Four years ago, Chris Nagele did what many other technology executives have done before — he moved his team into an open concept office.
His staff had been exclusively working from home, but he wanted everyone to be together, to bond and collaborate more easily. It quickly became clear, though, that Nagele had made a huge mistake. Everyone was distracted, productivity suffered and the nine employees were unhappy, not to mention Nagele himself.
Classrooms are essentially open offices. Well, they’re even worse than open offices since the desks and chairs are usually not comfortable and their is no ownership of what little space the students get.
What’s more, certain open spaces can negatively impact our memory. This is especially true for hotdesking, an extreme version of open plan working where people sit wherever they want in the work place, moving their equipment around with them.
Whoa, that sounds a lot like how classrooms work now!
We spoke with teachers and administrators at Cicero Public School District 99 in Illinois and Chagrin Falls Exempted Village Schools in Ohio about how they designed technology professional development programs to engage teachers for the long term. Here we share three lessons learned from their experiences building programs that impact educators and students alike. Source: Creating a professional growth culture:…
When schools try to innovate, they often take a traditional top-down approach: devise a strategy, roll it out to teachers and support a high-fidelity implementation. The end result is often one that lacks teacher support or genuine enthusiasm — initiatives putter along and change is sporadic or modest.In education and beyond, innovation is usually the…
Former New York Times technology reporter John Markoff used to think robots taking jobs was cause for alarm. Then, he found out that the working-age population in China, Japan, Korea and the U.S. was declining. Source: We need robots to take our jobs, according to John Markoff Some very surprising insight on where robots will be needed.
The water bottle flipping craze, in which a partially filled bottle of water is flipped and magically lands upright, swept the globe a couple of years ago. Now a group of Dutch scientists has designed a classroom demo version of the feat, described in a recent paper in the American Journal of Physics. It is…
Imagine if you grew up around people but never learned the language they spoke to each other. Wouldn’t it be absurd? Yet, technology powers almost everything in today’s world and most children have no idea about language it speaks. This rapid growth of technology requires a rapid pace of education to follow it, but it is pretty…
Today’s updates for the Class Notebook add-in for OneNote desktop update include: Grade scale support for Canvas and Skooler. Skooler joins the OneNote add-in family. Stickers—now includes the ability to customize. Source: OneNote Class Notebook add-in now includes grade scales, improved LMS integration and sticker customization – Office Blogs Some great additions to OneNote Class…
