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I am currently collaborating with two of our English teachers to co-design and co-teach research and content creation for digital research projects.   Susan Lester (10th Honors World American Literature/Composition) and I began our project about three weeks ago (read more in this blog post), and I’ll be working with John Bradford (11th Honors American Literature/Composition) as of Tuesday for the next month or so on his twist on the project (more details coming soon).  In both of our collaborative projects, we felt our students were not quite ready  in terms of skill sets or prior learning experiences to completely open up the possibilities for a digital research “paper” or project although students do have creative latitude in choosing and designing their multigenre elements that will be integrated into the wiki based “text”; students also have the option to integrate multimedia into each section of their wikified “papers”.

the three of us  felt torn in wanting to open up the options and not setting up students for utter frustration (to the point many would completely shut down) in terms of combining two advanced skill sets (new research skills and content are being introduced);

ony Wagner that the world doesn’t care anymore what you know; all it cares “is what you can do with what you know.”

And they increasingly don’t care how those skills were acquired: home schooling, an online university, a massive open online course, or Yale. They just want to know one thing: Can you add value?

he unique thing about this position was that he would only accept interest in the position through a post on Twitter, and that he would look solely at a candidate’s digital footprints and not at any paper resume.

Vala was looking for candidates to have a minimum Klout score above 60, a minimum Kred influence score of 725, a Kred outreach of at least eight, and more than 1,000 active Twitter followers in order to be considered.

or a month, it was a time to establish new connections, even with some of the other candidates themselves, as we waited for opportunities to interview with the company. We began to grow and learn from each other. The process was amazing. I was able to see their passion and they could see mine. By looking at what these candidates did for a current job and to see times of the day and days of the week that they were devoting to posting and sharing online digitally, I started to get a sense of who everyone was and what their passions were and what their work ethic was like. I got a chance to know candidates well before I even knew who they really were.

“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.”

Instead of lecturing, teachers can then use class time to guide their students, from the fastest to the slowest, as they work on group projects, create research papers or do chemistry experiments.

Teacher Jonathan Bergmann's Colorado district was so rural that kids in state competitions, including football, volleyball and debate, often took off the last class period of the day for travel time.

For him and Sams, the flip gave them more time for experiments,

True innovative thinkers will land upon a project and see it to it’s completion. They may have dozens of ideas in their head or paper, but there are single-minded about one or two specific projects.

that they never give up. Even when they’ve failed or fallen to their lost point, they get back up and try again.

Students at Manor New Tech typically complete nearly 200 projects over the course of their high school experience, with each project lasting about two to four weeks.

"How can we use mathematics to design and use a Dobsonian telescope?"

he rubric often includes time lines and information on essential elements of successful final products (for example, if a report may be produced as a podcast rather than a paper, the rubric specifies minimum length for the podcast).

Critically, pushing around symbols on paper is just a symbolic representation of the real math taking place within one’s head. When one does a calculation, whether it is by hand or by machine, an important feature of whether or not one can be said to be doing the calculation is whether or not one can predict the potential output from the algorithm, or if one understands the process they are using.

We also require, as a system, much more flexibility in the mathematics taught at the K-to-12 level. I’d like to see a system where many different types of mathematics are taught besides just the standard hierarchy leading to calculus.

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."

We see the embedded philosophy bloom when students assemble papers as mash-ups from online snippets instead of thinking and composing on a blank piece of screen. What is wrong with this is not that students are any lazier now or learning less. (It is probably even true, I admit reluctantly, that in the presence of the ambient Internet, maybe it is not so important anymore to hold an archive of certain kinds of academic trivia in your head.)

If students don’t learn to think, then no amount of access to information will do them any good.

Learning at its truest is a leap into the unknown.