools will always seem strange.
  • Humility: It takes a certain level of humility to say, "my non-tech approach is wrong and maybe I need to consider technology." 
  • It's Optional
  • : I am not a fan compliance-driven leadership. However, in a culture of compliance, some teachers will only do what leaders mandate them to do. So, technology isn't required. Somehow, we treat it as if it's a matter of personal choice in a way that we would never do with pedagogy. Someone is still allowed to be a "good teacher" and use virtually no technology whatsoever. Failure isn't an option, but irrelevance is. Somehow we've screwed up our priorities. Somehow we've allowed teacher comfort level to drive what we use with students.
  • Lack of Technology:
  • Lack of Research:
Maria José Vitorino

Rethinking the Library to Improve Information Literacy | Edutopia - 92 views

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    A good point made by a teacher about SL future and teaching mode future... in english. Blog de Andrew Marcinek. Post from last Summer; see coments too.
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