This technological revolution is different; it has the potential to fundamentally change the way we teach and the way students learn.

The sad reality is that most schools still believe that they are “teaching with technology” because they have a computer lab where they teach students important skills like word processing and how to create Power Point presentations.

we need to teach them how to find information and more importantly what to do with the information that they find

You can’t motivate students with technology because technology alone isn’t motivating. Worse yet, students are almost always ambivalent toward digital tools.

Technology, as Dina Strasser likes to say, is a motivational red herring

What students are really motivated by are opportunities to be social — to interact around challenging concepts in powerful conversations with their peers.

Education as a dwelling in the human experience of reality is ending. As with the Roman Empire, it is ending with a whimper, not a bang.

an education is learning to see, to think, to read, and to write.

Education is not chasing a grade.

“Students can critically read in a variety of ways: When they raise vital questions and problems from the text, When they gather and assess relevant information and then offer plausible interpretations of that information, When they test their interpretations against previous knowledge or experience …, When they examine their assumptions and the implications of those assumptions, and When they use what they have read to communicate effectively with others or to develop potential solutions to complex problems.

Interpretation of evidence

Making connections

Disruptive theory posits that there is a new technology — referred to as an enabling technology — that alters the price/performance paradigm of an industry

Enabling technologies allow the price/performance paradigm to be altered in such a way that it allows enterprises that leverage the new, enabling technology reach customers that the incumbents operating with the status quo technology cannot reach

How Does It Apply To Education?

The world has shrunk considerably and the speed of life has increased dramatically.

Democratizing Education

a single laptop and a satellite internet connection can provide a classroom, school, or village with access to any content they wish

The most popular complaints about online learning are lack of engagement, slow response time from the instructor, and a loss of the sense of community.

Anxiety is the enemy of learning. Students need to know their teacher, environment, and peers. In a virtual environment, you can only rely on your user interface to do this for you.

A Participants List

Have you ever seen a grassy lawn on a college campus with a multitude of little dirt paths criss crossing it? Each trail is worn by students making the same decision, branching where someone thought to head somewhere new and others followed. That’s the right model for how we should let students teach themselves.

We need writers, and filmmakers, and animators, and everyone else who generates educational content. We need editors and watchdogs to evaluate the content and make sure it is good. We need teachers who can hold students hands as they walk their educational path, and who can inspire them to explore areas they may find boring at first. We need supervisors and tests to evaluate how well this system is working. We need parents and communities to decide our expectations for that system. We need all those things.

The future of education doesn’t depend on us digitizing and updating textbooks, it will rely on us leaving the textbook format behind entirely.