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Put simply, project-based curriculum emphasizes learning through doing classroom projects that address a specific issue or challenge. Students typically carry out the projects in groups, and teachers guide them along

Tina Barseghian Editor of MindShift, a website about the future of learning Posted: January 7, 2011 02:48 PM BIO Become a Fan Get Email Alerts Bloggers' Index Napa New Tech High: 5 Reasons This is the School of the Future Amazing Inspiring Funny Scary Hot Crazy Important Weird Read More: Computer Tech School , Education Technology , Napa New Tech High , New Tech High Napa , New Tech Network , New Technology High , School Computer , Tech School , Tech Schools , Education News share this story 11481122 Get Education Alerts Sign Up Submit this story digg reddit stumble What does the high school of the future look like? It's one that emphasizes useful, relevant skills that can be applied

At Napa New Tech, you'll hear very little lecturing and see few teacher-led activities. For this school, the decision to use project-based curriculum was based not only on what topics students should learn, but also what skills they should acquire in school.

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.

must engage in ongoing capacity-building; ideally including a combination of coaching, mentoring, support and training.

Not surprisingly, technology investments seldom produce maximal educational returns. To strengthen this weak link, any consideration of purpose-built technologies must benefit from including strong training, professional development, and ongoing professional learning components.

Every student needs one-on-one access to computers and other mobile technology in classrooms.Every teacher needs professional development in the effective use of digital tools for teaching and learning, including the use of digital tools to promote writing.All schools and districts need a comprehensive information technology policy to ensure that the necessary infrastructure, technical support and resources are available for teaching and learning.

“For decades, the center of computing has been the desktop, and software was modeled after the experience of using a typewriter,” said Georg Petschnigg, a former Microsoft employee who is one of the creators of Paper, a new sketchbook app for the iPad.

“People are living in the moment and they want to share in the moment,” Professor Sundar said. “Mobile gives you that immediacy and convenience.”

Nobody even bothers to ask the question Seymour Papert first posed 45 years ago, “Does the child program the computer or does the computer program the child?” This is a tragedy.

Today one merely has to promise 75 quick and easy things to do in 37 minutes with the hottest product being peddled to schools. Another popular topic is incessantly about how your colleagues won’t or can’t use the latest fad.

PLN, PLC, PLP, etc… are just fancy alphabet soup for having someone to talk with. We should not need an National Science Foundation grant to make friends.

“Teachers don’t object to the use of technology,” said Sabrina Laine, vice president of the American Institutes for Research,

The founders of the school say they want to promote work that is strange, impractical and magical. The school’s motto? “More poems less demos.”

“People are coming from a programming background, and thinking, how do I make art with these skills? Things that are whimsical? Dreams?” said Zach Lieberman, one of the school’s four founders and instructors, who has taught at the Parsons School of Design and like his collaborators, has one foot in the technology world and another in the art world.

The school’s first crop of students include both traditional programmers and designers, but also a beatboxer from Canada, and a Ph.D. candidate studying criminal justice who wants to use data visualization to highlight problems in the prison system, said Mr. Lieberman.

Coding, likewise, involves understanding and working within structures.

Memorizing rules and vocabulary strengthens mental muscles and improves overall memory. That's why multilingual people are better at remembering lists or sequences. Coding similarly involves very specific rules and vocabulary.

Likewise, programming necessitates being able to focus on what works while eliminating bugs. Foreign language instruction today emphasizes practical communication -- what students can do with the language. Similarly, coding is practical, empowering and critical to the daily life of everyone living in the 21st century.

Computers and the attendant technology can no longer be considered desirable adjuncts to education. Instead, they have to be regarded as essential—as thinking prosthetics (Johnson 2001) or mind tools (Jonassen 1996). But, like any other tool, thinking prosthetics must be used properly to be effective

The sociocultural perspective focuses on the manner in which human intelligence is augmented by artifacts designed to facilitate cognition. Our intelligence is distributed over the tools we use (diSessa 2000; Hutchins 1995). The old saying, "To a man with a hammer, every problem looks like a nail" is very true

Pierre Lévy (1998) notes that one of the principal characteristics of the knowledge age, in which the Net Generation is growing up, is virtualization, a process in which "[an] event is detached from a specific time and place, becomes public, undergoes heterogenesis"