Launched at 4.0: mSchool | 4.0 Schools Blog. Where does learning happen? And how can we use technology to move beyond the traditional school model, engaging community resources to achieve similar – or better – learning outcomes? 4.0 Launch alum Elliot Sanchez has been developing his own answer to these questions with mSchool, a platform that transforms any space into a state of the art learning lab that delivers engaging, personalized learning to every student. The results of mSchool’s pilot have been astounding – students learned 2.9 years of math in their first year using the mSchool curriculum. As we gear up for Monday’s pitch night - the culminating event where our Fall Launch entrepreneurs demonstrate their progress and pitch to a panel of teachers for $20K – it’s crazy to think that Elliot was in the same place two years ago.
We measure our impact by the ventures we help launch – and mSchool’s amazing trajectory shows us what’s possible when smart people make little bets on changing the future of education.
School Models. Models to Reach Every Student with Excellent Teaching, Within Budget This page contains links to school models that use job redesign and technology to extend the reach of excellent teachers to more students, for more pay, within budget. The models are part of a larger set of 20+ model summaries. In each of these models, all teachers have career opportunities dependent upon their excellence, leadership, and student impact. Advancement allows more pay and greater reach. We call this an Opportunity Culture, explained in this infographic. Schools may find an Opportunity Culture especially effective for recruiting and retaining excellent teachers and teams in hard-to-staff schools and positions, such as STEM teaching, that students sorely need.
The detailed models below explain how changes in teaching roles, time use, and technology can allow teachers who achieve the best student outcomes to reach more students and help peer teachers produce excellent results, too. These models address: School Design 101: Space. School Design 101: Space | Workshop Prompt One of our favorite design activities (which we stole from Education Elements) is to have groups of educators interview actual students and design learning experiences based on student needs. We ask the educators to mock-up what the learning space looks like and, invariably their designs resemble Starbucks more than traditional classrooms.
Their layouts are relaxed, wired, and social – much like the offices of the world’s most creative companies. Think of Google or IDEO. IDEO is a design firm that created “a living laboratory of the workplace” for its employees, whose job is to design the world’s best new products. These buildings are designed to boost productivity, foster teamwork, and facilitate creativity. As we reimagine the school model, it is time to think beyond the classroom. School Design Questions: How do we design spaces for different learning experiences? Public Education Must Open Up and Innovate – Or Die | DomeMagazine.com. 8 Insane Schools, Playgrounds, And Libraries Of The Future. Zspace: The Future of 3D Learning - Getting Smart by Tom Vander Ark - STEM, virtual environments. I started my engineering career on a drafting board in the late seventies before CAD programs were widely used. I recall the challenge of drawing objects in multiple perspectives. I remember my calculus teacher asking me to imagine rotating a curve around an axis.
Today I visited the future of 3D learning and I’m excited about what’s in store for STEM students. Zspace is an immersive, interactive 3D environment created by InfiniteZ, a five year old company in Mountain View (also home of Google and Khan Academy). CEO Paul Kellenberger launched me on an amazing 3D field trip into Zspace, a beautiful 24 inch stereoscopic user interface. After putting on the polarized passive 3D glasses I was able to examine machine parts in ultra-high realism—not just rotating but picking them off the screen and seemingly putting them right in front of my nose for up close inspection.
These workstations will be pricy for a while, so Zspace is not an education 1:1 solution just yet. 10 Reasons Every District Should Open a Flex School. Flex is category of blended learning. Innosight Institute in their recently updated classifications of blended learning defined a flex model as “a program in which content and instruction are delivered primarily by the Internet, students move on an individually customized, fluid schedule among learning modalities, and the teacher-of-record is on-site.” While most instruction is online, “The teacher-of-record or other adults provide face-to-face support on a flexible and adaptive as-needed basis through activities such as small-group instruction, group projects, and individual tutoring.”
In schools using rotation models, student spent 20 to 50 percent of their time online. As noted in a previous post on this topic, Rocketship Education is a high-performing elementary network where students spend two hours per day in a computer lab. KIPP Empower in Los Angeles has classroom centers that students rotate through. There are 10 existing or potential benefits of flex models: For more see: Flipping Blooms Taxonomy.
Teacher Shelley Wright is on leave from her classroom, working with teachers in a half-dozen high schools to promote inquiry and connected learning. I think the revised Bloom’s Taxonomy is wrong. Hear me out. I know this statement sounds heretical in the realms of education, but I think this is something we should rethink, especially since it is so widely taught to pre-service teachers. I agree that the taxonomy accurately classifies various types of cognitive thinking skills. Old-school Blooms: Arduous climb for learners Conceived in 1956 by a group of educators chaired by Benjamin Bloom, the taxonomy classifies skills from least to most complex. Many teachers in many classrooms spend the majority of their time in the basement of the taxonomy, never really addressing or developing the higher order thinking skills that kids need to develop.
Here’s what I propose. Blooms 21: Let’s put Creating at the forefront What if we started with creativity rather than principles? Who’s an Education Entrepreneur?: NewSchools Venture Fund. Jason Tomassini, a talented scribe who’s just joined the ink-stained ranks at Ed Week, alerted those of us who were asleep last weekend to a “spat” between Diane Ravitch, the education historian with the itchy Twitter finger, and Justin Hamilton, spokesman for the US Department of Ed.
In the dustup, a mostly honorable group got sullied; herewith, a few words of defense. As Tomassini details, the trouble begins with this gauntlet Ravitch throws on Twitter: “Who will transform education: entrepreneurs or educators?” In a series of tweets Ravitch assails “entrepreneurs,” who “will sell the schools and kids and outsource teaching,” and then quickly focuses on for-profit entrepreneurs.
She tweets, “Entrepreneurs need to make a monetary profit. Does that lead to quality education? Nope.” We need to reclaim the term education entrepreneurs. These are not the education entrepreneurs I know. *Engrade is a new partner and is not yet listed on the Reconnecting McDowell website. To Flip Or Not Flip? To flip or not to flip? That is not the essential question. In assessing the optimal classroom dynamics, I would argue that we need to take a good look at what our classrooms look like right now, what activities our students gain the most from, what we wished we had more time for, and what things about our class we wish we could eliminate.
Do I flip: yes. Would I recommend it: enthusiastically. But let’s start by rewinding for a minute, to my 2009 AP Calculus class. Running Out Of Time Worst of all, I felt that I never got to hear from my students because they were trying their best to digest the newly presented material. So I asked myself the same questions that I posed at the beginning of this essay: what is working, what is not, and what do I wish I had more time for? Planning In math, we often have the preconceived notion of a boring, rigid learning environment where the teacher lectures and the students do endless practice problems until the skill is mastered. UDL and The Flipped Classroom: The Full Picture. In response to all of the attention given to the flipped classroom, I proposed The Flipped Classroom: The Full Picture and The Flipped Classroom: The Full Picture for Higher Education in which the viewing of videos (often discussed on the primary focus of the flipped classroom) becomes a part of a larger cycle of learning based on an experiential cycle of learning.
Universal Design for Learning has also been in the news lately as a new report Universal Design for Learning (UDL): Initiatives on the Move was released by the National Center on UDL, May, 2012. This post describes the principles of Universal Design for Learning and how they naturally occur when a full cycle of learning, including ideas related to the flipped classroom, are used within the instructional process. Universal Design for Learning The UDL framework: Source: More about UDL can be found at: Some of the key findings of the Universal Design for Learning (UDL): Initiatives on the Move study:
Blowing Up K-12? It seems sacrilegious, really, but I am advocating that we do away with the K-12 grade level structure in education. Perhaps because it has been how we have organized our schools since we evolved from the one room schoolhouse back in the nineteenth century, the grade level structure is taken for granted. You notice that reform agendas do not include doing away with grade levels. We have vouchers, charters, extended day, extended school year, evaluating teachers and principals if we are not firing them, privatizing schools or closing them and reopening them under new management, but no talk of doing away with grade levels. If anything, there is renewed interest in having students repeat grades as a backlash against social promotion.
We talk about thinking out of the box but no one talks about thinking out of grade levels.The reality is that many of the problems affecting our education system can be traced to the grade level organizational structure. That would be truly transformational. Warning Signs for Personalized Learning. A more nuanced, shared language to describe how online and blended learning differ from other forms of digital instruction is crucial to lasting educational change. When Julie Young founded the Florida Virtual School in 1997, her team coined the slogan “any time, any place, any path, any pace” to describe how the school’s online courses liberate students from traditional classroom constraints.
That phrase has become the mantra for people who are trying to articulate how K-12 schools need to change from a “factory-based” model, in which students progress in standardized batches with monolithic instruction, to a more personalized, student-centric model. The growing consensus is that, like it or not, digital technology is the one innovation that can bring personalized learning into reach, because it makes customized education for all students affordable. The trouble is that digital technology is a huge category, and many do not bother to unpack it.
What if Learners Bartered for Instruction? Background In the June issue of Edudemic Magazine for iPad (which we hope is available sometime next week), we talk about the notion of evolving currencies. As technology evolves living patterns change–and vice versa. These kinds of changes impact a range of societal factors.
Your mom starts using facebook, she gets more opportunities to see pictures of grandchildren, but perhaps seems less likely to call or physically stop by in lieu. As “things” change, new “things” become valuable. And new currencies yield new opportunities for exchange. Trading Ideas What if–in pursuit of learning–hobbies, expertise, and original thinking were currency? What if you traded one idea for another? What kind of impact might this have not simply on learner engagement and accountability, but more importantly how community members interact with one another?
How could this model be incorporated into formal learning environments? You can visit the Trade School Kickstarter page here to learn more information. New education standards end rote learning, cursive. Like fashion, trends in public education come and go. What's in vogue depends on the decade and often reflects which way the political wind blows and what shiny gadgets have hit the market.
With the threat of Soviet innovation and Sputnik, old math became new math in the 1960s and then back to old arithmetic about 10 years later. Phonics, like bell bottoms, always makes a comeback, although some fads are but brief historical blips. Think the metric system and mullets. But with such limited time to teach, there have long been debates about what children need to know and how and when to teach it - and when to stop teaching something altogether.
"Is it still necessary for kids to learn their times table when they can pick up their iPhone and ask Siri what is 20 times 2? " A new set of national standards, called the Common Core, has sought to answer that, offering states a guide for what skills and knowledge children should have at the end of each grade level. New national push A balancing act. Mind-reading robot teachers keep students focused - tech - 29 May 2012. WE ALL remember dozing off during a boring class at school. A robotic teacher that monitors students’ attention levels and mimics the techniques human teachers use to hold their pupils’ attention promises to end the snoozing, especially for students who have their lessons online. Tests indicate the robot can boost how much students remember from their lessons. Intelligent tutoring systems that use virtual teachers to interact with students could play a crucial role in the expanding field of online education.
The trouble with online courses is that it is usually impossible to know whether the student is concentrating and engaging with the lesson. Unlike virtual teachers, human teachers have a series of tricks for keeping their classes focused – changing the pitch or tone of their voice, for example, or gesturing to emphasise points and engage with their audience. “We wanted to look at how learning happens in the real world,” says Mutlu. Topics: Bill Gates spends $1.1 million fitting students with mood bracelets to see if their teachers are boring. By Daily Mail Reporter Published: 12:21 GMT, 12 June 2012 | Updated: 14:59 GMT, 12 June 2012 Microsoft supremo Bill Gates wants to fit school students with mood bracelets to measure how interested they are in their lessons.
The Bill and Melinda Gates foundation is spending $1.1 million (£700,000) testing galvanic skin response bracelets to see if they can measure whether students find their teachers engaging. The move is part of the billionaire’s mission to evaluate and improve the quality of teachers, which has already included controversial initiatives such as fitting classrooms with video cameras. Watch out teachers: The bracelets are being tested to see if they can pick up when students are bored in classes The bracelets measure how well the skin conducts electricity, which varies with its moisture level.
Effective? Sweat glands are controlled by the nervous system so skin conductance can be used as an indication of emotional response. One Per Cent: Kinect to watch your emotions and serve up ads. Rise of the Machines: Robots as Teaching Aides. Applying A Brain-Computer Interface For Children With ADHD. Digital Badges For Learning in the Classroom and Beyond. Gamification: Bring Gaming Mechanics Into Non-gaming Environments - Getting Smart by Adam Renfro - fixing failure, gamification, gaming, pace.