You don’t need to be a Dickens scholar to understand that for many teachers it is both the best of times and the worst of times.
Let’s start with the good stuff. Digital innovation is inspiring imagination. Educators from all over the world are learning how to responsibly blend technology into their teaching, while sharing resource suggestions and best practices with colleagues and their growing professional learning networks.
The freedom to choose an assortment of apps, videos and open educational resources that can augment – if not replace – traditional curriculum for any given unit or lesson plan is empowering. Learning how other teachers put these tools into their own practice via Twitter Chats, EdCamps and other collaborative environments is exhilarating.
Hours after her son returned to school, April McElrath of Smyrna, Delaware, posted to a Facebook group she’d joined for help and support. “He tried to start a game before school!!!” McElrath wrote, posting a picture of her sheepishly smiling son Marcus, 11, to the group for parents of children obsessed with the video…
At its most basic level, a startup is a learning machine—one that helps its founders understand and serve the real world in a manner that enables itself to continuously gather information and grow. If it doesn’t learn and adjust, a startup ends. Successful students, like startups, are those who are resilient, constantly absorbing new information…
As teacher resignation letters increasingly go public – and viral – new research indicates teachers are not leaving solely due to low pay and retirement, but also because of what they see as a broken education system. In a trio of studies, Michigan State University education expert Alyssa Hadley Dunn and colleagues examined the relatively…
A few months ago, I noticed an increased amount of discussion around the notion of blended learning. Many of these conversations started on a similar note: “We’re blended—all of our teachers use Google Classroom” (or Edmodo, Schoology, Canvas, Moodle, etc.). However, in probing further, I often discovered that these tools had merely digitized existing content…
Why, all of a sudden, are so many successful business leaders urging their companies and colleagues to make more mistakes and embrace more failures? In May, right after he became CEO of Coca-Cola Co., James Quincey called upon rank-and-file managers to get beyond the fear of failure that had dogged the company since the “New…
The Bridge concept — low-cost private schools for the world’s poorest children — has galvanized many of the Western investors and Silicon Valley moguls who learn about the project. Bill Gates, the Omidyar Network, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative and the World Bank have all invested in the company; Pearson, the multinational textbook-and-assessment company, has done…
