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we live in a connected world, with the Internet and powerful digital technologies literally at our fingertips, so it would be foolish not to integrate those things into the learning experience.

we’ve done is we’ve trained the passion out of our students from the 2nd grade up

Typically what I do is I try to construct my course or unit under some big umbrella that I already know is going to be very interesting to kids where they are right now in their development.

Technology doesn’t make teaching better or worse, simpler or more complex–it changes it all entirely. The frameworks. The models. The training. The instructional design. Curriculum. Lesson design. Assessment. Learning feedback. Classroom management. School design. All of it.

Not that this is a truly radical idea, Einstein understood this and stated ‘Education is not the learning of facts, it’s rather the training of a mind to think’.

If our goal is to teach students to swim we would not do so by pushing them into the sea, but we would also not expect them to learn to swim without ever getting into the water.

go back to trying to understand how we may best support our students achieve their potential and prepare for a world beyond our classrooms

“Adaptive technologies presume that knowledge can be modularized and sequenced,” says Watters, the education writer. “This isn’t about the construction of knowledge. It’s still hierarchical, top-down, goal-driven.”

e latest techno-fad, destined to distract administrators and upset curricula for a few years until the next one comes along. But there are two reasons why adaptive learning might prove more durable than that. The first is that the textbook companies have invested in it so heavily that there may be no going back. The second: It might, in at least some settings, really work.

“I like to think of analogies to other places where science and technology have had an impact, like transportation. We went from walking to horse-drawn carriages to Model Ts, and now we have jet planes. So far in educational technology, we’re in the Model T stage.”

From a content and skills standpoint, why wouldn’t we expect teachers to connect their students to the smartest, most experienced experts they can find online?

But it is not  either/or approach.  It’s NOT either the traditional approach or the modern approach. There is room for both approaches, particularly there will still be a need for the design and management of essential (e.g. compliance, and regulatory) training.

If nothing else, we should be thinking and talking about this, about how the new realities of the world require different thinking and doing and defining, especially in the context of the roles the adults play in the classroom.