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Guided by findings in educational research and neuroscience, the emphasis on cognitive skills like computation and memorization is evolving to include less tangible, non-cognitive skills, like collaboration and improvisation.

are all about moving other people, changing their behavior, like getting kids to pay attention in class; getting teens to understand they need to look at their future and to therefore study harder. At the center of all this persuasion is selling: educators are sellers of ideas.

Pink said school superintendents rated problem-solving as the top capability they wanted to instill.

Added by Greg Kulowiec on 2013-01-23 The following post is written by Greg Kulowiec of EdTechTeacher.  Join EdTechTeacher at the iPad Summit in Atlanta on April 10-12. The app store is loaded with options that allow students to create content on their iPads.  From comic strip creators to mind maps, video editing and publishing, screencasting & digital books, the options for individual student creation are expanding. However, collaboration between students is often a critical component of any classroom activity or project and increasingly there are options available that allow for collaborative efforts across iPads. Below are six ways to support collaboration between student iPads that cover the spectrum of creation options that range from text to digital storytelling to video creation. Explain Everything ($2.99)

A flexible and powerful screen casting option, students and teachers can collaborate on screencasts by exporting Explain Everything project files from an iPad.

Google Drive (Free)

The buttons link to pages that simply provide a place to upload a document, which is exactly what most instructors do: upload word–processed files of their classroom materials. They are encouraged to “plug in” their content under the appropriate category instead of envisioning a translation of their individual pedagogical style into an online environment. Blackboard “tends to encourage a linear pathway through the content” [3], and its default is to support easy uploading and text entry to achieve that goal.

Even after several years of working with the CMS, faculty requests for help focus on what the technology can do, rather than how their pedagogical goals can be achieved.

Morgan notes such improvement as a “side effect of the use of the software rather than a direct result of its use” [5] — those willing to play around with the features tend to discover new directions for their teaching.

Moodle’s pedagogic pretensions A lot of rot is spoken about Moodle supporting a ‘constructivist’ approach to learning

That was always a utopian dream. This Vygotsky-inspired babble is only really spouted by academics with too much time on their hands. It’s really just a standard collection of learning management tools with no real pedagogic innovation or intent. There’s nothing in Moodle that wasn’t, or isn’t, in other LMSs or VLEs if you will.

Educationalists love to talk about learner-centric, constructivist models of learning but usually default back into a didactic, lecture-driven, ‘I teach-you learn’, behaviour. Stray too far from the current model and any LMS will collapse into a soup of collaborative connectivity