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!
And it might be longer than you think. Source: A Study of 1 Million Teenagers Reveals This Much Screen Time a Day Leads to the Happiest Kids I struggle with this myself. It’s not that I’m mindless scrolling through social media, it’s my RSS feeds, news, and ebooks that I use the most. Sometimes a…
However, in today’s environment the additional challenge has become: How will I meet people or build relationships from home? Source: Five Strategies Building Relationships Remotely | LinkedIn The article is written for the business world, but it still has some use for teachers and students. Working remotely is not going away, and those that can…
Top 10 Reasons to Create Little Free Libraries in Your Community by Tammy Mulligan and Clare Landrigan We often support schools and communities with promoting summer reading. We want students to continue their “readerly lives” over the summer. A few years ago, we were researching ideas to get books to students in different communities and…
It has become a platitude by now to say that massive open online courses largely failed to achieve the promise many advocates saw to expand access to high-quality education democratically throughout the world. But now two researchers have provided the analysis and data to prove it. Source: Study offers data to show MOOCs didn’t achieve…
What I have discovered is we sometimes need to take inventory of some distractions and bad habits that keep us from being our most productive. I always been a big believer in asking myself: What do I need to start doing, keep doing, and stop doing? Source: Why You Need a Don’t-Do List | Kelly…
The mainstreaming of the popular roleplaying game Dungeons & Dragons has significantly changed how people address and understand the game. It’s become a spectator sport and a way for some gamers to earn their living. D&D gameplay and its symbolism have become a significant plot point in geek-oriented TV shows like Stranger Things and The Big Bang Theory. It’s the subject of copious scientific…