'Maker' movement inspires hands-on learning | The Seattle Times - 0 views
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Tinkering is being promoted on college campuses from MIT to Santa Clara University, as well as in high schools and elementary schools.
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The blending of technology and craft in tools like 3-D printers and laser cutters has made it possible for ordinary people to make extraordinary things. And many ordinary people, living as they do, more and more in their heads and online, are yearning to do something with their hands.
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Constructionist Approach
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A fabulous article full of stories about the impact of maker-centered learning experiences, and the growing number of places that provide them - elementary schools, high school, colleges, public. Perhaps most gratifying is the use of distinctly maker-centered AND educational terminology in the same article. A great sign of things to come!
Why Kids Need Schools to Change | MindShift | KQED News - 0 views
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In an ideal world, the school day would reflect kids’ changing needs and rhythms. There would be time for free play; school would start later to allow time for students’ much-needed rest; the transition time between classes would be longer, allowing time for kids to walk down the hall and say hi to their friends and plan their next moves; kids would have the opportunity to step away from school “work” in order to regroup and process what they’ve absorbed. “The actual encoding of information doesn’t take place when you’re hunched over a desk,”
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The five criteria that Challenge Success brings to schools attempts to modernize the obsolete system in place today: scheduling, project based learning, alternative assessment, climate of care, and parent education
The Future of Big Data and Analytics in K-12 Education - Education Week - 0 views
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data scientists would then search the waters for patterns in each student's engagement level, moods, use of classroom resources, social habits, language and vocabulary use, attention span, academic performance, and more.
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would be fed to teachers, parents, and students via AltSchool's digital learning platform and mobile app, which are currently being tested
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AltSchool's 50-plus engineers, data scientists, and developers are designing tools that could be available to other schools by the 2018-19 school year.
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Eventually, Ventilla envisions AltSchool technology facilitating an exponential increase in the amount of information collected on students in school, all in service of expanding the hands-on, project-based model of learning in place at the six private school campuses the company currently operates in Silicon Valley and New York City.
The Maker Directory - 1 views
When Everyone Is Doing Design Thinking, Is It Still a Competitive Advantage? - 1 views
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Design thinking has come a long way since I wrote about it here in 2008. The most valuable company in the world places design at the center of everything it does. Designers are on the founding team of countless disruptive startups. Domains such as healthcare, education, and government have begun to prototype, iterate, and build more nimbly with a human-centered focus. Now that design thinking is everywhere, it’s tempting to simply declare it dead—to ordain something new in its place. It’s a methodology always in pursuit of unforeseen innovation, so reinventing itself might seem like the smart way forward. But in practice, design thinking is a set of tools that can grow old with us.
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And I’d argue that in order to create sustained competitive advantage, businesses must be not just practitioners, but masters of the art.
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Umpqua
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How to Raise a Creative Child. Step One: Back Off - NYTimes.com - 0 views
Stop Teaching Classes And Start Teaching Children - 0 views
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Too often bits and pieces are tacked onto curriculum as yet another perfectly-reasonable-sounding-thing to teach.
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There is nothing wrong with changes in priority. In fact, this is a signal of awareness and reflection and vitality. But when education—as it tends to do—continues to take a content and skills-focused view of what to teach rather than how students learn, it’s always going to be a maddening game of what gets added in, and what gets taken out, with the loudest or most emotionally compelling voices usually winning.
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Skills are things students can “do”—procedural knowledge that yields the ability to do something. This could be revising an essay, solving a math problem, or decoding words to read. Content can be thought of as a second kind of knowledge—a declarative knowledge that often makes up the face of a content area. In math, this might be the formula to calculate the area of a circle. In composition, it could be a writing strategy to form sound and compelling paragraphs. In history, it may refer to the geographic advantages of one country in a conflict versus another. Should schools focus on content and skills, or should they focus on habits and thinking?
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Why Are Classrooms the Only Place Learning "Counts"? - Education Reimagined - Education... - 0 views
Equipping Young Leaders to Take on the 32 Most Important Issues of Our Time - Vander Ar... - 0 views
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If we take citizenship preparation seriously, we should be encouraging young people to engage with the world’s most important issues by helping them frame projects around these goals. Here are six reasons:
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Extended and integrated challenges are the best way to promote deeper learning and develop readiness for the automation economy. The goals include interesting and timely causes that many young people will find motivating. Making a contribution toward a goal they care about may be the best way to develop student agency. Goal focused projects get kids into the community and connected with local resources (see #PlaceBasedEd) It’s also a chance to shift the paradigm from “prepare for a career 10 years from now” to “make a difference right here, right now.” Taking on real challenges will promote creative and effective uses of technology from collaboration to production.
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Integrate projects into existing courses. The Global Goals site has useful project resources for 16 of these goals. Plan an integrated unit between two courses. Most of the goals combine science, sociology, research, problem-solving and writing. Capstone projects in the last two years of high school are a good place to start. Each academy at Reynoldsburg High School in Ohio and Chavez Schools in Washington, D.C., engage in a capstone project. Students at Singapore American School are required to conduct a capstone project.
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Why we should bring back vocational training | MNN - Mother Nature Network - 0 views
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College isn't for everyone.
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That's 59 out of 100 students whose high school program (or life situations) didn't prepare them for the type of work they'll be doing for the rest of their lives
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The demise of vocational education at the high school level has bred a skills shortage in manufacturing today, and with it a wealth of career opportunities for both under-employed college grads and high school students looking for direct pathways to interesting, lucrative careers."
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Education Experts Explain the Role Teachers Would Play for Students in Classrooms in a ... - 0 views
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With so many different learning styles and students at different places in their learning within a grade and within subjects, students and schools will benefit greatly from co-teaching models.
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Individual teachers will not be responsible for individual students as much as the team of teachers will be responsible for the learning outcomes of each student they touch within the school day.
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The notion of “teacher” will change significantly in the future. The growing number of formal and informal learning options is causing an unbundling of the teacher role.
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SMU disrupts design with new Master's in art and design innovation - 0 views
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One of the mandatory classes places students in studio classes where they are given a client and a prompt to solve an open-ended problem using human-centered design.
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The current client is Café Momentum, a nonprofit restaurant that trains and hires juvenile offenders. The problem students have to solve is that many of the young men who work at Café Momentum are unable to get a lease or live in unaffordable housing because of their age.
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Students can take two elective courses in almost any subject as long as they can justify why they are taking the classes. She also emphasized that MADI is for anyone.
The Art of Getting Opponents to "We" - The New York Times - 0 views
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Significantly, participants all came to align behind a single vision statement — and now they are actively communicating and advancing that vision nationwide through their organizations and networks. They host meetings with educational networks, superintendents, principals, teachers and philanthropists, reach out to libraries, museums and after-school programs, and identify and connect pioneers in learner-centered education.
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Convergence staff and facilitators work to create a “safe space,” maintaining a strict neutrality and ensuring that everyone feels heard, says Fersh. It’s important that participants “feel they’re not in a place that’s already cooked or leaning toward any solutions.”
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Convergence staff members look continually for opportunities to forge connections among participants. They begin meetings with “connecting” questions — for example: “When did you know that education was of great importance to you?” — that are designed to reveal people’s values and experiences, rather than highlight their disagreements. The objective is not to sweep differences under the rug, but to build rapport that a group needs to grapple effectively with its differences.
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When Grading Harms Student Learning | Edutopia - 0 views
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Is grading the focus, or is learning the focus?
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Zeros do not reflect student learning. They reflect compliance.
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a deduction in points. Not only didn't this correct the behavior, but it also meant that behavioral issues were clouding the overall grade report. Instead of reflecting that students had learned, the grade served as an inaccurate reflection of the learning goal.
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The Most Famous Nursery Schools in the World - And What They Can Teach Us - 0 views
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“We have not correctly legitimized a culture of childhood,” says Lella Gandini, a longtime Reggio teacher, “and the consequences are seen in all our social, economic, and political choices and investments.”
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To counter this, Reggio’s schools are relentlessly child-centered — not to achieve notable results in literacy and numeracy, but to achieve notable qualities of identity formation and to ensure that all children know how to belong to a community.
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The teachers follow the children, not plans.”
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Mastery Credits? Mastery Transcript? « Competency Works - 0 views
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the reductionist approach that wraps a student into one number – the GPA – is deeply problematic
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MTC wants to create a system of credits and transcripts that represents the whole child, or whole teenager in the case of high schools
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Credentials needs to have systems in place to provide confidence that they really do represent demonstrated knowledge and skills.
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Project-Based Learning Through a Maker's Lens | Edutopia - 5 views
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A Maker is an individual who communicates, collaborates, tinkers, fixes, breaks, rebuilds, and constructs projects for the world around him or her.
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A Maker, re-cast into a classroom, has a name that we all love: a learner.
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A Maker, just like a true learner, values the process of making as much as the product.
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The messy, hands-on Maker classroom is perfect for a PBL unit when the teacher is willing to collaborate, tinker, fix, break, and rebuild alongside students. Some fundamental elements to consider in the designing of a maker-centered project, but not as absolutes. It is important to realize that any project taken on in a maker-centered classroom is, by definition, a PBL experience.
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Fabulous piece about the myriad connection among PBL and Maker. And your commentary is so helpful and provocative. Thank you!
Supporting Children's Identities as Designers and Makers Through Inquiry - ICS Early Ye... - 2 views
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Throughout these explorations, the children began to understand that the ‘classroom as a Design Studio’ was a place where ideas, creativity, technique and skills can be used to make beautiful, interesting and useful products.
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The children’s idea that they should create their own museum in order to share their products affirms their strong identities as designers. As a learning community, the children have created interconnected systems full of makers with a range of products and knowledge about process which they are eager to share with others. The children are currently in the process of planning their own Kindergarten Design Museum.
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We supported the desire of the children to have creative freedom to design in abundance and were also mindful of the ecological responsibility to use materials responsibly.