future of learning
Staff Picks: Blended Learning, Smart Phones, EdReform, 21st-Century English
Tom picked blended learning as the topic of the year. Karen picks a review of the recent book Teaching Generation Text, which looks at the benefits of mobile learning in the classroom. Sarah picks Byron Sanders' response to the heated debate around Gene Marks' recent Forbes article, "If I Were a Poor Black Kid."
Education Funding Should Promote Equity, Performance & Innovation
Kansas governor Brownback is proposing a new school funding formula that would let counties raise their local property taxes rates to spend more on schools. He's right that school funding needs an overhaul, but he's missing all of the key ingredients: school funding should be weighted, portable, and performance-based.
Our 10 Favorite Websites & Blogs
This week, we’d like to showcase some of our favorite websites and blogs for information around innovations and learning. Taking Note Taking Note, written by former PBS and NPR reporter John Merrow, is an extension of Learning Matters, which is an independent media production company…
Fareed’s Economic Fix
America's problems are not economic, demographic or technological. They are political. Simple policy measures can change our fate. If we built out our infrastructure, kept monetary policy pro-growth and reformed our tax code to encourage business investment, we would have growth, a manageable deficit and a bright future.
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…
Free, Mobile, Clouds and Other Innovation Topics
We can’t reform our way to the education our kids need for their future. The gap between what they need and what our Bismarckian schools can produce is widening. This is a problem of obsolesce not effort or intent (at least in most places). Telling one teacher to differentiate instruction…
Review: Schooling in the Workplace
A review of Nancy Hoffman's new book, School in the Workplace, How Six of the World's Best Vocational Education Systems Prepare Young People for Jobs and Life. Its blended learning workforce style.
Z Future Is Here!
Generation Z, that group born between 1992 and 2010, is making a greater impact on society than any generation in the past. This group is the first to be born in the age of the Internet. They do not know a world without it. Thanks to the ubiquity of high-speed Internet, smartphones, and tablets, their world is an on-demand, information age that they are actively helping shape before they’re even teenagers.
7 Things to Include in Your Innovation Conference
If I was hosting an innovation conference focused on secondary education, here's seven things I'd include: a design prize, interesting breakouts, virtual field trips, lessons from workforce development, cool components, and a design studio.
Getting Smart: How Digital Learning is Changing the World
A Getting Smart book that makes the case for a blend of online and onsite learning, shares inspiring stories of schools and programs that effectively offer “personal digital learning” opportunities, and discusses what we need to do to remake our schools into “smart schools.”