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 result of iteration rather than central planning. In schools that succeed in implementing real instructional improvements, teachers figure out how to improve teaching and learning by journeying through multiple passes of a cycle of experiment, reflection and adjustment.
Number one on their list is, what I feel, an important and overlooked aspect of education. Research and development is all too often replaced with, “the research says we should be doing this, so let’s implement this across the building or district, without doing any R&D”.
“They are not sleeping. They are not going to school. They are dropping out of social activities. A lot of kids have stopped playing sports so they can do this.” Michael Rich, a pediatrician and director of the Clinic for Interactive Media and Internet Disorders at Boston Children’s Hospital, was talking about the impact “Fortnite:…
Students planning to catch up on “Game of Thrones” during class at Purdue University will have to find new ways to entertain themselves. When students return from spring break Monday, they will find access to Netflix, Hulu, Spotify, Pandora and other streaming services blocked in academic buildings on the West Lafayette, Ind., campus if…
To graduate from a public high school in Chicago, students will soon have to meet a new and unusual requirement: They must show that they’ve secured a job or received a letter of acceptance to college, a trade apprenticeship, a gap year program or the military. Source: Chicago won’t allow high school students to graduate without…
On a Sunday night two weeks back, in the Rose Court Garden of the Disneyland Hotel in Anaheim, California, 150 antsy competitors between the ages of 13 and 22 milled around eating miniature whoopie pies by the light of the Moon, sizing up their global rivals in the efficient use of Excel, PowerPoint, and Word….
Cricut dropped a major change into a feature update announcement last Friday: Any Cricut device owner who does not subscribe to the Cricut Access cloud platform will be limited to no more than 20 uploads/imports per month to Design Space. (Designs made using elements Cricut sells through Design Space do not count against the limit.) The change applies not…
The Curiosity Show captured the imaginations of Aussie kids, teaching them simple science experiments to do at home. It was produced in South Australia and ran nationally from 1972 until 1990. Source: Curiosity Show gets a second chance at life, goes viral on YouTube – ABC News (Australian Broadcasting Corporation) The Curiosity Show Youtube Channel…
