EdTech

[Students need] three things: they need content knowledge, but that’s the easy part today. It’s online; you don’t need a teacher to acquire content. The world simply doesn’t care how much you know anymore because Google knows everything. What the world cares about, now that content has become a commodity, is what you can do with what you know. And that suggests the two other education outcomes that are absolutely critical, and to simplify them I call them skill and will. Students need a new set of skills to thrive for work learning and citizenship in the 21st century; and they need will, meaning motivation, and arguably the most important is motivation. Because if you are motivated you will continuously learn new skills and new content knowledge, which you will have to in this era, and its the thing we do the most damage to in our schools today.

We’re not giving kids work that is intrinsically interesting in the vast majority of our schools, and we’re spending far too much time on test prep, and the tests themselves are predominantly multiple choice factual recall tests that tell us absolutely nothing about work learning or citizenship readiness in the 21st century. Kids know it, and they’re bored out of their minds.

I think the whole idea of a digital portfolio is part of what I call Accountability 2.0, moving away from an over-reliance on stupid tests and moving towards really looking at student work and having students meet a performance standard for passing on to higher grades and for graduating from high school. And it […] can be an important factor in motivating kids to want to do better work.

Girls should play more video games.

spatial skills matter: The ability to mentally manipulate shapes and otherwise understand how the three-dimensional world works turns out to be an important predictor of creative and scholarly achievements

spatial skills can be improved by training; these improvements persist over time; and they “transfer” to tasks that are different from the tasks used in the training

Too much of the wrong kind of media can hurt infants, but that doesn't mean you need to practice total abstinence

total abstinence, that is to say families following the AAP’s recommendations, was actually associated with lower cognitive development, not higher

sensationalizing flawed studies that find negative relations.

My husband and I never made a conscious decision to not limit screen time for our kids; we simply didn’t worry about it.

Our screens don’t isolate us from one another – they are another medium through which we interact.

technology is not mysterious. It doesn’t freak them out. It doesn’t control or oppress them. It’s a tool. They do homework on their iPads. They read books on e-readers for school and pleasure. They play games, watch videos, and chat with friends. It’s not a big deal. Screen time, for us, is still time spent together

The AAP's long-standing recommendation has been that kids' entertainment screen time be limited to less than one or two hours per day, and for kids under 2, none at all. But in a world where screens surround us -- in restaurants, gas stations, grocery store lines, as background ambiance at home (heck, even in pediatricians' waiting rooms) -- this recommendation is becoming nearly impossible to follow.

there is no easy answer to the question of "how much." So maybe parents need to start asking two new questions: "what" and "when."

"Quality content matters" says Dr. Chip Donohue, Director of the TEC Center at Erikson Institute, "What they watch is more important than how much"

pupils should be able to use Google during GCSE and A-level exams.

It’s perhaps best to concede that this is something that would work better in some subjects – history and geography come to mind – than others, and only then for particular questions. Colleagues in the languages department might well despair at the thought of exam scripts peppered with inexplicable phraseology gathered from Google Translate.

Why then pretend this isn’t a fact of 21st-century life, an important part of how grownups in the world of work conduct their research? The role of a teacher is varied. We are here to inspire, encourage, excite and prepare pupils for the wider world. It is bizarre to omit this cornerstone of modern life from our pupils’ most important educational experiences.

AltSchool is a decidedly Bay Area experiment with an educational philosophy known as student-centered learning. The approach, which many schools have adopted, holds that kids should pursue their own interests, at their own pace.

AltSchool mixes in loads of technology to manage the chaos, and tops it all off with a staff of forward-thinking teachers set free to custom-teach to each student.

no administrators, no gymnasiums, no cafeterias, no hallways. There are no report cards and no bells

game-based learning seems to be a misnomer, as the learning is not based on games, but enhanced by them. Commercial games are repurposed and modified to support curricular goals, as opposed to driving them. Of course, learning can and should also be based on games, as they are valid texts that can be studied in and of themselves, but it is important to see video games as elastic tools whose potential uses exceed their intended purpose.

It’s important that video games are regarded as useful and engaging learning tools in their own right.” To that end, he uses popular commercial games that would not outwardly seem suitable for the classroom.

the game gives students a different perspective on the laws of physics, where mechanics are simulated by a computer to create a realistic gaming environment. It can also be a great source of discussion when the laws of physics are broken!” Students think about how the simulation deviates from reality and transform what might be perceived as a game’s shortcoming into a critical thinking opportunity.