Independent School Collaboration

I believe that the secret to change lies in developing the social fabric, capacity and connectedness found in communities of practice and learning networks.

building a new future- one that focuses on the gifts each teacher, student, parent and leader

The study identified three important best practices related to online instruction: “Online learning can be enhanced by giving learners control of their interactions with media and prompting learner reflection.” The study seems to indicate that online learning environments improve student learning when students are able to manipulate instruction based on their particular learning needs or when the online curriculum provides learning mechanisms that trigger student reflection or self monitoring of learning. Online learning is more effective when the curriculum includes blended learning elements (e.g., face-to-face interaction, online collaboration, independent practice, etc.). Effective online learning environments include a variety of learning activities. The simple inclusion of online learning activities such as video or online quizzes do not necessarily improve student learning. Although these sorts of instructional activities are often recommended by educators, the study was not able to find a significant connection between the activities and improved student achievement.

This network is a forum for discussing education and is a laboratory for experimenting with social-educational networking, blogging, wikis, social bookmarking, and multimedia. Educators and students are encouraged to participate and contribute to this virtual community.

Mobile phones, computers everywhere, hypertext, social networking, collaborative cognition (from Wikipedia on up), Google, text-messaging, Twitter, audiobooks, digital texts, text-to-speech, speech recognition, flexible formatting - these are not "add ons" to the world of education, they are the world of education. This is how humans in this century talk, read, communicate, learn. And learning to use these technologies effectively, efficiently, and intelligently must be at the heart of our educational strategies.

Maybe worse than irrelevant. Maybe dangerous. The belief that "your" experience is relevant leads to a nightmare loop. Students who behave, and learn, most like their teachers do the best in classrooms. Teachers see this reflection as proof of their own competence - "The best students are just like me." And thus all who are "different" in any way - race, class, ability, temperament, preferences - are left out of the success story.

The mode of Microsoft meetings used to be: You come with something we haven’t seen in a slide deck or presentation. You deliver the presentation. You probably take what I will call “the long and winding road.” You take the listener through your path of discovery and exploration, and you arrive at a conclusion.

So most meetings nowadays, you send me the materials and I read them in advance. And I can come in and say: “I’ve got the following four questions. Please don’t present the deck.”

a new kind of conference; a conference where every participant has the opportunity to shape the conference so that it is personally meaningful and valuable.