future of learning

EdTech

Webinar: The Promise & Potential of Personal Digital Learning

Register for Tom Vander Ark's upcoming webinar "The Promise and Potential of Personal Digital Learning," a discussion on how schools are incorporating innovative technology to boost achievement and prepare students to thrive in the idea economy of the future, Friday, November 4, 2011 at 1:00 - 2:00 p.m. EST.

Personalized Learning

Jobs’ passing: Who will bring our 1984 moment to learning?

Steve Jobs passing and the outflow of feelings says this is more than a mere corporate titan's death. In the flood of remembrances, we can see how different he was from many technology-industry peers. Although he never turned his relentless design sensibility on the building of full learning environments, there are lessons we can take away for what a “Jobs-like” focus in learning would be like.

EdTech

Q&A: Teachers Need to be “Provisioned” for Emerging Technologies & Assessment

In her Q&A, Dr. Mazur talks about the importance of DGBL in developing new learning strategies and assessment models that engage students in learning skills for the 21st century. She articulates, however, that while these new, emerging technologies are widely successful and effective,, the current educational system in place prohibits real growth in the games-for-learning industry. She says we need to move away from standardized testing and create new provisions for teaching that welcome and support DGBL in the classroom.

Personalized Learning

Customizing Without Computers

I saw the future of high schools yesterday. It wasn't about cool digital aps, laptops, or talking to other young people on the other side of the world. It was re-engineering schooling around young people and their lives. Only in its second year,ACE Leadership High School, a charter school in Albuquerque, has the key to to unlocking our young people's hearts and minds.

Personalized Learning

Get out the blender, kids

I think I have just glimpsed the future, or at least what could be the future, of public education. I’m talking about the effective use of today’s technology to enhance learning, or what insiders are calling ‘blended education.’ Michael Horn, a co-author of Disrupting Class, provided a definition: Blended learning is any time a student learns at least in part at a supervised brick-and-mortar location away from home and at least in part through online delivery with some element of student control over time, place, path, and/or pace.

Personalized Learning

Neural Gawkiness

Adults' enduring perplexity about teenagers are captured in quotes by Aristotle and Shakespeare in The New Science of the Teenage Brain, the cover story of the October National Geographic. The article by David Dobbs explains how young people's lives are shaped by the mind-blowing reorganization occurring in the brains of adolescents between the ages of 12-25. The article is fascinating and worth reading the entire piece. It's also a fabulous tool for us to use to get policymakers attention to why so many policies and programs like Scared Straight, lock them up, and zero tolerance don't work. So after reading the article, spend a few minutes sending an email or two or a letter to the editor in your local paper.