“It’s a bit old-fashioned that one teacher goes to a training and then comes back to the school. We need to have the training within the schools so that teachers learn together.” – Anneli Rautiainen, Finland At last week’s Partners in Learning Global Forum, we celebrated educational excellence around the world. Without a doubt, we saw some of the most exciting classroom innovation we’ve seen in the decade since Partners in Learning’s founding. But how do we scale-up innovation (ensuring that it’s equitable) and create a system to sustain it over time? We thought we’d ask an educator who knows first-hand how to build and sustain an effective education system, Finland’s Anneli Rautiainen. Finland remains a gold standard for education reform, with leading PISA rankings, high-quality teachers and successful graduates. So what is the Finnish National Board of Education (FNBE) doing right? But even Finland’s schools have challenges. What else is Finland doing to ensure it continues to lead in education? Finland is now in the process of updating their core curriculum – something they do every ten years. Can you describe how your professional achievements have advanced innovation in education?
Big Thinkers: Judy Willis on the Science of Learning Judy Willis: Hi, I'm Judy Willis and I am a neurologist. I've been a neurologist for 15 years and after the 15 years my patient practice really changed. I started getting so many referrals for kids whose teachers thought they had ADD, obsessive compulsive disorder, staring spells, seizures petit mal epilepsy, and the increase was huge and yet the kids had no greater incidence of it. And I saw the notes were coming from the school so I visited the schools. I'd look in the classrooms and I saw kids who indeed were playing with everything they could find, staring out the window, coloring on someone's chair or book. The problem was that the way they were being taught was lectured. There's a part of the brain that is an emotional filter. So if a person is in a state of stress, the amygdala gets highly active. So we need to keep that switching station in a state of low stress. So how do you get students to focus their attention? The other one I'll use is color. What else does a videogame do?
SAMR as a Framework for Moving Towards Education 3.0 Evolution, in its broadest sense, serves as a force to help humans move towards a better way of living given the current times or Zeitgeist. It follows, then, that the education field should evolve as new opportunities and forces emerge and present themselves. But in general, this is not the case. From the Time Magazine article, How to Bring Our Schools Out of the 20th Century There’s a dark little joke exchanged by educators with a dissident streak: Rip Van Winkle awakens in the 21st century after a hundred-year snooze and is, of course, utterly bewildered by what he sees. The evolution of education can be explained from moving from Education 1.0 to Education 3.0. Briefly, Education 1.0, 2.0. and 3.0 is explained as: Education 1.0 can be likened to Web 1.0 where there is a one-way dissemination of knowledge from teacher to student. Emerging technologies is, can be, should be a driving force of this evolution towards Education 3.0. Slides from a presentation given on this topic:
How 17-Year-Old Nikhil Goyal Is Disrupting Education At 17 years old, Nikhil Goyal is shaking up America’s education system. Goyal is a senior at Syosset High School, a public school in New York. While most high school students focus on athletics, academics, and socializing, Goyal aims to transform the American education system. Goyal’s book, One Size Does Not Fit All: A Student’s Assessment of School ,describes the flaws within America’s education system and provides solutions to fix the present challenges. He explains the importance of finding progressive leaders to transform our nation’s education system. “Everybody is born with innate curiosities,” Goyal said. Goyal encourages students to get involved in the education movement by writing about their personal experiences within the classroom through creating a blog. “When I was documenting some of the work schools were doing, it was very pragmatic,” Goyal said. “When we allow students to have a voice, we can revolutionize the education system,” Goyal said.
Reteach and Enrich: How to Make Time for Every Student Calvin Baker: Most of us grew up, classic American education, you know. You can go through a unit where these was math, social studies or English, and at the end of the unit, you had a test. Then you moved onto the next unit, because you had to get through all the chapters by the end of the school year. And some kids would do well, some wouldn't. Katie Dabney: In the past, we would just move on to the next chapter in the book, and sorry if you didn't get that. Lindsey Flora: So these formatives are a way of assessing everything that you have learned about prime and composite numbers. Crystal Deryke: So we're gonna go ahead and get up our math offices. Nancy Varela: Is this a test that you have to take really fast? Everybody: No. Katie Dabney: What we do is we teach an objective, and that objective is calendared out for us. Nancy Varela: And so how many reteaches are you looking at? Lindsey Flora: I'm looking at five I reteach, yep. Nancy Varela: Crystal, do you have your number yet?
Using SAMR to Teach Above the Line - Getting Smart by Susan Oxnevad - 1:1 program, Apple, edchat, EdTech, SAMR, technology For as long as I can remember I have been an advocate for helping teachers understand the stages of technology integration to help them effectively use tech as a tool for learning. I’ve adopted a few different tech integration models over the years, discussed the ideas with administrators for use as a starting point for tech integration, and kept the ideas front of mind as I invent and discover new ways for using technology as a tool for learning. Discussing the stages of tech integration has led to some thought provoking and inspiring conversations, but the ideas have not gained a lot of momentum in my face-to-face teaching environment until now. About SAMR Researchers have determined that technology integration typically moves through specific levels. The SAMR model is a useful tool for helping teachers think about their own tech use as they begin to make small shifts in the design and implementation of technology driven learning experiences to achieve the next level. Substitution
What if school was more like this? This was written by George Couros who is Division principal of Innovative Teaching and Learning for Parkland School Division in Alberta, Canada. He is suspiciously well dressed and has the healthiest head of hair I've ever seen. He tweets here and blogs here. This post was originally found here. by George Couros Here is a little activity that you can do with staff when returning to school to get the wheels turning on project based learning inspired by this awesome video. Take the Alberta Education Competency Wheel below: Then watch this AMAZING video below about a self-initiated project done by a pretty cool kid: As you watch the video, write down all of the things that the student did on his own to meet the expectations as listed in the “Competency Wheel”. You could also discuss this article that has some lessons taken away from the video (quote shortened below): 1. 2. 3. Better yet, show the video to kids and discuss the wheel with them.
Singapore's 21st-Century Teaching Strategies (Education Everywhere Series) Adrian: I think it is important to make school fun. And when school is fun, you don't get kids waking up in the morning and saying, "Do I have to come to school again?" So we embrace technology, because it helps us make learning more engaging. I believe that when kids are engaged, when kids are interested, that's where learning takes place. Ho: The kids are really from a very different world now. Teacher: What you want to do right now is, okay, think of the Socratic questions. Adrian: Ngee Ann Secondary School is a typical school in Singapore where we take in students with different academic abilities, and we have about 1,512 students in this school. Lee: In the early 1990s, the teachers really are the monopoly on knowledge, and they are the one that comes to the class to deliver that knowledge so that the students can acquire them. Teacher: Velocity defines the rate of change of the sense of time. Adrian: We look at technology very meaningfully. Student: [speaking foreign language]
edutopia Plenty of students may know how to create digital media, but too few know how to produce engaging, high-quality content, the kind that makes them stand out not only to college admission officers, but also to potential employers. What does that kind of quality involve? We need to teach and encourage students to post original, outstanding content that will distinguish their unique identities in a sea of increasingly indistinguishable resumes -- which are going the way of the typewriter. To help accomplish this task, I model creating a positive digital footprint by making effective use of social networking and blogging. Facebook Educators do students a tremendous disservice by demonizing Facebook, which can enhance a student's online presence and real-world prospects. Twitter I also show students my Twitter account, which includes links to articles that I've written, content that I've enjoyed, and causes that I support. LinkedIn Snapchat Blogging
How school can kill the desire to learn This was written by Jay Trevaskis who is a teacher in Sydney, Australia. He tweets here and blogs here. This post was originally found here. by Jay Trevaskis I used this image in one of my classes earlier this year and thought I’d struck gold. I actually had but, sadly, the school “system” quickly tarnished it and gave me clearest indication that school, which is intended to increase our students desire to learn, in it’s institutionalized form can actually do the opposite. I’ve been encouraged to use stories and stimulus materials to pique the student’s curiosity and to use the stories behind the pictures to challenge their thinking and actions. As the students entered the room I had this image up on the wall waiting for them. Once the observations and questions started to dry up, I shared with the class the key details: that it was a picture taken at the 1968 Olympic Games after the 200m Sprint. This went on for the remainder of the lesson. Then the bell rang.
David Thornburg on the Evolving Classroom (Big Thinkers Series) David Thornburg: Traditional classrooms, the kinds that I certainly grew up in, really don't reach every child. Not because of teachers, not because of anything the teacher's doing so much as the actual physical structure of the room. The idea that children learn best by sitting in uniform rows facing the front of the room, has been known to be ineffective for some learners since the 1300s, as a famous painting that shows what a real classroom looked like at the University of Bologna. And when you look at it, you laugh, because there's students sleeping, there's students talking to each other, and there's the poor professor in the front of the room trying to give a lecture hoping that everyone's learning something. So our motivation was to say if the structure of the classroom is at fault, what new structures could we design that might be better? David: My name's David Thornburg.
edutopia Overview Integrating Technology Instructional Coaching Hampton High School has integrated technology across its entire program with a full-time instructional coach who supports the teachers in this work. The presence of a coach sharpens the school's focus on how technology can best make the learning more engaging and relevant for students, and gives teachers support in navigating the vast field of technology applications and devices. How It's Done Funding: How They Got Started Hampton High School initially received funds from the state-funded “Classrooms for the Future,” Pennsylvania’s three-year grant program that gave schools technology equipment and required them to turn a classroom teacher into an instructional coach to help support technology use. Bringing Teachers on Board Principal Jeff Finch admits that the first year of having an instructional coach to integrate technology was a hard sell for teachers. Key Questions for Integrating Technology Role of Tech Instructional Coach