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I think that all students entering in to a 1:1 community SHOULD read this post so they can grasp the gravity of the situation.

They are changing the way we are thinking here at Van Meter.

I recently connected with the mayor of our town. He is going to help me with my interest of public relations. I hope the more I learn about communication, and public relations the easier it will be in college, and in the business world.

It is a change, and some people don't like change, but I believe it is a change for the better.

our school culture and capacity. I need to be able to clearly articulate our vision and help them understand what we are doing to obtain this reality. I do not want all of my teachers to have the exact same strengths, as that is not realistic or beneficial, but want to continue to build their leadership abilities. It is essential that if we are working in a climate of continuous change, school administration needs to create a system based upon the strengths of individuals, and build a system that utilizes these strengths to the benefit of the entire school. We need not only to have a purpose in our schools, but we need to GIVE purpose to those who are a part of our school. Find the strength of your colleagues and use them.

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.

Employees would be at a meeting and during discussions someone would always say, “is that info up on the wiki?” 

This allowed and even forced employees to keep information on the wiki current and updated.

This was the beginning of a significant cultural shift because other departments were asking for a wiki. 

They understood the opportunities, saw the potential, and wanted in.

All departments were interviewed to understand what their needs and requirements were.  After conducting the interviews, it was determined that media wiki may not be the best approach since departments wanted to work with existing file formats such as PDF, Word, Excel, and others that were not supported by the wiki platform.

As a result, Vistaprint decided to keep the media wiki but instead integrated Sharepoint as a document management platform.

Organic growth was not trusted so a skeletal structure was built

One more key point: 30 years of Gallup data show that when people have jobs that fit their talents and when they are engaged in their work, they are much, much happier. They are also more productive, healthier, and more economically profitable. If we give talented kids what they need to launch themselves as entrepreneurs and then show them how to be engaged and what their strengths are, we can guarantee them a happier, better life.

We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters.” A world where all can use Twitter but hardly any can commute by air is less impressive than the futures dreamed of in the past.

e notes that, for all its inhabitants’ Googling and Skypeing, America’s productivity performance since 2004 has been worse than that of the doldrums from the early 1970s to the early 1990s.

esearch by Susanto Basu of Boston College and John Fernald of the San Francisco Federal Reserve suggests that the lag between investments in information-and-communication technologies and improvements in productivity is between five and 15 years. The drop in productivity in 2004, on that reckoning, reflected a state of technology definitely pre-Google, and quite possibly pre-web.

nnovation is what people newly know how to do. Technology is what they are actually doing; and that is what matters to the economy.

n the end, the main risk to advanced economies may not be that the pace of innovation is too slow, but that institutions have become too rigid to accommodate truly revolutionary changes—which could be a lot more likely than flying cars.