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CFY, conducted a pilot in 2011-12 that worked with teachers on incorporating blended learning into their classrooms. Our goal was not technological but pedagogical.

Envision these cycles as gears that are interlocked and running as one to drive student achievement and student ownership of learning. Neither of these cycles requires technology, but both are greatly enhanced by using technology.

Shifting Prominence of Each Gear from K-12

Principles of networked learning, constructivism, and connectivism inform the design of a test case through which secondary students construct personal learning environments for the purpose of independent inquiry.

Ask yourself, "What do I remember as the most rewarding and inspiring experience in school?

Yes, you need knowledge of the periodic table to do chemistry, but you don't need to memorize it if it's on your desktop -- electronic or otherwise. What matters is the ability to do something with the elements in the periodic table.

schools become relevant once more: in teaching our children to evaluate and use that information in ways that are important and meaningful and to satisfy their fundamental human desire to construct solutions for the world full of engaging and pressing problems they will inherit.

An effective personal knowledge network can provide access to new ideas, innovations, successful experiments, failed results, and, if constructed with diversity in mind, contrary opinions that can be cause for reflection, re-consideration, and personal growth.

Knowledge should no longer be considered a stable artifact to be passed from one person to another, but instead should be viewed as a process, always changing and growing.

I believe that IWB’s are an asset to the classroom. They can seamlessly use web 2.0 applications to engage students in creative and constructive lessons for learning. The important element in this however is the training of the teacher using the IWB. Without training the user, the IWB becomes an expensive video projector or an expensive PowerPoint presentation tool or a very expensive hat rack.

with a pilot who had a 747 placed in his driveway as an incentive to fly a bigger plane without training?

Kids understand IWB’s and want to use them. It’s the adults who need to be brought along. Creativity should be the focus and remembering should be the support.

increasingly clear to me that the less I teach, the more my students are actually learning

I Resign From Teaching

I have carefully constructed learning questions and activities for each student. The students are working collaboratively with each other on differentiated learning activities and producing a variety of evidence

14th century France inhabited a relatively simple personal world with maybe three sides: farm, village, and the church. Today ordinary individuals construct amazingly complex personal worlds with many facets. The game has truly changed.

"elephant in the room," a big conspicuous but largely undiscussed problem: What should we do with tired content?

If only we could shrink some topics, we could expand others that offer much more.

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.

“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.”

You hear two opinions from experts on the topic of what happens when kids are perpetually exposed to technology. One: Constant multitasking makes teens work harder, reduces their focus, and screws up their sleep. Two: Using technology as a youth helps students adapt to a changing world in a way that will benefit them when they eventually have to live and work in it. Either of these might be true. More likely, they both are. But it is certainly the case that these kids are different—fundamentally and permanently different—from previous generations in ways that are sometimes surreal, as if you'd walked into a room where everyone is eating with his feet.

It's as if Beatlemania junkies in 1966 had had the ability to demand "Rain" be given as much radio time as "Paperback Writer," and John Lennon thought to tell everyone what a good idea that was. The fan–celebrity relationship has been so radically transformed that even sending reams of obsessive fan mail seems impersonal.

The teens' brains move just as quickly as teenage brains have always moved, constructing real human personalities, managing them, reaching out to meet others who might feel the same way or want the same things. Only, and here's the part that starts to seem very strange—they do all this virtually. Sitting next to friends, staring at screens, waiting for the return on investment. Everyone so together that they're actually all apart.