How fast is the world changing? What might education look like next week or next year? Check out this hot-off-the-press news release from Don Wettrick and his Innovations class at Franklin High in Indianapolis: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IAkrfqkcNAA This is just the first year for the Innovations class. This is a public school. Students are meeting Common [...]
I did two things last week that, just a few years ago, I could not have imagined. I spoke to a group of teachers gathered in Philadelphia, without leaving my dining room table. And they were math teachers and the subject was the Art of Questioning. Why the sense of breakthrough? First, I was lousy [...]
Those who followed my EdJourney will recall my report on Doug Berman and his ground-breaking four year computer science program at Porter Gaud School in Charleston. Doug Bergman is a nationally recognized teacher and his courses are a blend of open-ended projects on student-created ideas that he describes as “structured but chaotic”. During my visit, [...]
As I mentioned last week. Presbyterian Day School in Memphis is doing some really interesting work with embedded technology, starting at early grade levels. They started to share it all with me in person and I got out of my depth in a hurry. Then I tried to capture and embed all of the rich [...]
One of the emerging threads of this journey that defines schools that are making progress along the path of change is trimming away what is not critical and focusing on a core set of values. This post is about a great process of building change capability in the faculty and success with a new technology [...]
Yesterday Jonathan Martin posted a wonderful piece on the tension between using technology as a necessary and critical part of modern education, and the inevitable hard-wired connection that we are all developing to and with these tools. We all feel this, for our students and for ourselves. We want and need to be connected to [...]
What does a future of flipped classrooms and blended learning look like? I don’t know, but that is the point: we have to adapt to a world of more continuous evolution where success is not guaranteed. This struck home two days ago following a Twitter conversation; thanks to Josie Holford, Head of School at Poughkeepsie [...]
Yesterday Melissa Smith, a Tech Coach for K-8 in Memphis, TN, asked if I would comment on the use of blended learning in the K-8 environment. Sure! I have the exact same feeling about blended learning as I do with unblended learning: good learning takes place when an inspired teacher helps a student to discover [...]
Finally, we can increase the number and use of computing devices while reducing our classroom technology expense. This has been a promise we have been chasing for more than a decade and it is here, but only if we exert some discipline. Many of us are sharing thoughts about why a 1:1 technology environment will [...]
This morning San Diego Unified School District announced they will buy and distribute $15 million in iPads next year. This follows implementation of a district-wide netbook rollout in middle schools three years ago, all paid for by bond proceeds approved by taxpayers. In the article in this morning’s San Diego Union Tribune district officials describe [...]