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Martin Leicht

What It Takes to Become an All Project-Based School | PROJECT BASED LEARNING | MindShif... - 0 views

  • New Tech schools are entirely project-based and cross-disciplinary.
  • Students take courses like Bio-literacy, which mesh subjects together, emphasizing that disciplines are not stand-alone endeavors. Technology is woven throughout the school day and at home seamlessly.
  • only 60 percent of assessment is based on content. The other 40 percent is based on what he called “school-wide learning outcomes,” things like written and oral proficiency, work ethic, presentation skills and the ability to give and take feedback. Students can see the project rubric and know where they need to improve their skills.
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  • “Students are working on authentic projects and problems.” He gave an example of a cross curricular physics and environmental science class that studied the physics of power and electricity. “Our students learned those skills and then rewired houses that were destroyed in New Orleans’ 9th Ward.
  • Each school is given a coach who visits throughout the school year, checks on lesson plans, suggests changes and helps troubleshoot problems. And New Tech focuses on nurturing the leadership capacity of principals so they can continue to innovate with teachers.
  • decisions by consensus
  • When kids enter his seventh grade they are so used to the traditional school system, they don’t know how to work collaboratively on projects. “At first their grades go down just because it’s projects. It’s actually kind of harder because you have to be a self-learner.” In traditional schools, kids are constantly being directed, so they don’t have to think for themselves as much
Martin Leicht

Play Is Serious Business | Psychology Today - 0 views

  • the Prussian military developed a model that now resembles our school structure today
    • Martin Leicht
       
      Okay, we throw the Prussians under the bus for developing school, as we know it. 
  • Researchers have already exposed the risks of sitting for hours at a time and know that it increases health problems
  • Stuart Brown, one of the foremost play researchers in the world, states that play is essential for both brain development and social development, from childhood into adulthood.
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  • It is a biological mechanism for making learning enjoyable.
  • Play helps meld emotion into the experience of learning.
  • If a child is denied the opportunity to play, the body and mind fight back.
  • Play allows children to let off steam
  • positive emotions broaden the scope of attention and increase cognitive flexibility.  Why not embrace the tool in the curriculum?  
  • When school becomes a stressful place for a child, it is no longer a supportive, positive learning environment
  • teachers at traditional schools can adapt their classrooms to include more choices, more creativity, and more open play
  • Play has become a luxury – available in private schools that espouse progressive learning principles, but crowded out of public schools by a teach-to-the-test mentality.
  • Despite increasing research on play and emotion, relatively few studies of play within the school environment exist.
  • Increasingly, educators are calling for a return (link is external) to the greater integration of play into elementary education.
    • Martin Leicht
       
      integration, the question what is the integration equation? How much play how much less structured teach to the test? 
  • Fredrickson
Dana Watts

Reinventing Medical School | Fast Company | Business + Innovation - 1 views

  • former global lead of systems design at IDEO.
  • a leadership-focused year of self-directed study, a team-based curriculum, and a first-of-its-kind Design Institute for Health, a joint collaboration between the Dell Medical School and the College of Fine Arts, developed to apply design thinking to health care challenges and innovation.
  • It will be the first new medical school at a tier 1 research university in more than 50 years (the most recent was Penn State in 1963), giving the school a unique opportunity to build its curriculum, facilities, and priorities from the ground up
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  • There is little valuable learning in that process."
  • Typical medical school curricula force students to memorize inordinate amounts of material, only to forget most of it after they take the exam," says Dr. Susan Cox, executive vice dean for academics and chair of medical education at Dell. "
Dana Watts

Why Every Edtech Company Should Take Field Trips to Schools | EdSurge News - 1 views

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    Love the fact that article places the ownership on businesses instead of the other way around. It is a two way street.
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    This is a no-brainer for EdTech companies. It's pure marketing and R&D. I don't mind the idea of the corporate world learning from going to school, let's keep them honest about what they are learning. This particular person is proudly touting her strategies for stealing free R&D at the expense of disrupting any flow of learning. Not to mention capitalizing on the little free planning time the teacher has (point #3). If a school is okay with this, so be it, but I might question its focus.
Brian C. Smith

Computer Science Should Supplement, not Supplant Science Education - 0 views

  • In the integrated STEM classroom, using the principles of NGSS, educators are working to seek out real-world, relevant, authentic problems that would be of interest to students and ask them to apply computational thinking to solve the problem using data analysis, visualization, seeking patterns, and computation.
  • And as everyone knows, time in the school schedule is VERY limited and providing computer science as on a separate track cuts the instructional time pie even more, and sets up another silo in high schools.
Brian C. Smith

technology - Practical Theory - 0 views

  • We need to understand that until we stop fetishizing technology by making it the focal point of the work every time we pull it out of the closet, we will never move past the notion of “technology integration” to a place of “modern learning.”
  • The idea that technology must be invisible in school is simply this: Using technology to inquire, to create, to share, to research, to learn is not and should not be notable anymore. It should simply be a matter of course.Using technology in school is not the point – learning is.
  • There are still moments when we learn about the technology itself, and that’s a good thing. Whether it is in a computer science class where students are learning to program, or it is in a technology infusion workshop where we help students to learn how to fully integrate the technology into their sense of themselves as a student and citizen, there are moments where we — student and teachers — make the invisible visible.
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  • both students and teachers should have moments of reflection of how the tools affect the learning. But there’s a big leap between understanding how the tool both is vital to and transformative to the work and making the work always about the tool.
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    Lehmann offers an important context for thinking about learning in a technology-rich world.
Brian C. Smith

10 Tips For Launching An Inquiry-Based Classroom | MindShift | KQED News - 0 views

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    "Unfortunately, many educators and schools are so focused on achieving standardized outcomes that they don't leverage the best tool at their disposal - students' natural curiosity."
Brian C. Smith

How to Incubate Creativity in School Through Making and Discovery | MindShift | KQED News - 1 views

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    "'Our goal is not to create more scientists and engineers; it's to leave doors open for kids.'" This is a particularly powerful message for those interested in developing creativity. Creativity is cannot be captured in the form of a rubric, it is within the child and we must cultivate and allow it to develop in ever opening doors.
Brian C. Smith

These Creative Kids Designed A Way To Measure All The Plastic In The Ocean | Co.Exist |... - 0 views

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    This project happened right here in Hong Kong with a partnership between a school and makers in the community. We have the contacts for this type of project. Do we really want this? If so, what needs to give in order to make it happen? If we don't, why the heck not? ~ Brian
Martin Leicht

It's 'digital heroin': How screens turn kids into psychotic junkies | New York Post - 0 views

    • Martin Leicht
       
      Signs/signals being sent to the parent. "It's educational" is a reasonable excuse, yet does it trump parenting technique/skill?
  • As his behavior continued to deteriorate, she tried to take the game away but John threw temper tantrums. His outbursts were so severe that she gave in, still rationalizing to herself over and over again that “it’s educational.”
    • Martin Leicht
       
      Is too much of any one thing, e.g., baseball, food, study, computers, etc., a good idea?
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  • Many parents intuitively understand that ubiquitous glowing screens are having a negative effect on kids. We see the aggressive temper tantrums when the devices are taken away and the wandering attention spans when children are not perpetually stimulated by their hyper-arousing devices.
  • Recent brain imaging research is showing that they affect the brain’s frontal cortex — which controls executive functioning, including impulse control — in exactly the same way that cocaine does. Technology is so hyper-arousing that it raises dopamine levels — the feel-good neurotransmitter most involved in the addiction dynamic — as much as sex.
  • “An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure” to be especially true when it comes to tech addiction.
    • Martin Leicht
       
      When do we as parents act? Or is it more a partnership going forward? Yes, we (schools) asked students to use these devices. And we must do are bit to help students manage/cope. At the same time, parents need to be aware too. I know we all want to be liked as parents. In today's modern family, life is complex. Yet, I come to the conclusion that I am not my son's friend. There's going to be a lot of actions/directives he will not like. And yes, I will need to do a lot of work to get us through it, yet isn't that my job as a parent to deal with the changes as they come in order to guide him toward adulthood?
  • According to a 2013 Policy Statement by the American Academy of Pediatrics, 8- to 10 year-olds spend 8 hours a day with various digital media while teenagers spend 11 hours in front of screens. One in three kids are using tablets or smartphones before they can talk
    • Martin Leicht
       
      1 in 3 before they can talk are using tablets? Okay, this is an interesting statement. Is it supervised use? How long? I would ask the question, why? We as parents make a lot of interesting choices as parents and we all need to stop and reflect on those choices often. If it is before they can talk, then it is definitely not the school asking/requiring the device.
  • Once a person crosses over the line into full-blown addiction — drug, digital or otherwise — they need to detox before any other kind of therapy can have any chance of being effective.
  • So how do we keep our children from crossing this line? It’s not easy.
  • That means Lego instead of Minecraft; books instead of iPads; nature and sports instead of TV
    • Martin Leicht
       
      Great strategy, active parenting. I would suggest, cooking, surfing, and any activity involving ones hands. Of course, do parents have time for this?
  • When I speak to my 9-year-old twin boys, I have honest conversations with them about why we don’t want them having tablets or playing video games.
    • Martin Leicht
       
      I like the "conversations" point. Not one, many conversations.
    • Martin Leicht
       
      Another great strategy. I would add, the conversation is on going. The author references the distracted parent syndrome above, that one is key!
  • Developmental psychologists understand that children’s healthy development involves social interaction, creative imaginative play and an engagement with the real, natural world.
    • Martin Leicht
       
      Moderation, no? Does not the standby wisdom that everything in moderation apply here too?
  • Thus the solution is often to help kids to connect to meaningful real-life experiences and flesh-and-blood relationships. The engaged child tethered to creative activities and connected to his or her family is less likely to escape into the digital fantasy world.
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    Yeah, this is why the Reggio Emilia Approach and maker-centered learning is excellent. The blending of the digital and physical world to learn nearly anything on any topic and beyond. Kids might spend more time with devices in activities stemming from maker-centered learning, but it isn't all on the device and it provides alternative ways of knowing, understanding, and doing. We, the adults, are ultimately responsible for creating the conditions for this to be so. Papert has taught us this decades ago. I don't know why we don't study his work among the others that have known this for a very long time. Isn't it time to do so with the technology group?
Martin Leicht

Is Design Thinking the New Liberal Arts? - CIO Journal. - WSJ - 0 views

  • The first is feasibility
  • Next comes viability
  • The final dimension is desirability
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  • Design thinking is now being applied to abstract entities, such as systems and services, as well as to devise strategies, manage change and solve complex problems.
  • d.school, was launched in 2004 as a graduate program that integrates business, the social sciences, the humanities and other disciplines into more traditional engineering and product design
  • take on the world’s messy problems together.
    • Martin Leicht
       
      human values & continuing evolution
  • deliberate mash-up of industry, academia and the big world beyond campus is a key
  • rigorous engineering education; entrepreneurship and entrepreneurial thinking; and the arts, which broadly encompasses creativity, innovation and design
  • students needed to learn how to think critically and creatively every bit as much as they needed to learn finance or accounting.
    • Martin Leicht
       
      approach from different perspectives & even combine approaches to find innovative solutions
  • has design thinking now become the new liberal arts? After pondering the question, I believe the answer is: No
  • Design Thinking is frequently identified as an engaging process and methodical framework for approaching complex, multidisciplinary problems in ways that consistently result in solutions that are successful and often creative in unpredictable way
    • Martin Leicht
       
      DT - it's a framework for thinking about complex, multidisciplinary problems to be applied to anything
    • Martin Leicht
       
      successful design solutions are found at the intersection of "feasibility", "viability," and "desirability.'
  • How is design thinking human-centered,
  • Do disciplines, in order to evolve and advance, need some place in which to play and from which to be provoked?… Research-as-questioning is a much freer and more playful approach to discovery. It keeps us in closer contact with our natural disposition to curiosity and wonder.”
  • concluded that their action-oriented approach to problem solving did not pay proper attention to past knowledge. “A truly human-centered design, if it takes culture at all seriously, would have to take pastness seriously
    • Martin Leicht
       
      study of the past sets us up to live well in future
    • Martin Leicht
       
      Design Thinking does not really focus much on the past beyond the definition of the problem/challenge were liberal arts does.
  • But for them to really shape the future of university learning, they will have to do a better job of engaging with precisely what the university was designed to promote, and what design thinking, with its emphasis on innovation, has thus far completely ignored: the past.”
  • The difference between science and engineering is often described by the nature of the questions that are asked: scientists ask why as they attempt to understand the world, while engineers ask why not as they attempt to change it and create what has never been
    • Martin Leicht
       
      You need both Science, the why, and Engineering, the why not, to fully leverage/use/benefit from design thinking. As do Liberal Arts and Design Thinking. Both are a symbiotic twin.
Martin Leicht

Where Non-Techies Can Get With the Programming - The New York Times - 0 views

  • They aren’t going to become programmers, but they realize these are skills that will make them better lawyers
  • for example, learn to write short, tailored programs that can identify clusters of words and concepts in Supreme Court rulings more accurately than a Google search
  • Code, it seems, is the lingua franca of the modern economy.
    • Martin Leicht
       
      BIg data, by using code you fine tune your search and pull in the data/information you need.
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  • One recent institutional adaptation is the creation of so-called CS+X initiatives at schools like Stanford, Northwestern and the University of Illinois. These programs are hybrid majors that combine computing with other disciplines, including anthropology, comparative literature and history — a nod to the reality that software skills can advance research in nearly every field.
  • Today, at many universities, at least half of the student population takes the intro courses.
  • coding as a window to “computational thinking,” which involves abstract reasoning, modeling and breaking down problems into the recipelike steps of an algorithm
Martin Leicht

Have Smartphones Destroyed a Generation? - The Atlantic - 0 views

  • She told me she’d spent most of the summer hanging out alone in her room with her phone.
    • Martin Leicht
       
      A challenge for certain, to parents, teens/students, and the community on the whole.
  • Today’s teens are also less likely to date.
  • Even driving, a symbol of adolescent freedom inscribed in American popular culture,
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  • Independence isn’t free—you need some money in your pocket to pay for gas, or for that bottle of schnapps.
  • But iGen teens aren’t working (or managing their own money) as much.
  • Across a range of behaviors—drinking, dating, spending time unsupervised— 18-year-olds now act more like 15-year-olds used to, and 15-year-olds more like 13-year-olds. Childhood now stretches well into high school.
  • n an information economy that rewards higher education more than early work history, parents may be inclined to encourage their kids to stay home and study rather than to get a part-time job. Teens, in turn, seem to be content with this homebody arrangement—not because they’re so studious, but because their social life is lived on their phone. They don’t need to leave home to spend time with their friends.
    • Martin Leicht
       
      "may be inclined" - the author puts a lot on this statement as a possible source for this challenge we face. Parents rely no data trends get get their kids to stay home and study. I am sorry, the point may be true, yet I find it questionable parenting.
  • this means iGen teens have more leisure time than Gen X teens did, not less.
  • It’s not only a matter of fewer kids partying; fewer kids are spending time simply hanging out.
  • Teens who spend more time than average on screen activities are more likely to be unhappy, and those who spend more time than average on nonscreen activities are more likely to be happy.
  • Of course, these analyses don’t unequivocally prove that screen time causes unhappiness; it’s possible that unhappy teens spend more time online. But recent research suggests that screen time, in particular social-media use, does indeed cause unhappiness.
  • This doesn’t always mean that, on an individual level, kids who spend more time online are lonelier than kids who spend less time online
  • The more time teens spend looking at screens, the more likely they are to report symptoms of depression.
  • One piece of data that indirectly but stunningly captures kids’ growing isolation, for good and for bad: Since 2007, the homicide rate among teens has declined, but the suicide rate has increased. As teens have started spending less time together, they have become less likely to kill one another, and more likely to kill themselves.
  • This trend has been especially steep among girls. Forty-eight percent more girls said they often felt left out in 2015 than in 2010, compared with 27 percent more boys
Martin Leicht

Key Features Of A Meaningful eLearning Course - eLearning Industry - 0 views

    • Martin Leicht
       
      planning keeps appearing as #1 factor in online learning
  • A learning objective is a statement in clear, measurable terms that informs what a learner will be able to do after completing a training program.
  • Ask them rhetorical questions which will compel them to think Ask learners to pick up definitions and examples of terms taught from various sources End the course with a scenario followed by a couple of questions. Get learners to comment on discussion forums on the usefulness and applicability of a course Get them to summarize learning by creating a checklist Ask them to pick items from the options provided and justify their choice
Brian C. Smith

Collaboration - 0 views

  • Collaboration is more than simply the division of labor. It should not be taught as an isolated skill or coerced. Sadly, like many seemingly good ideas, schools seek to mechanize collaboration by turning natural process into a set of measurable skills and multi-year course of study, easily assessed. Some children win, while others fail.
  • Cooperation and collaboration are natural processes. Such skills are useful when the creative process benefits from interdependence. The best collaboration mirrors democracy when individual talents, knowledge, or experiences are contributed to produce something larger than the sum of its parts.
  • Work with your friends. Work with people you trust. Work with people who have different skills or expertise. If that doesn’t produce the result you desire, you will find others to collaborate with. That is how you learn to collaborate. You may teach it, but the students will not stay taught.
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  • The only reason to assign group size is scarcity of materials (we have to share). Even in those largely avoidable scenarios, it hardly matters if group size varies a bit. The main consideration is inactivity by some members when a group is too large.
  • Collaboration is both selfish and selfless. You give of yourself by sharing your talent and expertise, but the collaboration should benefit you as well.
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    Read the whole post.
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