Join us as we create a national awareness campaign to celebrate innovative teachers and instructional strategies. Technology has changed the way we do everything from grocery shopping, to listening to music, and reading books. It's time to take action to leverage this potential with more innovative uses of technology in our nation's schools to ensure every student experiences personalized learning with great teaching.
This is a powerful quote. Thinking back to my schooling, it could probably be said that I thought of knowledge as finite, only limited to what my teacher and textbook said.
Too bad it took an economic crises to spur this movement.
“I don’t believe that charters and vouchers are the threat to schools in Orange County,” he said. “What’s a threat is the digital world — that someone’s going to put together brilliant $200 courses in French, in geometry by the best teachers in the world.”
Wow! He is absolutely right on. Why take a course with based on a rigid time and place when one can learn at a place and pace that makes sense to them?
“We believe that the world is going digital, but the jury’s still out on how this will evolve,” said Wendy Spiegel, a Pearson spokeswoman. “We’re agnostic, so we’ll provide digital, we’ll provide print, and we’ll see what our customers want.”
This is where I think textbooks companies need to lead. Customers typically only want more of the same, more of what has worked in the past, more of what has a track record. They dont' necessarily think beyond and/or have the luxury of being visionaries.
At Empire High School in Vail, Ariz., students use computers provided by the school to get their lessons, do their homework and hear podcasts of their teachers' science lectures.
Down the road, at Cienega High School, students who own laptops can register for "digital sections" of several English, history and science classes. And throughout the district, a Beyond Textbooks initiative encourages teachers to create - and share - lessons that incorporate their own PowerPoint presentations, along with videos and research materials they find by sifting through reliable Internet sites.
If you've never watched an online lecture from MIT, you are apparently in the minority. According to recently released statistics, more than 10 million people are now using MIT's OpenCourseWare Project. The OCW shares syllabi, exams, notes, problem sets, lectures, and even some discussions for just over 2,000 courses. (Discussions are held through online study groups using OpenStudy.
Those factors include integrating technology into intervention classes; setting aside time for professional learning and collaboration for teachers; allowing students to use technology to collaborate; integrating technology into core curricula at least weekly; administering online formative assessments at least weekly; lowering the student-to-computer ratio as much as possible; using virtual field trips at least monthly; encouraging students to use search engines daily; and providing training for principals on how to encourage best practices for technology implementation.
Only about 1 percent of the 1,000 schools surveyed by Project RED followed all those steps, and those that did “saw dramatic increases in student achievement and had revenue-positive experiences,” Ms. Wilson said.
Most schools that have integrated laptop computers and other digital devices into learning are not following the paths necessary to maximize the use of technology in ways that will raise student achievement and help save money, a report concludes."We all know that technology does things to improve our lives, but very few schools are implementing properly," said Leslie Wilson, a co-author of the study, "The Technology Factor: Nine Keys to Student Achievement and Cost-Effectiveness," released last month. She is the chief executive officer of the Mason, Mich.-based One-to-One Institute, which advocates putting mobile-computing devices into the hands of all students.