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High School Students Want More Tech, Fewer Lectures

launching a project with an "entry event" that engages interest and initiates questioning

Students created a driving question

product of students' choice created by teams

High school gives all students iPads and somehow it all works out

10 BYOD Classroom Experiments (and What We’ve Learned From Them So Far)

What can Holy Trinity teach us? That when it comes to BYOD, it pays not to be overly strict with how the devices can be used in the class, as greater freedom allows teachers to work with students to develop the best uses for technology for their subject matter and teaching style.

BYOD requires much more than just changing tech policies and can sometimes mean overhauling the curriculum and spending money training teachers, though it does help students create a more personal and memorable learning experience.

that factory-model schooling was not just ineffective but actually harmful to most students—a message which had been so radical and out of the mainstream twenty years ago, actually sounded very much like the messages of my other guests.

the Internet has become an unparalleled platform for learning, intitiative, participation, productivity, and creativity, almost all of this happens outside of formal educational institutions

technology as a liberating force

Boasting a 98 percent college-matriculation rate among graduates, High Tech High warrants a closer look, and Whiteley's documentary devotes a full year to examining the project

"The only surviving skills that will save young kids are creative and innovative. As the current school system is now, for 12 of 16 years, you're not in an environment that brings that out of them."

Except halfway through the piece, Randy Yerrick — an associate dean of educational tech at the University of Buffalo — makes the take-away point: The chief reason to use high-tech tools is when you want to teach in a fashion that has “no good digital equivalent”. Or to put it another way, only use computers in situations where you want to do something that can’t be done without them.

3) Dialogue. Computers also let teachers and students have dialogues that aren’t easily possible in regular face-to-face formats.

What can computers teach that textbooks and paper can’t?

Some of the latest technology tools for the classroom, however, promise to ease the challenges of differentiating instruction more creatively and effectively, ed-tech experts say, even in an era of high-stakes federal and state testing mandates. New applications for defining and targeting students’ academic strengths and weaknesses can help teachers create a personal playlist of lessons, tools, and activities that deliver content in ways that align with individual needs and optimal learning methods.

Preliminary data showed significant student progress toward mastering the skills targeted in the program, officials say

“By leveraging technology to play a role in the delivery of instruction,” he says, “we can help to complement what live teachers do.”