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!
The dinosaurs pair over Bluetooth to a new Jurassic World companion iOS / Android app, and kids can drag and drop code to make them do things. The robots can move, light up, make noise, or engage in different interactions. I particularly loved their dancing mode. Source: Dancing dinosaurs will teach your kid to code –…
Today, the company is giving parents better insight into what their kids are doing on their tablets with the free Parent Dashboard. The dashboard lives at parents.amazon.com and can be accessed from any web browser. Source: Amazon is launching a new dashboard that lets you monitor the content your kid consumes – The Verge Amazon…
I decided to focus on learning spaces this year in the classroom and around my school. It led me to create a makerspace in my school’s library, but it also led me to take a hard look at the classroom. Last summer, I visited my classroom and decided to change it around. The entire process…
Maryland’s legislature is considering a bill to allow computer coding courses to fulfill the foreign language graduation requirement for high school. A similar bill passed the Florida State Senate in 2017 (but was ultimately rejected by the full Legislature), and a federal version proposed by Senators Bill Cassidy, Republican of Louisiana, and Maria Cantwell, Democrat…
I hear this concern often from the parents of many of my patients. They routinely remark that their sons do just enough to keep the adults off their backs, while their daughters relentlessly grind, determined to leave no room for error. The girls don’t stop until they’ve polished each assignment to a high shine and…
In “The Essays of Warren Buffett: Lessons for Corporate America,” the Berkshire Hathaway CEO lays out a problem that plagues many businesses: prioritizing short-term goals over long-term success. “If management makes bad decisions in order to hit short-term earnings targets, and consequently gets behind the eight-ball in terms of costs, customer satisfaction or brand strength, no…
