Worth Reading...

Sharing some articles, posts and videos.


1. Learning Today Looks Nothing Like Learning in the Past (Lirenman)- ideas about blogging activities and fostering connections with those outside of your building.

My class is involved with Quad Blogging with primary classes in the UK and New Zealand.  We've been visiting their blogs and leaving them comments. We've been learning from them.  This coming week the three classes we've been following are coming to visit us. I can't wait.

 2.  Gift Giving Project (Stanford)- potential task to instigate reflection on the design thinking process or identified key learning outcomes.

The Gift-Giving Project is 90-minute (including debrief) fast-paced project though a full design cycle. Students pair up to interview each other, come to a point-of-view of how they might design for their partner, ideate, and prototype a new solution to "redesign the gift-giving experience" for their partner.

   

3. Recasting Teachers and Students As Designers (Kahl)- discusses the importance of infusing design into our work with students.  Great point about how design empowers learners to assume ownernship over their learning.

 

 The biggest thing that design gives students is this amazing sense of possibility…that everything and anything is possible. 

  4. Finding UX, Designing UI (Socol)- asking kindergartners on how to  redesign schools.  In particular the post focuses on our use of space in schools and inlcudes links and videos to other institutions.

 We got many, many ideas - from Kindergärtners wanting cow tables and a castle with a dragon (what good is a castle without a dragon anyway?), to multiple requests for rooftop reading decks and reading treehouses, a cafeteria softserve machine, a soft student lounge, rolling science labs, movable cubes to read/work in, carpets, bean bag chairs, more outside doors, a big slide to get between the upper and lower playgrounds (ending in a trampoline or not), more art, gym every day (they currently have it four times a week), a zip line to get from one end of the school to the other, far more color - and kid-relevant color - in the school, a "giant robot bluebird which would walk the hallways saying hi to students," and choice - choice - choice... 

 5. The Global One-Room Schoolhouse (Brown)- An animated highlight of John Seely Brown's Keynote Presentation, "Cultivating the Entrepreneurial Learner in the 21st Century," at the 2012 Digital Media and Learning Conference.

The Global One-Room Schoolhouse: John Seely Brown (Highlights from his "Entrepreneurial Learner" Keynote at DML2012) from DML Research Hub on Vimeo.

 

6.TEDxBrussels - Kushal Chakrabarti - Literacy is not enough