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I couldn’t help thinking that it sounded like a recipe for chaos, and I told him so

He couldn’t get two screens, so he had students bring in their laptops

Sketchup is remarkably user-friendly! Technology in the classroom is a great tool... it motivates students, stimulates learning, and often levels the playing field. Sketchup is a terrific example... there were gasps of delight and exclamations of enthusiasm as Brian demonstrated just a few of the basics. We all wondered why we had spent so much time with pencil and paper... this looked to be a whole lot more fun and more versatile. Needless to say, every child wanted to try it and they were all able to quickly master a few simple steps with Brian's guidance. I think they would have gladly designed an entire city had we given them time!"

As a teacher, I saw a multitude of curriculum connections; geometry, measurement, logic, problem solving, art, perspective... the list goes on and on.

here is, at its very core, a problem with the LMS paradigm. The “M” in “LMS” stands for “management.” This is not insignificant. The word heavily implies that the provider of the LMS, the educational institution, is “managing” student learning. Since the dawn of public education and the praiseworthy societal undertaking “educate the masses,” management has become an integral part of the learning. And this is exactly what we have designed and used LMSs to do—to manage the flow of students through traditional, semester-based courses more efficiently than ever before. The LMS has done exactly what we hired it to do: it has reinforced, facilitated, and perpetuated the traditional classroom model, the same model that Bloom found woefully less effective than one-on-one learning.

We can extend, expand, enhance, magnify, and amplify the reach and effectiveness of human interaction with technology and communication tools, but the underlying reality is that real people must converse with each other in the process of “becoming.”

Because the LMS is primarily a traditional classroom support tool, it is ill-suited to bridge the 2-sigma gap between classroom instruction and personal tutoring.

undamentally human endeavor that requires personal interaction and communication, person to person.

n the post-LMS world, we need to worry less about “managing” learners and focus more on helping them connect with other like-minded learners both inside and outside of our institutions.

We need to foster in them greater personal accountability, responsibility and autonomy in their pursuit of learning in the broader community of learners. We need to use the communication tools available to us today and the tools that will be invented tomorrow to enable anytime, anywhere, any-scale learning conversations between our students and other learners

However, instead of that tutor appearing in the form of an individual human being or in the form of a virtual AI tutor, the tutor will be the crowd.

The paradigm—not the technology—is the problem.

Building a better, more feature-rich LMS won’t close the 2-sigma gap. We need to utilize technology to better connect people, content, and learning communities to facilitate authentic, personal, individualized learning. What are we waiting for?

if you miss your inbox for a day, that means you won't see it until the day after, which is when it's due

Instead, just reserve some time on your calendar to get the work done every week; right after class is actually remarkably efficient, but there's nothing wrong with just scheduling an hour right before your class to hammer out the work.