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What happens to schools and classrooms and learning in a 2.0 world? New website for Will Richardson he will no longer be updating http://weblogg-ed.com/

Will Richardson is know for his expertise in web technologies and its integration in student learning.  He is a resourceful individual worth gleaning from.

Now count all the other tests they take. How much stress does that cause? How much learning time is lost?

#ScaleFail - I'm worried about educators who so quickly try to "scale" initiatives without thinking through which elements can scale, which might scale, and which will be a ScaleFail.

Important things are difficult to assess. Content Knowledge is easy to assess. Great infographic showing this.

It's been great fun to get to share a part of eight school opening days this year from Mississippi to Vermont. They're always filled with a great deal of energy, and they're also a good way of getting a sense of where things are in terms of schools' evolution (or lack thereof) in thinking around technology in a teaching and learning context. I'd love to be able to say that it feels like we're a lot farther down the road, but by and large, that's not the what I'm seeing. There is still a real emphasis on the implementation of "stuff" without the hard conversations about pedagogy that deal with preparing kids for a connected world. There are pockets of that, but not much that is being discussed within the frame of a long-term plan or real vision as to what classroom learning is going to look like in say, ten or even five years. (I put out a Tweet last week asking what the timeframe was for the technology plans at the schools where people are teaching, and most said three years with an occasional five year plan or a "Technology plan? What's that?" thrown in. I'm wondering, by the way, when we'll stop calling them technology plans and just call them learning plans.)

Will Richardson talks about the impact of smartphones on education. This links nicely to the NPR report (based on the Pew study) that the digital divide is being turned on its head.

Got to love Will Richardson. Not earth-shattering, but a great synthesis of several things that have been rattling around in my head lately, too.

In a couple of weeks, both Tess and Tucker will be starting their first day at brand new schools. They'll know no one, have all new teachers, new surroundings, and, hopefully, new opportunities. I'm not sure they're totally at peace with these changes, but as I keep telling them, it's the kind of stuff that builds character. (I keep regaling them with school switching stories of my own, the most challenging being when my mom moved us out to New Jersey from Chicago when I was beginning 6th grade and three days before school started I was wading barefoot in a creek, stepped on a broken bottle, and ended up with 10 stitches in the bottom of my foot and a pair of crutches for the first week of classes. Talk about character building.) Wendy and I have been trying to prepare them for this shift as best we can, and while I know it's a bit scary for them, I'm really hopeful the change will be good for them on a lot of different levels.