Personalized Learning
Personalized learning is a mindset and approach to teaching that focuses on meeting each learner where they are and tailoring a curriculum that considers their interests, prior knowledge and skill level, and pace. Such a demand on the teacher requires sophisticated usage of technology in a combination of personalized, blended and online learning.
Brain Rules Schools: what school would look like if we listened to research
Here's a quick glimpse of a brain-based middle school day based on Brain Rules, the best selling book by molecular biologist John Medina. In a spirited romp through neuroscience, evolutionary genetics, and psychology, Medina lays out “12 Principles for Surviving and Thriving at Work, Home, and School.”
NYTimes Misses the Mark
Gail Collins uses her column to question the validity of online public schools for everyone except middle class homeschoolers and tries to make her case using some flimsy arguments, and familiar critics.
6 Ways Digital Learning is Changing Teaching
I visited Wireless Generation, a leading education technology company, in Brooklyn this week. In a discussion about Getting Smart, a couple dozen employees including teachers and technologists asked great questions about the future of learning. Here are two more. As someone who has, within the last decade, been a…
Questions About Digital Learning
I visited Wireless Generation, a leading education technology company, in Brooklyn this week. In a discussion about Getting Smart, a couple dozen employees including teachers and technologists asked great questions about the future of learning. Your book includes a lot of “in 5-10 years” predictions, but…
Fund the Child, Not the District
Mike Pettrelli and the Fordham Institute should be commended for starting the conversation on “school governance.” Mike’s two important posts on the topic can be found here and here. This triggered comments from the grande dames of the status quo, Randi Wiengarten and Diane Ravitch,. The discussion brings an important question into focus. Why do we even need “school districts?”
The Beginning of Something
We are living through an uninspiring policy environment and disastrously bad economy but it feels like the beginning of something extraordinary. Fareed’s interview with Walter Isaacson on Sunday made me think about periods in history where a confluence of forces create extraordinary events and lift unlikely heroes.
Is Your School Preparing Learners for Success? 5 Questions to Consider
This post by Shane Krukowski first appeared on Innovative Educator on 11/23/11. Shane is CEO of Project Foundry, a great project-based learning platform. “The future is something which everyone reaches at the rate of sixty minutes an hour, whatever he does, whoever he is.” ~C. S. Lewis Redesigning education involves much…
10 Frames for Education: A Case for Options
The cacophony that is U.S. public education is a function of overlapping frames—the variety of aims and perspectives from which stakeholders approach the ‘system.’ Following is a list of ten dominant frames: 1. Workforce development: the 21st century skills folks are primarily concerned with preparing a larger percentage of students…
Mentoring Your Students in Social Media or Vice Versa
Generation Z is moving so fast we can only track their contrails. They have advertisers, marketers, and educators flummoxed with how they operate. What makes the Zs so different from the Boomers, Xs, and Ys? Quite simply, the Internet.
2 Poems
Parker Palmer Parker Palmer introduces the most evocative book about teaching, The Courage to Teach, with this Rilke poem. Ah, not to be cut off, not through the slightest partition shut out from the law of the stars. The inner—what is it? if…