PSU TLT

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"At Penn State, we needed a clicker system that was both easy to use and flexible enough to support our wide-ranging teaching methodologies," said Dave Test, a member of the university's technology classroom support organization. "With i>clicker, our faculty can easily implement clickers into their courses, adding myriad engagement opportunities with their students, but without the steep learning curve that we've experienced in the past. i>clicker gives us rock solid reliability and all of the features we need, without all of the headaches of other clicker systems."

Instead of the traditional schedule of eight 45-minute classes each day, with courses broken into two semesters, high school students at Calhoun intensively study three to five subjects in each of five terms, or modules, that are 32 to 36 days long. Classes are in blocks of 65 or 130 minutes each day. Every day, students have 45 minutes of “community time,” an intentionally unstructured period for the students to hang out.

What started five years ago as an effort to accommodate maddeningly complex schedules in a relatively small space quickly became a sort of evangelical mission to make progressive education more, well, progressive: embracing depth over breadth, allowing for more experiential learning in Central Park and at nearby museums, and, administrators said they hoped, reducing stress. Steven J. Nelson, Calhoun’s head of school, said the new schedule fostered teaching in the ways children learn best.

It’s great to have smart people and money helping to discover and build innovations in education. But does Fred Wilson really advocate getting rid of schools entirely in favor of teaching each other on the internet? If not, then how far do we want to go? Indeed, we need to make distinctions here. Education is a many fangled thing, not all of it served well by hacking. In some areas, our kids will be better served if we stack (that is, double down on what already works) instead of hack their experiences

ChromeBooks, centralized, almost entirely cloud-based machines by Google, will be available for students and schools at $20/per month/per user, enabling full updates, central login controls, and a central administrator panel to handle users and control access. The price includes a web console, full support, warranty and replacements, and how-tos along with free updates. They will be available on June 15 and offer many of the same features available in Chromebooks for Business.

I have been frustrated by the dramatic increase in specialization that has taken hold across so many disciplines. Since I first started in academe more and more journals have sprouted which seem to say more and more about less and less, each with their own attendant group of acolytes.