Interestingly, KY is looking to get rid of their sophisticated examinations because of political pressure, lack of comparibility, and $. In the 90s KY was a leader in attempting to change assessment and accountability, but for a plethora of reasons has fallen back in line. Not trying to be negative, but recognize the difficulty in the challenge and hope he's up to it.
Once charter schools have opened, it becomes politically difficult to close them, even in cases where they are bad or worse than their traditional counterparts.
Ed, great example of how not to structure the change. Open more charter schools, make them have a 5 year evaluation plan, have an accountability plan in place that allows the school to stay true to their ideal, make changes that they feel will help them achieve their goals, even allow them additional time if results warrant, and then HOLD THEM ACCOUNTABLE. If they can't show they haven't at least held their own, then close them, but make that part of the evaluation plan from the beginning.
The rub of that plan is that you can't hold them accountable at a level that you aren't going to hold everybody else to. What about traditional schools that aren't working, what do you do with those schools? Isn't that one of the big knocks on NCLB that they are 'being taken over' because of some testing system?
Congress will need to broaden and sustain those reforms in the upcoming reauthorization of the No Child Left Behind Act.
I disagree with tearing it up and starting over, isn't that what we do in education? Try something it doesn't work (for lots of reasons, including lack of implementation), and move on to the next shiny thing. Why not analyze the program, identify the aspects that have shown efficacy, identify the aspects that haven't achieved their goals, make changes that are informed and researchable, put them in place and hold people accountable for implementing.
I think NCLB was well intentioned and represented the best thinking of a group of people (in education as in many areas i don't think you can say it represents the best thinking of everyone).
I just don't like the idea of letting everyone off the hook by starting over. I believe it reinforces the concept that I don't have to worry about this project because it too will pass.
Exercise
Briefly look at 2-3 examples of courses run on "loosely coupled technologies," that is, outside of a CMS using contemporary Web 2.0/social software tools and methods.
The importance of the distinction is this: As Digital Immigrants
learn - like all immigrants, some better than others - to adapt to their
environment, they always retain, to some degree, their "accent,"
that is, their foot in the past.
There are hundreds
of examples of the digital immigrant accent.
our Digital Immigrant
instructors, who speak an outdated language (that of the pre-digital age),
are struggling to teach a population that speaks an entirely new language
Digital Immigrant teachers assume that learners are the
same as they have always been, and that the same methods that worked for the
teachers when they were students will work for their students now. But
that assumption is no longer valid. Today's learners are different.
So what should happen?
Should the Digital Native students learn the old ways, or should their
Digital Immigrant educators learn the new?
methodology
learn to communicate in the language and style
of their students
it does mean going faster, less step-by step, more in parallel, with
more random access, among other thing
kinds of content
As educators, we need to be thinking about how to teach
both Legacy and Future content in the language of the Digital Natives.
Adapting materials to the language of Digital Natives has already been
done successfully. My own preference
for teaching Digital Natives is to invent computer games to do the job, even
for the most serious content.
"Why not make the learning into
a video game!
But while the game was easy for my Digital Native staff to invent,
creating the content turned out to be more difficult for the professors, who
were used to teaching courses that started with "Lesson 1 – the
Interface." We asked them instead to create a series
of graded tasks into which the skills to be learned were embedded. The professors
had made 5-10 minute movies to illustrate key concepts; we asked them to cut
them to under 30 seconds. The professors insisted that the learners to do
all the tasks in order; we asked them to allow random access. They wanted
a slow academic pace, we wanted speed and urgency (we hired a Hollywood script
writer to provide this.) They
wanted written instructions; we wanted computer movies. They wanted the traditional
pedagogical language of "learning objectives," "mastery",
etc. (e.g. "in this exercise you will learn"); our goal was to completely
eliminate any language that even smacked of education.
large mind-shift
required
We need to invent Digital Native methodologies for all
subjects, at all levels, using our students to guide us.
The "professor versus laptop (or other wireless access device)" issue is a false construct if we view technology-mediated learning as a social system offering many ways to alter one component and thus change the whole system. Rather than seeing distraction as a challenge, educators can see it as an opportunity to reflect upon and change the design of their entire instructional approach. Creative and innovative educators can use technology innovations to help reform teaching, similar to the way Guttenberg's press helped bring about scientific revolution and modern authorship.
incremental change, if you’ve looked at any system, has a particular way of breeding immune reactions and resistance to further change. If you bring in a little bit of change people adapt to it and then it gets professionalized.
In a study published in the January 30 edition of Psychiatry Research: Neuroimaging, Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) researchers concluded that an eight week mindful meditation practice produced measurable changes in participants' brain regions associated with memory, sense of self, empathy and stress. This is the first study to document meditation-produced changes in the brain's grey matter over time.
Previous research has documented structural differences between the brains of experienced mediation practitioners and individuals with no history of meditation. These brain changes included thickening of the cerebral cortex in areas associated with the integration of emotions and attention. However, earlier studies were unable to document that those brain differences were actually caused by meditation.
mindfulness meditation (which focuses on nonjudgmental awareness of sensations, feelings and state of mind)
significant improvements in the meditators' stress levels compared with pre-participation responses -- and reductions in stress also were correlated with decreased grey-matter density in the amygdala, part of the brain which is known to play an important role in anxiety and stress.
ncreased grey-matter density in the hippocampus (an area of the brain known to be important for learning and memory) and in structures associated with self-awareness, compassion and introspection.
"A supermarket chain in South Korea has come up with a way to allow commuters to do their shopping while they wait for the subway. They hung life size banners along subway walls that recreate supermarket aisles and included QR codes for each item on the virtual shelves that when scanned add the item to the shopper's online cart. When customers check out, the order is placed via the supermarket's website and then delivered to the customer's home later that day."
Look at how thinking differently changed the way people shopped for groceries in Korea. As educators, can't we find a way to think this differently too so we can change education...putting the learners at the center.
Looking for Learning in 21st Century Classrooms
A leadership guide to supporting and coaching best practice technology use across the curriculum. Administrators are given the charge to foster professional development of teachers through classroom observation, walk-throughs and overall supervision. In recent years, technology has changed significantly and the world has altered alongside that change. Education has begun the process of including technology, but finds variety in teacher expertise and practice. What questions can supervisors ask of their teachers to best promote technology-use to improve learning? Here are some helpful guiding questions.
"Lawrence Lessig (now at Harvard) has another thoughtful presentation regarding copyright that he gave at EDUCAUSE 2009. He makes a compelling case about how "things have changed" but that our copyright laws have not kept up with those changes. In the past, "copyright had a tiny role."
River-wrecking dams are the wrong choice for a warming world. International Rivers works on three key areas where climate change, dams and rivers intersect. For an in-depth look at each of these areas, click on the links below or visit our Publications page.
Succinct, informative article by James Harbeck summarising six efforts to change English spelling. Range from the classicists of the Renaissance to the Chicago Tribune. Includes successful and unsuccesful changes, and traces several words back and forth.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
Lifelong learning is a continuous engagement in acquiring
and applying knowledge and skills in the context of authentic, self-directed
problems.
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).
technology should provide ways to "say the 'right' thing at
the 'right' time in the 'right' way
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?
reduce the gap between school
and workplace learning
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?
problem solving in the real world
includes problem framing calls into question the practice of asking
students to solve mostly given problems.
teachers should see themselves not as truth-tellers
and oracles, but as coaches, facilitators, learners, and mentors
engaging with learners
Report from the Aspen Institute about policy changes and general philosophy changes needed in order to achieve student-centered learning, and the importance of technology to make this work.
It has changed the very essence of daily life and revolutionised the way we work, play and interact. But has technology reached its full learning potential in the classroom? The picture seems mixed. While there is no doubt that technology has changed the admin of teaching, in lessons, technology is often still seen as an add-on or a simple replacement for traditional methods, rather than enhancing learning. But integrating technology into your teaching has so much more to offer.
"The world is changing and that is nothing new. To quote a great prophet, "It was always burning, since the world's been turning." But the rate of change coupled with the explosion of data and media means that information from and about the world around us has turned from a manageable stream to a continual barraging flood. We can either give our pupils the skills to set up a self-sustaining hermitage in a mobile signal black spot, or we can provide them with the managed explosure and then skills to assess and deal with what is being hurled at them."
"re you a bright spark with a brilliant educational technology idea that could change the way we teach and learn in schools and drive up educational outcomes? If so Cool Initiatives wants to hear from you! Cool Initiatives, premier early stage investor in education and edtech, has just launched The Cool Initiatives Education Challenge 2019 . It's giving away a total of £17,500 - no financial strings attached - to students, teachers or early stage start ups that offer an innovative edtech solution to change the face of education as we know it today."