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Teachers benefit because they receive training, professional development and ongoing support that aligns with technology they receive and the work they do in their classrooms. Moreover, they have reliable tech support when they need it.

when one is a novice in a field, you have limited working memory about the topic. This means there is little space to do hard, unfamiliar work. It’s quite possible that working with others,

dmit that time alone is a problematic measure for any study because “what takes one student ten minutes to complete may take another student twenty”), three of which I have included here.

Third, “requiring student interaction just for the sake of interaction may lead to diminished completion rates. Again, standards for online teaching should not contain arbitrary thresholds for required interaction.”

This doesn’t mean we should discourage interaction, but it does mean we should not measure the quality of a program based on inputs like seat time.

I would definitely share my own thoughts, my own experiences, and my own reflections on how the environment of learning is changin

I would be very transparent in my online learning activity and try to show people in the school that it’s OK, that it has value. I think it’s very hard to be a leader around these types of changes without modeling them.

students should be able to create, navigate, and grow their own personal learning networks in safe, effective, and ethical ways.

And now we’re moving into what they call a “lifelong learning” model—which is to say that learning is much more fluid and much more independent, self-directed, and informal. That concept—that we can learn in profound new ways outside the classroom setting—poses huge challenges to traditional structures of schools, because that’s not what they were built for.

So, I think we need to focus more on developing the learning process—looking at how kids collaborate with others on a problem, how they exercise their critical thinking skills, how they handle failure, and how they create. We have to be willing to put kids—and assess kids—in situations and contexts where they’re really solving problems and we’re looking not so much at the answer but the process by which they try to solve those problems. Because those are the types of skills they’re going to need when they leave us, when they go to college or wherever else. At least I think so. And I don’t think I’m alone in that.

I almost defy you to find me anyone who consciously teaches kids reading and writing in linked environments. Yet we know kids are in those environments and sometimes doing some wonderfully creative things. And we know they’ll need to read and write online. You know what I’m saying? But educators would read Nicholas Carr’s book, and their response would be to ban hypertext. It just doesn’t make sense.

“Why do you blog?” That’s what we need. We need people who are willing to really think critically about what they’re doing. I’m not an advocate of using tools just for the sake of using tools. I think all too often you see teachers using a blog, but nothing really changes in terms of their instruction, because they don’t really understand what a blog is, what possibilities it presents. They know the how-to, but they don’t know the why-to. I’d look for teachers who are constantly asking why. Why are we doing this? What’s the real value of this? How are our kids growing in connection with this? How are our kids learning better? And I definitely would want learners. I would look for learners more than I would look for teachers per se.

And I think we have to move to a more inquiry-based, problem-solving curriculum, because

it’s not about content as much anymore. It’s not about knowing this particular fact as much as it is about what you can do with it. What can you do with what you understand about chemistry? What can you do with what you’ve learned about writing?

What does it look like? Kids need to be working on solving real problems that mean something to them. The goal should be preparing kids to be entrepreneurs, problem-solvers who think critically and who’ve worked with people from around the world. Their assessments should be all about the products they produced, the movements they’ve created, the participatory nature of their education rather than this sort of spit-back-the-right-answer model we currently have. I mean, that just doesn’t make sense anymore.

myriad ways in which technology allows students to connect with other students, field experts, and other teachers around the world,

learning is deeply pleasurable, if not always fun (doing hard things is not always fun, but worth it)

that students are good at deciding for themselves what kinds of remediation they may need and how best to get it (in consultation with an advisor or other students)

assumption that everyone has a stake in their own learning, that

Many of the conventional school environments I'm in are distinctly flat, arid, uninteresting places, physically and intellectually. Bulletin boards that could date from my own elementary school line classroom walls, with publisher's slogans about trying harder or doing your best. Adults choose what goes on the walls , and the aesthetics of learning spaces seem almost deliberately ignored.

"It's not about the technology, it's about rethinking how learning happens."

4- Exploit digital images for classroom use

5- Use video content to engage students

6- Use infographics to visually stimulate students

But after years of schooling, most of our children are waiting for the teacher to tell them what to learn, when to learn it, and how they’ll be assessed as to whether or not they learned it.

What if we as teachers saw ourselves as part of a much bigger “cloud” of adults whose main role was to develop and support the enthusiasm for learning that our children innately bring with them to school but that we all too often temper in our zeal to “deliver” the curriculum? T

Our students live in a world where they need us less and less from a content, knowledge and information standpoint.