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”.
Five years ago, University of Kentucky CTO Doyle Friskney realized that the campus’s classrooms mirrored those of other colleges: Lecture-based halls where students would sit and listen to a professor, with little interaction among one another. Something had to change, Friskney said. “Millennials don’t necessarily like lecture classrooms as well as faculty members do—they like…
Today is the day that Adobe end-of-lifes one of the greatest and most frustrating of internet technologies, Flash. Flash was great in the late 90s, allowing web developers to create interactive, good looking websites. YouTube took Flash to a new level by allowing video to be played easily. The downsides for Flash are many. The…
Think about the lawyers who’ve been hugely successful doing what they have done for 20-30+ years in law firms. They aren’t seeing the shift to needing to be technically competent, using technology to be more efficient, using social media to connect with potential clients, or restructuring their firm to take advantage of a variety of…
NASA has created an online image and video library. The library consists of more than 140,000 images, videos, and audio files from NASA. Media can be browsed by newest added files, or you can search by keyword or object name. The new website consolidates media from more than 60 collections. Since the media was created by…
Walking into her office in early December in her tiny very very “high poverty” rural elementary school, sinking into her chair, principal Alison Dwier-Selden sighed and said, “I have learned that looking forward to Christmas is middle class privilege.” Truth. There are undeniable facts about poverty in America, and Alison’s quote is one. Hunger is…
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…