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Steven B. Johnson writes in Where Good Ideas Come From about the revolutionary power of social media such as Twitter to advance ideas and innovation in a myriad of fields, and it has been fascinating to see this concept in action in the swift spread over the past six months of the practice of flipping classrooms,  which is also known as reverse instruction or learning, and is closely related to (or often synonymous with) teacher vodcasting.

  At the same time, what is now an opportunity is also becoming an urgency: if students don’t need to come to class to get informational content delivery, if they can get it easily on their own, we need to transform how we use our classroom time such that it continues to be relevant and valuable.

I decided to use [reverse instruction] to teach my students the basic concepts of neurons.  For homework, I posted to our wiki a Khan Academy video, as well as, a couple of TED talks from leading neurologists to explain some of the purposes neurons have and cutting edge research that’s being done in the field.  In total, maybe about 25 minutes of work.

Sams and Bergman asked a fundamental question: why are lectures delivered at school and problems worked at home? It's always been done that way, but it doesn't have to be.

They flipped the classroom to make it more flexible and dynamic, matching it with the needs of the students.

With class time liberated from lectures I was able to incorporate more hands-on activities, projects, and helping students better understand confusing and challenging concepts.

he current educational system is based on individual and teacher learning. However, this simply isn’t realistic in today’s classroom. Students are social creatures and their education should be delivered in a way that is more in line with their day-to-day interactions. The solution? Go back to the principle that worked so well in the single school house model: social learning.  Student-to-student and social learning has already proven to be effective and cost effective (it’s free).

As part of a redesign of our instructional model, students should be provided with the infrastructure to collaborate with each other live, in real-time, 24 hours a day. We should give students free, collaborative, multimedia online study rooms with access to standards-aligned content. We should do this because we have a social responsibility to do it, but it also makes good plain economic sense.

Why limit your student population to a few hundred when you can leverage the knowledge of hundreds of millions?

Shift #1  – Let’s make the curriculum map the curriculum map. That’s not a textbook’s job.

Better yet, can we build our curriculum maps to be digital frameworks, on which we can hang the additional digital resources that we use to help teach our students, standards and content?

then our coordinators need to be good at more than just instructional implementation. They also need expertise in publishing on the Web and in resource development and distribution

insight and concrete examples that can help educators understand how computers are reshaping our economy, the jobs that will be available to our students & more importantly, how we can begin to restructure our classroom instruction to help develop the expert and complex thinking skills that are required to compete and hold a job in our changing economy.

Computers don't cause unemployment, they can replace only specific types of jobs / tasks: 1. Routine Cognitive - cognitive tasks that can be accomplished by following specific rules 2. Routine Manual - manual tasks that follow precise, physical movement that can be programmed

Step two, help our students developed the skills and abilities necessary to find, understand, analyze and evaluate information.