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!
Trying to keep up with science and technology news can become overwhelming. Bullets.tech is a website that breaks down science and news articles to five bullet points. This would be great for helping students find things they are interested in or keeping up with science news.
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…
In a PBL classroom, students do things. But what about the teacher? What do we need to be doing while the students are doing things? What does it look like when the teacher is a coach? Are we still doing things, and if so, what are they? In Making Space for Thinking, we made the…
Get ready for Chrome OS to get a lot more pervasive and a lot more interesting this year, if only because it’s going to show up in new kinds of hardware. Google has been talking up the latest round of Chromebooks — the Samsung Chromebook Pro from CES and today’s new education-focused Chromebooks — but…
“In theory they’re giving you an extra push, so you should be using less of your own energy. But the problem is that humans are so different from one to another, and some of us actually try to fight against the exoskeleton,” Zhang tells The Verge. “But the difficulty is not the device, it’s the fact that…
An extensive review of employee teams at Google found that the most successful were those with a high level of psychological safety. In other words, when employees felt safe enough to take risks (and make mistakes) without being shamed or criticized, they did better work. “The wisdom of learning from failure is incontrovertible. Yet organizations that…
