Worth Reading

After a two month hiatus here are some posts to check out.

1. TedxLondon: The Problem Finders- changing our pedagogical approach

Currently, the world’s education systems are crazy about problem-based learning, but they’re obsessed with the wrong bit of it. While everyone looks at how we could help young people become better problem-solvers, we’re not thinking how we could create a generation of problem finders.

2. Teaching Digital Wisdom- a pedagogical approach to technology and the classroom that does not stop at whether or how students may access digital devices in my classroom, but seeks also to address why it is important that students critically engage these very questions.

Stepping into the waters of collaborative learning, John Trimbur questions the claim that an aim of collaborative learning is to help bring about consensus. “Consensus,” Trimbur argues, “can be a powerful instrument for students to generate differences, to identify the systems of authority that organize these differences, and to transform the relations of power that determine who may speak and what counts as a meaningful statement” (442). A pedagogy seeking digital wisdom, then, will look for areas of dissensus and critically examine differences.

3. Shared Security, Shared Growth- Our changing economy has given rise to a nation of freelancers and contractors—and the need for a twenty-first-century social contract.

Gone is the era of the lifetime career, let alone the lifelong job and the economic security that came with it, having been replaced by a new economy intent on recasting full-time employees into contractors, vendors, and temporary workers. It is an economic transformation that promises new efficiencies and greater flexibility for “employers” and “employees” alike, but which threatens to undermine the very foundation upon which middle-class America was built. And if the American middle class crumbles, so will an American economy that relies on consumer spending for 70 percent of its activity, and on a diverse and inclusive workforce for 100 percent of the innovation that drives all future prosperity.

4. Developing A New Metric for Assessing Learning- how to assess learning in a world of evolving access to information

 Professor David Perkins raises the question, "What's worth learning?" in his new book, Future Wise. He argues that when students have ubiquitous access to information and facts through mobile devices, then perhaps what we should focus more on the content, processes, and skills that have relevance to their lives rather than whether or not they can regurgitate a mountain of disparate content facts.

5. What Hollywood Can Teach Us About the Future of Work- the "Hollywood Model" in which freelance work is increasing

This approach to business is sometimes called the “Hollywood model.” A project is identified; a team is assembled; it works together for precisely as long as is needed to complete the task; then the team disbands. This short-­term, project-­based business structure is an alternative to the corporate model, in which capital is spent up front to build a business, which then hires workers for long-­term, open-­ended jobs that can last for years, even a lifetime. It’s also distinct from the Uber-­style “gig economy,” which is designed to take care of extremely short-­term tasks, manageable by one person, typically in less than a day.

6. Kinetic Affect Performs at WVU- Each year, Kinetic Affect returns to their Alma Mater at WMU to speak to thousands of students and faculty. Their message is simple; to remind our youth to follow their passions and to embrace the obstacles they face as opportunities to grow as they pursue their dreams.

Worth Reading...

Sharing a few interesting posts from the past few weeks.

1. How Four Women In An RV Plan to Change Young Girls' Lives (Fast Company)- group of Stanford students who intend to travel across the country this summer to interest girls in design, STEM and the maker movement.

After spending a day helping Stanford’s SparkTruck team coach design and maker workshops for elementary school students in San Francisco last October, students Katie Kirsch and Jenna Leonardo felt inspired. They spent the drive back to campus imagining new ways they could bring design thinking—the creative process of understanding needs, identifying a problem and creating new ways to solve it—to young women’s lives. They asked each other an old motivational prompt: "What would you do if you knew you couldn’t fail?"

2. New Research on Games and Classroom Practices (Reich)- case studies on the effectiveness of games as an assessment tool

But to have a positive impact on student learning, formative assessment demands information that is both useful and used. Our study documented some of the ways teachers are indeed utilizing games for formative assessment purposes, and the potential value of these uses for these important classroom practices. These case studies explored common features in games that teachers could use for formative assessment. In addition to identifying ways these features are useful to teachers, we also identified many areas for improvement.

3. Slice and Carve: The New Wave of Computer Creativity (NY Time)- how a new wave of machines is bringing precision to the way people make things

4. Noam Chomsky On the Dangers of Standardized Testing
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5. Studio 360- Humza Daes Puts Shame in Your Instagram Game

6. Well-Prepared In Their Own Eyes (Jaschik)- perspective from employers and students on job readiness skills

7. Reinventing High School (Fallows)- see how the CART school in Freson, CA structures learning

I sat with the group while the students talked through progress on their 10-week-long project, the production of a seven-minute video. This year’s theme for the video teams is science fiction. The essential question of their assignment: “How do imagination and technology contribute to our understanding of science, nature, and the human mind? How does the exploration of science and nature encourage us to dream of a better future”?  The soup-to-nuts tasks include writing an original story and script, casting actors, directing, filming, effects, editing, promotion, and presentation. The final package includes a reality-documentary of the entire video production, with its many high points and low points.  A few nights ago, Jim and I watched about half of last year's 22 productions on DVD. The most remarkable part to us were the student-produced documentaries which accompanied each film. The students spoke about how doing this intense work taught them about frustrations, perseverance, teamwork, satisfactions, and a lot of other things we would all like high schoolers to experience.

Worth Reading

Passing along a few interesting reads from the past couple of weeks....


1. Entrepreneurship is Elementary:  How A Project-Based Curriculum Catalyzed A Community (Rappaport)- a program in which elementary students are pushed to think and act like entrepreneurs.

Realizing that our little tech community could essentially be STEM Sesame Street, I set out to design a curriculum that would introduce the students to 21st-century careers and skills, from engineering to design to public speaking. It was one part career day, one part entrepreneurship workshop. As an education entrepreneur for years, I knew that the skills we used daily at our startups--critical thinking, creativity, collaboration--also happened to be central tenets of the fledgling Common Core State Standards.

2. Send Your Students’ (and anyone else’s) High Hopes Up High (Crosby)- update about the High Hopes project where students launch a balloon in the air with a camera attached to it.  The project was explained by Brain Crosby in his TEDxDenver ED Talk several years ago.


3. You Know What You Need... You Need A Learning Contract (Cormier)- thinking about the contracts we make with students in the classroom.  Here is an idea which views the learning contract as the basis for what is accomplished in that it takes the place of a syllabus, a textbook, an assessment model and a social contract.

I’m fascinated by how so many folks seem to have the same response to it that I did the first time I started reading about it – “this is exactly what i need.” It’s a simple concept – come to an agreement with people about what they want to work on, how much they want to work, who’s responsible for what and what everyone expects from the time you’re going to spend together.

4. Knowledge Building, Knowledge Of in Contrast to Knowledge About (Reilly)- what type of knowledge do we value and foster in our classrooms and beyond

Knowledge about dominates traditional educational practice. It is the stuff of textbooks, curriculum guidelines, subject-matter tests, and typical school “projects” and “research” papers. Knowledge of, by contrast, suffers massive neglect. There is instruction in skills (procedural knowledge), but it is not integrated with understanding in a way that would justify saying “Alexa has a deep knowledge of arithmetic”—or chemistry or the stock market or anything else. Knowledge about is not entirely useless, but its usefulness is limited to situations in which knowledge about something has value independently of skill and understanding. Such situations are largely limited to social small talk, trivia games, quiz shows, and—the one biggy—test taking.

5.  The Evolution of Product Design As Told By Citizens Watches- the video depicts this evolution as it occurs on a watch designer's desk, as well as through various taglines and typography over the years. Kramer used a variety of cameras, like a handcranked 35mm from the 1930s and a 1980s VHS camera, to get the looks of each era right. Each new product innovation is marked as "The End," leading to the question, "What if every ending was the chance to start something better?"



6. The History of Our World In 18 Minutes- David Christian narrates a complete history of the universe, from the Big Bang to the Internet, in a riveting 18 minutes. This is "Big History": an enlightening, wide-angle look at complexity, life and humanity, set against our slim share of the cosmic timeline.


7. How Video Powers Global Innovation- Chris Anderson says the rise of web video is driving a worldwide phenomenon he calls Crowd Accelerated Innovation — a self-fueling cycle of learning that could be as significant as the invention of print.  But to tap into its power, organizations will need to embrace radical openness.

Worth Reading....

1. Playground Poem (Stager)- 

it is worth noting that many of the nations “beating” the USA academically (as if learning were a zero-sum game of winners and losers), have more recess than the United States. K-12 schools in my second home of Australia have a 20-30 minute late “morning tea” and an hour for lunch and recess – through graduation.

2. Michael Wesch on Seymour Papert and Constructionism (Fryer)- “Nothing could be more absurd than an experiment in which computers are placed in a classroom in which nothing else has changed… Computers serve best when they allow everything to change.”

3. Jennie Magiera's Keynote from the July 2014 EdTech Teacher Summit (Fryer)- This podcast is a recording of Jennie Magiera’s opening keynote on the second day of EdTechTeacher’s Summit in Chicago on Navy Pier on July 29, 2014. Jennie is a teacher and educational leader in the Chicago Public Schools, and has taught in a 1:1 iPad classroom. Jennie and the other teachers in her team (primarily from Burley Elementary and the National Teacher’s Academy in CPS) are passionate about not only engaging students in the learning process, but also using social media to help students discover and share their own voices with those in their neighborhood, community, city, and nation.

4. This Is What A Student-Designed School Looks Like (Vangelova)- students are allowed to design their own school within a school at Monument High School in Great Barrington, MA

5. Unpacking the Science: How Playing Music Changes the Learning Brain (Hicks)- 

“How do we process sequences with complex hierarchical structure and make sense of them?” he asks. “How do we integrate sensation and action? How do we remember long and difficult sequences of information? These are fundamental neuroscience questions, and music can help us answer some of these questions, because it’s in some ways simpler than language, but it’s still of sufficient complexity that it can address these very deep and important aspects of human brain function.”

6. Welcome to Epic, A School Where Students Are Heroes On a Quest (Schwartz)- another example of rethinking how we structure school

Students in adolescence start telling the story of themselves; who am I, what do I do, and there’s this narrative out there that people tell them about who they are,” Hatcher said. In Oakland, often the expectation is that African American and Latino students won’t succeed. Epic educators are challenging that narrative by giving students the chance to become the superheroes of their community. Hatcher wants his students to feel they can control their lives despite the random violence happening in the neighborhoods where they live.

7. A Portal to Chaos and Adventure (Westervelt)- innovative and creative space for students to play 

Children need an environment with “the opportunity to engage in open, free play where they’re allowed to self-organize,” he adds. “It’s really a central part of being human and developing into competent adulthood.”

Brown says this kind of free-range fun is not just good; it’s essential. Wild play helps shape who we become, he says, and it should be embraced, not feared.

Worth Reading

Sharing a few highlights from the past couple of weeks with a particular emphasis on how some schools are challenging established educational structures.


1. Introduction to Designing Spaces for Learning- Ewan McIntosh introduces the Designing Spaces for Learning subject as part of the CSU Knowledge Networks course. In this clip, he shares a rationale for the three key areas of the subject - design, space and learning - and gives some advice for sharing thinking informally with the larger design/spaces for learning community.



2. Five Tips for Working With Works of Art (Moma)- this came out of a three day institute I attended about arts integrated curricula



3. Made With Code (Google)- showing how things we love are made with code



4. Zaana Howard on Design Thinking at Lean UX 14- podcast about the use of design thinking to bring people together to create and share

5. Will Computers Ever Replace Teachers (Reich)- pushes the reader to think about educating or preparing students to do things that computers cannot do

We use machine learning in a limited way for grading essays on tests, but for the most part those tests are dominated by assessment methods—multiple choice and quantitative input—in which computers can quickly compare student responses to an answer bank. We’re pretty good at testing the kinds of things that intelligent tutors can teach, but we’re not nearly as good at testing the kinds of things that the labor market increasingly rewards. In “Dancing with Robots,” an excellent paper on contempotary education, Frank Levy and Richard Murnane argue that the pressing challenge of the educational system is to “educate many more young people for the jobs computers cannot do.” Schooling that trains students to efficiently conduct routine tasks is training students for jobs that pay minimum wage—or jobs that simply no longer exist.

6. 5 New Design Careers for the 21st Century (Brown)- 

Fancy a career in design? When I made that choice 30 years ago, the options were limited. You either got an engineering degree and then went to design school, or you went to art school and studied graphic design, architecture, or industrial design, like I did.  Today, things are very different. Thanks to the still-booming Silicon Valley, interaction and user-experience designers have been added to the mix, but those aren’t the only opportunities for design thinkers. Even graduates of non-traditional programs can embark on exciting design careers. To wit, here are five disciplines that didn’t even exist at IDEO a few years ago.

7. Pacific School of Innovation and Inquiry- 

People don't start learning when they enter a school building or stop when they exit. Learning is natural. Everyone learns all the time. PSII recognizes this truth, supporting learners in the pursuit of their personal passions wherever and whenever that learning needs to take place. The school is a gathering place where ideas can be shared and where strong face-to-face relationships become the foundation for truly personalized learning.

8. What Happens When School Design Looks Like Game Design (Shapiro)- insight into the Quest to Learn School which design curriculum from the approach of a video game perspective.

Quest To Learn shows us what happens when the old “factory model” of organization is replaced with a systems-based game-like paradigm. They call it games, systems, or design. That’s code for understanding content in context — and for seeing the interconnectedness between elements.

“We need to do a better job at giving children and young people opportunities to rise, which means developing systems that enable that rise — that enable them to move across networks and to engage in really hard problems with relevant resources. Games are all about creating spaces of possibility, where players feel they can do anything,”

9. How One Designer Bridged the Gap Between Play and Learning (Summers)- speaks to connection between play and learning with Margaret Middleton; an exhibiter at the Boston Children's Museum

“Play is naturally conducive to learning. It’s one of the best ways to learn: learning by doing, learning by playing and experiencing things. That’s what experimentation is all about. Play and science have a lot in common that way. The boring parts about it I guess, is that I have to be thinking about making sure that it’s safe and that everything that we’re making is going to be durable. It gets touched by thousands of hands every day. That’s more the practical side of things.”

10. A School That's All About Play (Barseghian)- Imagine a school where the students’ day revolves around playing games, all day long. Video games, live action role-playing games, board games, building games. At the PlayMaker School in Los Angeles, the school day takes kids from one game activity to the next, as they explore any number of different subjects and ideas, from the physics of flight to ancient Mesopotamian culture

Worth Reading

Here is some weekend reading/viewing material....


1. The Story of a 3D Printed Whistle (Crosby)- elementary students working on developing a whistle- much harder than one might think to engineer a high quality whistle

I’ve seen many examples of figures printed out on a 3D printer … and they are impressive. Students have to figure out and problem solve coding the design to get it just right. But this is different in that students aren’t just printing out a figure that looks like a whistle, they are using the engineering design process to make a whistle that actually works 

2. Marymount’s ‘Come Alive’ Event Inspires Student Creativity, Ingenuity (Seguel)- coverage of Marymount of Santa Barbara "Creativity, Engineering and Coding Come Alive" event

Marymount Head of School Andrew Wooden explained Marymount’s new Design Thinking program in more depth: “Design Thinking is not just about kids building things, but about learning to approach challenges of all kinds, learning to use and trust trial and error, and finding creative solutions to problems.”

3. For Students the Importance of Doing Work That Matters (Richardson)- does the work we do with students matter in that matters in the real world and has a purpose outside of the classroom

Still, we can start small, can’t we? What if we took 10% of what we’re currently doing and handed it over to our students, asking them to meet the standard or the outcome we’ve set for them in a way that they care about and that had a purpose beyond the classroom? What if we created opportunities for them to educate, entertain, inspire, or connect with people from all over the globe who might be sincerely influenced by the work they’re doing? And what if we asked them to assess their own work in ways that matter to them, ways that inform them what worked, what didn’t work, and how they might do it differently down the road?

Schools and classrooms should support a deep culture of “doing work that matters,” where the adults in the building serve as models for the type of creating and learning we might expect from kids.

4. Beyond Laptops and The Power of Vulnerability (Cofino)- as teachers we all have something to share and something to learn

When we all appreciate that each of us has something to share and something to learn, we really do open ourselves up to the possibility of becoming better than we were when we started.

5. Design for Extreme Affordability- is a two quarter, multidisciplinary, project-based course open to Stanford University students. Students work in teams, using design thinking methods, to develop products and services that serve the needs of the world's poor 

Extreme will be a class that I talk about for the rest of my life, and will undoubtedly influence my future career choices, management style and approach to problem solving. 

6. Schooled (Russakoff)- inside look at leadership of a large urban school district

7. Stanford’s Dave Evans & Bill Burnett on Using Design Thinking to Address the “Wicked Problem” of Designing Your Life & Career- 

The research says that maybe only two or three out of ten people actually have a passion that they’ve identified, that they can work into. We believe that actually, passion turns out to be what you develop after you find the things that you enjoy doing.

8. Chris and Jon Boggiano on Radius of Play

Worth Reading..

Sharing highlights from the past week.

1. Creativity Becomes An Academic Discipline (Pappano)- growing number of degrees undergraduate and graduate in creativity

Traditional academic disciplines still matter, but as content knowledge evolves at lightning speed, educators are talking more and more about “process skills,” strategies to reframe challenges and extrapolate and transform information, and to accept and deal with ambiguity.

2. Forget Coding, Let's Change Up How We Teach Math (Burt)- leveraging Math (as a space) to teach code and to eternally address questions of will I ever use this outside of school...

One of the most common obstacles we hear about why schools don’t teach computer science is that there aren’t enough qualified educators out there to meet the demands.  But there’s a trained army of math teachers out there willing to find new and better ways of delivering their content, that with a small amount of preparation could no doubt be leading the way.  So, how can we make time in their curricula and schedule to make it happen?

3. Passion-Based Learning, Day 1: Probing Minecraft's Appeal (Renwick)- thoughts about why Minecraft appeals to students and what lessons to learn from why there is an intense interest in Minecraft.

When someone enters Minecraft, the world is their’s to create. They are in control of their destiny. What a stark contrast to our students’ lives in school. The standards are set, the assessments are pre-determined, and the plans have been prepared. All without the students’ input. If this is their learning to own, we don’t always do a very good job of including them in the process.

4. Making Ourselves Vulnerable (Richardson)

Walk down the vendor floor of any big edu-conference and you’ll see our obsession with making learning less messy and less “vulnerable.” Struggle, patience, courage, persistence, failure, passion…none of these are quantifiable to the degree that reformers or most edupreneurs need them to be to “count.” Yet schools will spend time and money (lots of it) on stuff that organizes, compartmentalizes, personalizes, standardizes, and captures “learning” in order to be compared “successfully” to other districts down the road.

5. Rethinking Education With Design Thinking (Pfau)-highlights schools in the Bay area where design thinking influences work with kids

Students not only master the concepts embedded within each project, they also exercise their skills of collaborating with teammates, investigating their topic thoroughly, using empathy to generate ideas for solutions, prototyping, testing and most importantly, they learn that failure is not a setback. As Gever explained in his talk, the retention of information that kids have as a result of this process is significantly higher. More significantly, learning to identify the need for and acquire skills in response to problem solving situations is a life long skill set that will better shape these kids to confront productive careers that address real world problems.

6. School In the Cloud Report- A brief introduction to the School In the Cloud project

7. Art, made with coding: calling future interactive artisits- In between creating masterpieces like the Sistine Chapel and “Madonna and Child,” Michelangelo dissected cadavers in the hopes of understanding how the human body worked so he could paint it accurately. He’s not the only one: there has long been a connection between science and art. And it’s true today more than ever, as modern artists use technology for inspiration, inventing ways to give life to code, letting it spill from the screen and onto the canvas.

Worth Reading

Sharing a few highlights from the past few weeks.  Enjoy....


1. How To Be Creative (Hunt)- takes the position that creativity is a skill which can be developed.  From this stance shares ways to foster greater creativity in all of us

This is the key to creativity. It’s not a linear process and it’s not predictable. You need to give it space and lots of encouragement. If you are held to pumping it out like a factory, you are probably not going to nail it. And it doesn’t come to you at the most opportune times.

2. Can't We Do Better (Friedman)- thoughts about the latest PISA results and what it means for education; contains a few interesting thoughts about the academic implications.  Could serve as an interesting discussion starter.

So now let’s look at the latest PISA. It found that the most successful students are those who feel real “ownership” of their education. In all the best performing school systems, said Schleicher, “students feel they personally can make a difference in their own outcomes and that education will make a difference for their future.” 

3. Redefining The Writing Process (Carey)- discusses the strategic infusion of tech into the writing process both to facilitate the development of ideas and to also cultivate writing as a collaborative process

Writing does not need to be a solitary experience. It can be collaborative (just like presenting)

4. The WISE Learning Games Playlist (Institute of Play)- visual with links to a list of game-based learning tools

The premise of the WISE PLAY program is that the potential of games goes far beyond pure entertainment. Given the fact that games engage players in situations that require them to solve hard problems, collaborate with others to complete sometimes-complicated tasks, think creatively, and fail often in pursuit of a compelling goal, games can be good for learning, too.

5. dChat- weekly Q & A session from the Stanford d. school.  The chat featured David Kelley of IDEO

6. Do Tests Predict Success- Studies show that test scores are not the best predictor of success in college, career and life. Watch Angela Duckworth explain what kids really need to succeed. 

7. Building Networks, Connections, Processes (Sayer)- Building networks, connections and processes to enable innovation and conversation to build the profession and create challenging learning situations.

8. Makey Makey- DIY invention kit for everyone

Worth Reading...

Sharing some good reads I have come across recently

1. As Demographics Shift, Kids' Books Stay Stubbornly White (Blair)

When it comes to diversity, children's books are sorely lacking; instead of presenting a representative range of faces, they're overwhelmingly white. How bad is the disconnect?

2. Money and Morals Sharing the Stage With Shakespeare (Grimes)

What Shakespeare understood, Professor Sandel insisted, was the transformative power of money. When it enters into social relations it changes things. When economists asked the citizens of a Swiss village if they would accept being designated a nuclear-waste storage site, 51 percent said yes. When the question was posed again, this time with the promise of a cash reward for living with the waste, the yea votes plummeted, to 25 percent. The money, they said, made them feel that they were being bribed to perform a civic duty.  

3. Change the Frame: Two Ways to Rethink Education for Reform (Reich)

I'm convinced by the arguments of Mimi Ito and her various colleagues associated with MacArthur's Connected Learning movement that in the future, learning will take place from cradle to grave--in schools, online, in museums, libraries, makerspaces, and all kinds of other "third spaces" for learning that we have yet to imagine. Young people need access not just to schools but to ecologies of learning that envelop students in learning opportunities.

4.  High-Tech Sensors Help Old Port City Leap Into Smart Future (Frayer)

What they've been flocking to see is mostly invisible: 12,000 sensors buried under the asphalt, affixed to street lamps and atop city buses. The sensors measure everything from air pollution to where there are free parking spaces. They can even tell garbage collectors which dumpsters are full, and automatically dim street lights when no one is around.

5. Diana Rhoten on Sparking Student Interests with Informal Learning 

  

6. How Building a Car Can Drive Deeper Learning (Is School Enough?)

Worth Reading...

From the archives...

1. There Goes Pig Farmer Pete Langley (Stanford d. school)- application of design thinking to explore what makes us passionate about our heroes.  The field of study includes the fans of the Dale Earnhardt Sr, Michael Jordan and Stephen Colbert.

Design thinking has always been keen on observing and interviewing extreme users to learn how their needs and workarounds are amplified; this tends to expose meaningful insights that aren’t easily visible in the middle of the bell curve. But how does a superfan relate to an extreme user and what exactly are they ‘using’? If we think of the hero as a consumable, the superfan is its most ardent extreme user.

2.  The Forefront of Performance-Based Design- insight into an attempt to build the greenest commercial building in the world.  The building is seeking to meet the ambitious goals of the Living Building Challenge, the world’s most strenuous benchmark for sustainability.

The goal of the Bullitt Center is to change the way buildings are designed, built and operated to improve long-term environmental performance and promote broader implementation of energy efficiency, renewable energy and other green building technologies in the Northwest.

3.  How We Might Use Social Business to Improve Health In Low Income Communities (Open IDEO)- OpenIDEO has partnered with the Holistic Social Business Movement (HSBM) of Caldas – a joint venture between the Grameen Creative Lab and the Government of Caldas, Colombia – to consider how social businesses can improve the health of low-income communities in Colombia and around the world.  Leveraging social business and the entrepreneurs who buil them to improve healthcare in low-income communities.  

4. Innovation Enters the Classroom- more about the impact they physical classroom has on learning.  Ideas for creating flexible learning spaces. 

“We like to offer different types of spaces for students to work in so that they can be intentional about what space they want to work in during that phase of their process,” says Scott Doorley, a professor at Stanford University’s Hasso Plattner Institute of Design. “So we can have students jump into a space that has low couches when they want to have a discussion or reflect. Or a space that has tools if they want to be building, or a space that has whiteboards and stools if they want to have a brainstorm and be active about sharing ideas. We try to give students an environment that allows them to be intentional about what they need at any given time.”

5.  Why Primary Kids Tweet (Cassidy)- sharing benefits of having primary school kids tweet.  Development of key literacy skills through composing a message.

The tweets we composed together were authentic writing. They came from something that the children wanted to say and were directed at a real audience. Let’s see–meaningful text, authentic writing and a real audience. Isn’t that a good recipe for successful writing instruction? The development of empathy for people in another culture and the beginnings of a worldview were just delightful side benefits.

6.  Interactive User Experience On The High Line- One of my favorite spots in NYC.  Also a great walking tour experience for students.  School of Visual Arts students ere asked to create a networked, mobile or interactive installation that enhances or extends the experience of the High Line park in NYC. Each group presented a concept document that included research documentation and an experience journey of the concept to a guest panel which included a representative of Friends of the High Line. 

7. Teacher Remixed: 5 Ways To Change Our Profession-  rethinking what it means to be a teacher

from answers to questions.

Another way to put it: we should help kids find the answers to their answers. Our questions should be meant to elicit kids’ questions, not to cue “correct” answers, reward “proper” behavior, or trigger deflective behaviors that “justify” the punishments we dole out to kids. Inquiry should be our foundational pedagogy, but not our only one. Questioning our own beliefs and behaviors should come before questioning our kids. We should ask and learn to discover, not to confirm.

8. A Lesson In Empathy