Group items tagged

"As school boards address the overall challenge of social media use within schools, they should focus on the reality that the impact no longer lies only on the individual and local schools. Social networks include students and teachers all over the world and, therefore, teaching and coaching on digital literacy for teachers and students is where the focus should rest. Knowing how to build successful communities of learning and how to integrate social connectivity within a learning environment is a much more needed outcome than finding a way to control and monitor specific users and content."

Background/Context: Recent trends suggest that middle-class parents may be a growing constituency in urban public schools and districts. Within the burgeoning literature on the middle class in urban public schools, most scholars have focused on parents' goals and orientations and/or the consequences of parental involvement in classroom and school settings. This article broadens the literature's scope through a focus on middle- and upper-middle-class parents' "out-of-school," neighborhood-based engagement. Examining the place-based organizing of a middle- and upper-middle-class neighborhood parents' group, this article highlights the significant influence that parents' work outside classrooms and PTA meetings can have on a local school.

"Re-Engineering Information Technology: Design Considerations for Competency Education by Liz Glowa, February 2013 Re-Engineering Information Technology: Design Considerations for Competency Education analyzes and examines components and elements of effective competency-based information systems. Based on interviews and research, the ideas in Re-Engineering Information Technology build upon the lessons learned in analyzing information systems developed by competency education innovators, best practices of systemic approaches to information management, and emerging opportunities. The paper is designed for readers to find those issues that are of most interest to them in their role and be used to catalyze strategies, support new competency-based instructional models, and inform decision making for continuous improvement. You can find more resources on the Competency-Based Pathways Wiki."

(Re)Constructing Home and School: Immigrant Parents, Agency, and the (Un)Desirability of Bridging Multiple Worlds by Fabienne Doucet - 2011 Background/Context: This study examines the tactics that Haitian immigrant parents used to negotiate the boundaries around home and school, presenting the possibility that families play an active and deliberate role in creating distance between the worlds of home and school.

This analysis responds to a generation of criticism leveled at 1:1 laptop computer initiatives. The article presents a review of the key themes of that criticism and offers suggestions for reframing the conversation about 1:1 computing among advocates and critics. Efforts at changing, innovating, and reforming education provide the context for reframing the conversation. Within that context, we raise questions about what classrooms and schools need to look and be like in order to realize the advantages of 1:1 computing. In doing so, we present a theoretical vision for self-organizing schools in which laptop computers or other such devices are essential tools.

"We are moving away from the model in which learning is organized around stable, usually hierarchical institutions (schools, colleges, universities) that, for better and worse, have served as the main gateways to education and social mobility. Replacing that model is a new system in which learning is best conceived of as a flow, where learning resources are not scarce but widely available, opportunities for learning are abundant, and learners increasingly have the ability to autonomously dip into and out of continuous learning flows." Hat tip to Jason Finley:  ttps://groups.diigo.com/group/vermont-education/content/user/jdfinley 

Background/Context: Though change is constant in organizations, determining how to successfully implement planned change has been a perennial challenge for both organizational scholars and practitioners. While the empirical knowledge base on planned change in schools and other organizations offers numerous insights, the inattention to activity, or the practice of leading and managing change, remains. Organizational change theory, and specifically organizational routines, offers a useful lens with which to examine planned change in work practice in schools. The purpose of this study is to understand the role organizational routines play in changing school work practice.

The Technology Integration Matrix (TIM) illustrates how teachers can use technology The Technology Integration Matrix (TIM) illustrates how teachers can use technology to enhance learning for K-12 students. The TIM incorporates five interdependent  characteristics of meaningful learning environments: active, constructive, goal directed  (i.e.reflective), authentic, and collaborative (Jonassen, Howland, Moore, & Marra,  2003). The TIM associates five levels of technology integration (i.e., entry, adoption,  adaptation, infusion, and transformation) with each of the five characteristics of  meaningful learning environments. Together, the five levels of technology integration and  the five characteristics of meaningful learning environments create a matrix of 25 cells.

Kids learn from teachers, peers, and the physical environment.  Video about flexible, connected, adaptive spaces and furnishings designed with adolescents' physicality and 21st century learning in mind.

A powerpoint that poses good questions about flexibility in teaching and learning.  Like all good powerpoints, it's mostly pictures and few words - too bad in this case, because I'd love to hear what the presentation was about.

What student voice and parent engagement do NOT look like, and thoughts on what to do about it.

Teachers know that making lessons relevant helps motivate students. The most frequent approach is to link curriculum to learner interests. Two educators, Mario Fantini and Gerry Weinstein, in two now out-of-print books, Making Urban Schools Work and Towards Humanistic Education, pointed out that it would be more effective to link curriculum to the concerns of learners. (You can find used copies of both through Book Finder.) What do kids worry about? What anxieties sometimes keep them up at night? What peer interactions churn up their emotions? How do they deal with their fears about the future, college admissions, employment or bullying?

"Yet the reaction from most "reformers," especially those with the most money, is to pretty much stay the course, to treat education as something that schools define, deliver, assess and confirm. Technology allows us to do that "better" than we have in the past, in some conversations "better" than teachers can. It allows us to "achieve" at higher levels, to compete more effectively with the world, and to stoke the push to make every child "college ready." This is not "beginner's mind"-type thinking." The Storified link is particularly worth checking out.

The John W. Gardner Center for Youth and Their Communities (JGC) at Stanford University partners with communities to develop leadership, conduct research and effect change to improve the lives of youth.

Best quote: Where are the student-led ideas, the disruptive solutions and true innovation?  Article on brand-consciousness for schools.

According to TLE team member Owen Milne, this site is "the go-to for understanding the ongoing relationship between pedagogy-space-technology as it relates to designing and managing active learning environments."

Great reflection by one teacher on her shifting thinking about schools and learning. 

One teacher's shift in beliefs and practices in education, from teacher-centered to student-centered.