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Personalized Learning

Rocketlist Inspires Students In Entrepreneurship

Kuato Studios recently launched Rocketlist, a website created to inspire students to harness creativity and learn real world skills such as coding, engineering, or design. Rocketlist showcases a series of inspirational videos featuring the connections, skills, and path of successful, young entrepreneurs today.

Leadership

Avoid Hit-or-Miss Professional Development

As a former principal and curriculum director, I can easily tell the difference between good and bad professional development. I’m embarrassed to admit that I have had my hand in delivering some poor quality events in my career. Some of my colleagues refer to past trainings as a “spray and pray” approach to learning something.

Personalized Learning

Creating Authentic Jobs For Student Learning Teams

I think students have wised up to us. We’ve meant well as we’ve given them small jobs and empowered them with assigned roles for classroom activities. We’ve asked them to be note-takers and time-keepers. They’ve pounded our erasers in the previous century, just as they clean our whiteboards today.

Personalized Learning

5 Instructional Shifts to Promote Deep Learning

Technology is a powerful tool for learning that can be used effectively to help students develop the skills necessary to succeed in school and beyond. Students can develop transferrable knowledge and skills as they engage in learning experiences that require them to construct knowledge. In order to facilitate these types of deep learning experiences, an adjustment in traditional instructional practices is necessary. These ideas are supported by the Common Core State Standards.

Personalized Learning

Use Google Drive as a “Stepping Stone” to 3D Learning

Craig Roberts, assistant director of education at the Duke Institute for Brain Sciences, believes his students learn better when they explain things visually. So, he has them build fruit fly brains out of Play-Doh, and construct human brain cells out of miscellany from The Scrap Exchange, a local nonprofit creative reuse center. More often, he sends them to the whiteboard to illustrate core concepts using a splash of color and lots of lines.

Personalized Learning

Innovation In the Face of Dated Modalities

The charter school movement that began 20 years ago in Minnesota has provided an unprecedented opportunity for educators to implement innovative change. This kind of change invokes a variety of emotions.

Personalized Learning

The Case for Authentic Learning

It was John Dewey who created the notion of “learning by doing.” His famous line was, “Education is not preparation for life: Education is life itself.” And years later it was Jerome Bruner who stated that it wasn’t enough to learn, say, history. The more successful approach would be to teach students to think like a historian. The ideas of these education philosophers, and others such as Johann Pestalozzi, are making something of reappearance in the call for more authentic learning experiences in an age of extensive testing. Authentic learning could be defined as learning that involves real-world tasks and problems.