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Researching What for Why? I enjoy research. I spend much of my time reading it. I also often find myself in sustained and vigorous conversations with colleagues from some of the leading research institutions from around the world...and it's time that I value very much. Indeed, the Foundation maintains a register of some of the leading research around 1-to-1 on our site....however, I am also sick and tried of the unrelenting practice of political leaders and educational policy makers who continually seek to justify inaction and limit the scope for innovation in the name of research. One only has to review the mountains of literature around the most effective ways to teach reading and the efficacy of small classes to conclude that too much educational research is based on loose assumptions, inappropriate methodologies, a blatant lack of rigor and ideological bias. Too often the funding base for educational research creates preconceptions about the outcomes, real or perceived, and the volume of research that swamps the education market seems to be more related to tenure or the attraction for doctoral topics, than a genuine need. It really is about time we took stock of the situation. For more than three decades we have seen an increasing stream of research that has targeted our use of technology in schools. What purpose has much of it served, other than to often significantly distract educators from continuing to develop innovative practice, and seek new ways to enga

How can we support innovative teachers taking risks, if every move is covered by a researcher measuring outcomes?

Why don't we start by working on the culture of our schools, and encourage those that are seeking to create a culture of innovation. Why don't we start thinking carefully about what it really means to support risk-taking in our schools; it seems the only risks people are interested in are about the evils of the net and beyond...how about we support our educational leaders who are creating new agendas for learning within their schools and seeking to genuinely leverage technology within an immersive environment to truly create worthwhile, authentic learning opportunities.

But something like the concept of plagiarism has not changed.

But I don’t think that youth today are somehow more prone to plagiarism than their parents and grandparents, no, just as I don’t think they are somehow “dumber” or less interested in reading or many of the other myths about youth in a digital era.

Few of the handouts we analyzed—18%—defined plagiarism, discussed it as a form of academic fraud, and/or explained ways of avoiding it.

t’s a signal that the kinds of learning experiences that are gained through making can be recognized and valued in education, as they should be. It also serves as a reminder that the kind of informal learning that happens outside of school is important, and should be considered alongside achievements in formal education.

“We love it when students pursue their passions outside of class,” said Dr. Wendell, “and making is a fantastic example of that.”

T]he essence of what colleges want is for students to be engaged in whatever they are doing. We don’t want students who do things because they have to, or because they think it will look good on their résumé. We want students to do things because they find true enjoyment and personal growth from them. That’s the way that young people — and, for that matter, old people and middle-aged people — thrive.

There's no one teaching them about the nuances involved in creating a positive online footprint.

if you’re not transparent or findable in that way—I can’t learn with you.

“Without sharing, there is no education.”

But we realized within the first day how much more important it was to just get them working on their individual projects. It’s ironic because as a teacher, we end up teaching the same thing separately to all the mini-groups, and we want to teach it at once; we naturally desire the simplicity of that. However, when a team gets stuck on something and can’t proceed because they are lacking a piece of knowledge, that is when the iron is hot to strike. It seems that that is really the most effective way to teach (even if as a teacher it takes five times as much work!), because, as usual, emotional motivation trumps rationality.

Post a list of norms for online and offline behavior and keep it up. Refer to it. Make it a part of your classroom culture.

No matter if you have a one-computer or a 10-computer classroom, you can have resources available and open at all times using the computer as a station. Can't find the right word when you're modeling writing an essay? Walk over to the computer while you are talking to the students and use visualthesarus.com to find just the right word.

#7. Take a photo of an interesting location with your cell phone, email it to yourself, and use it the next day to help teach a concept: descriptive writing about a setting, for example. Show students you are thinking of their learning even outside of the classroom. After all, learning shouldn't end at the bell.

this is what collaborative learning looks and sounds like in 21st-century schools. “Why shoul

”Top-down authoritative teaching styles – and, in some cases, courtesy titles as teachers become peers, friends and resource facilitators – are out, along with desks arranged in tidy rows, all seats facing forward. In the classroom of the past, students memorized and regurgitated on tests the facts teachers presented in lectures. In the classroom of the present and future, students increasingly take personal responsibility for their own educations. “We have given them res

Every single day, I am finding new connections that make kids’ education more exciting. If our kids didn’t see this vision and they didn’t see what is so powerful about it, it wouldn’t work.

that it no longer makes sense to consider the world as divided between developing and industrialised countries; and that people everywhere respond similarly to increasing levels of wealth and health, with higher material aspirations and smaller families. “There is no such thing as a ‘we’ and a ‘they’, with a gap in between,”

The best measure of political stability of a country, he believes, is whether fertility rates are falling, because that indicates that women are being educated and basic health services are being provided. “

Innovation in infographics has always been driven by the need to explain difficult things,

The Google model relies on rapid experimentation and data. The company constantly refines its search, advertising marketplace, e-mail and other services, depending on how people use its online offerings. It takes a bottom-up approach: customers are participants, essentially becoming partners in product design.

The Apple model is more edited, intuitive and top-down.

Steve Jobs had a standard answer: none. “It’s not the consumers’ job to know what they want,” he would add.

Understanding how to use Python, or write code to solve problems, is just a way of having an additional tool to be creative with."

"The old teaching method — you know, where a teacher says something and you write it down and then take a test — that's about as passive as it gets," he says. "This idea pushes kids to be more actively involved since, by and large, it's something we're both learning together. That leads to a lot of innovative teaching — and a lot of innovative learning, for that matter."

"I'm certainly not a coder," says Lisa Brown, an English teacher and head of the English department at Beaver. "But, like anything, the more I've played around with it the more I've realized there's a lot that's really accessible and understandable."

Despite the considerable differences among all those institutions, one idea binds them together: the understanding that reflection and practice together are the best pedagogy. As Andrew Delbanco puts it in College: What It Was, Is, and Should Be: "Learning is a collaborative rather than a solitary process.

Computers will enhance learning, but they will never replace the profoundly personal dimension in deep learning.

We know that the best learning involves practices—lots of them. We know that effective learning is best achieved through the engagement of other deeply attentive human beings. The learning might occur in a traditional classroom, but it might happen in a different space: a lab, a mountain stream, an international campus, a cafeteria, a residence hall, a basketball court.

Missing in this formula for a world-class education is an urgent call for schools to produce students that actually know something about the world--its cultures, languages and how its economic, environmental and social systems work. 

Global competence starts by being aware, curious, and interested in learning about the world and how it works. 

Globally competent students recognize that they have a particular perspective, and that others may or may not share it. 

First, he or she is up to date with technology, not only in the educational arena, but across the board.

Second, your knowledge broker must be able to have the interest in finding resources for any class content.

Third, and perhaps most important, the knowledge broker must be able to transfer his/her knowledge to a teacher - who is most likely not all that excited about technology or at best a bit skeptical - in a calm, jargon-free style.

1) focus on project based learning 2) focus on play 3) focus on student-centric learning & passion (applied in both kindergarden and graduate school) 4) focus on practical problem solving 5) focus on the spirit of kindergarden 6) some outside the classroom learning 7) support activities & support structures for facilitating student passions 8] Everyone likes the physical world & experience (not just kids) 9) Can do media & virtual words too, in conjunction with physical world (particularly for modeling of complex systems) 10) Challenge to integrate individual/personal passion into group projects & collaboration (connect similar interests or complementary skills in an “organic way”) 11) There is a distinction between emergent collaboration and the order of “you 3 work together” 12) Scratch can change education–mirroring the use of Logo before it. Also, scratch mirrors snapping Legos together to create “media rich projects and share in an online community” Its programming for novices. Its accessible & tinkerable. Its about meaningful projects (not just generating list of prime #s). Resnick also points to the interesting program of Alice at Carnegie Mellon which is 3-D, but it unfortunately isn’t as meaningful & personal & social as Scratch. They’ve had 1 million projects in 3 years from kids around the world

 Promotion and modelling of risk-taking.

It is not only that our leaders have jumped in and shared their learning, but they have flattened the organization and learned from others as well.  I will see many of our superintendents attend events such as “Innovation Week” to see what is happening in our schools, so that they can either share their learning with others, or act as connectors.  It would be easy to “lead from above”, but it is more important to get involved and “lead by example”.  This is something I have seen often from our administrators at every level.

Collaboration is talked a lot about in schools as an “essential trait”, but there are many people that thrive off the notion of competition.  To me, it is not one or the other, but a combination of both that really push our organization forward.  “Competitive-Collaboration” is something that I believe will really push us to the next level.

Direct instruction and lecture are probably the two most basic forms of instruction familiar to educators. It is how many, if not most, educators were instructed in their education. It is familiar. It is comfortable.

t will require both work and even more discomforting; CHANGE.

It is a change-or-die situation. We are running out of time for people to ease out of their comfort zones. We need to prioritize professional development. We need to make everyone comfortable with learning. That should be the only comfort zone for students and educators.

Observers say that Albemarle County stands out as a district that thrives on change and innovation, with a willingness to challenge the status quo to build a new type of learning environment for students.

In most school districts around the country, they say, innovation is happening at a painfully slow pace and often only in pockets such as individual classrooms, rarely if ever making the jump to a real, systemwide shift.

Those factors include strong leadership, empowered teachers and students, an infusion of technology districtwide, the creation of an organization with continuous learning at its core, and the freedom to experiment.