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!
During a professional development session a while back I thought I killed someone. He didn’t respond when his name was called. He didn’t respond I tapped his shoulder. Finally, he responded when I shook him a bit harder. Lucky for me (and him) he was just asleep. But it was a wake up call to…
So knowing your audience is extremely important to you? That’s the only way you know you’re communicating. Otherwise you’re just giving a lecture, you’re facing the board and talking to the board, and people in the classroom behind you have to meet you at the board. The educator who says ‘Oh, these people just don’t…
We live in a world where we are constantly connected to information. This vast ocean of information, the best knowledge of mankind — almost all of it — can be accessed at any time in just seconds. But simply being able to access information is not all that impressive. It in no way means that…
Digital tools can help give students a platform to demonstrate their honesty, courage, and integrity in the classroom on a regular basis. Source: 4 Digital Tools That Help Students Practice Integrity | MindShift | KQED News I like three out of four of these tools. I’m not a fan of Turnitin. This past year I…
Computing pioneer Evelyn Berezin died at 93 this week. She was most known as the designer of the first true word-processing computer. But she designed many other innovative computing systems and helmed Redactron Corporation, a company that helped transform offices by producing and distributing her word-processor device. Source: Computing pioneer Evelyn Berezin died this week—she should…
Rogers was so meticulous in his process for translating ideas so they could be easily understood by children that a pair of writers on the show came up with a nine-step process that he used to translate from normal English into “Freddish”, the special language he used when speaking to children. Source: Freddish, the special language…