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...I noticed my kids, two boys in Grade 5 and a daughter in Grade 7 on the computer writing, checking homework and communicating with other kids in their classes. My kids are all too young for Facebook, even though in my daughter’s class, she is apparently one of the only kids “not on Facebook” despite the age restrictions. As a parent, I appreciated that they had in the Digital Dashboard something similar to Facebook where they could interact with their peers, where they could access their homework information and resources, where they could be creators of content, not just content consumers… and all using a platform that respected their privacy.
(By Cyri Jones, ZEN Strategic Consulting Services Inc.) Moms and dads provide insight and advice about raising tech-savvy children in the digital age, to help them stay focused and achieve in school and at home... Teacher's Guide to Project-based Learning. This guide is for teachers. It explains how to design and run projects for students that begin with an enquiry and end with a tangible, publicly exhibited product.
There are six main sections:
Section 1: Introduction - explains what project-based learning is, and why more and more teachers are doing it.
Section 2: Inspiration - Shows the work that students created in five real life projects, with some information about how the projects worked.
Section 3: Foundations - introduces the three keys to successful project-based learning: multiple drafts, critique, and exhibition.
Section 4: Execution - a guide to planning and running projects.
Section 5: Integration - explains how to build a ‘culture of excellence’, which will encourage students to do great work of lasting value.
Section 6: Conculsion - the final section wraps it all up. (By Alec Patton) ![Blended Learning: A Disruptive Innovation [INFOGRAPHIC] #edtech #edutech | Shifting Learning | Scoop.it](http://img.scoop.it/YTd0zWp92U0-fkB2x7mo8zl72eJkfbmt4t8yenImKBVaiQDB_Rd1H6kmuBWtceBJ)
Check out this in-depth infographic all about Blended Learning. Learn what it is, why it's spreading, and how it works in real and virtual classrooms. "The Global Transformation in Education" addresses the forces of change that are causing educators globally to rethink what education for today's students should involve." 
Here's a chart that explains the differences between personalization, differentiation, and individualization. After some research on these terms, Barbara Bray and I were able to determine the differences between these terms in relationship to teaching and learning. Via Barbara Bray, Kathleen McClaskey 
What is Project REAL?: The project is a student voice initiative launched in 2010 by staff in the school’s HSIE faculty. 125 Students in Years 9 & 10 were surveyed in order to ‘review’ faculty pedagogy. The participating staff wanted to use student voice to identify pedagogy best suited to ‘digital learners’ of the new millennium. From this process a number of classrooms were ‘redesigned’ and pedagogy was amended to meet student demands. What happened sent participating staff on a ‘whirlwind’ of change that challenged, not only their role in the classroom, but the complex relationships that exist between students and staff. Essentially Project REAL is an attempt to establish the extent to which the physical space and social relations that exist in the classroom inhibit or improve student learning outcomes.
About us: I.H.S is a low-SES National Partnerships School located just north of Newcastle. The school has over 900 students and has a strong history of success in the performing arts. challengebasedlearning.org is a social networking site for educators and students interested in Challenge Based Learning (CBL). Find other educators interested in CBL, propose challenges and share solutions.
Challenge Based Learning is an engaging multidisciplinary approach to teaching and learning that encourages students to leverage the technology they use in their daily lives to solve real-world problems through efforts in their homes, schools and communities.
Challenge Based Learning is collaborative and hands-on, asking students to work with other students, their teachers, and experts in their communities and around the world to develop deeper knowledge of the subjects students are studying, accept and solve challenges, take action, share their experience, and enter into a global discussion about important issues.
White Paper: https://www.challengebasedlearning.org/public/admin/docs/CBL_Paper_October_2011.pdf
NACOL - North American Council for Online Learning :: Promising Practices in Online Learning Blending Learning: The Convergence of Online and Face-to-Face Education http://www.15centnewspaper.com/resources/inacolblend.pdf
"...blended learning should be approached not merely as a temporal construct, but rather as a fundamental redesign of the instructional model with the following characteristics: " A shift from lecture- to student-centered instruction in which students become active and interactive learners (this shift should apply to the entire course, including face-to-face contact sessions); * Increases in interaction between student-instructor, student-student, student-content, and student-outside resources; *Integrated formative and summative assessment mechanisms for students and instructor. Most importantly, in this view, blended learning represents a shift in instructional strategy. Just as online learning represents a fundamental shift in the delivery and instructional model of distance learning, blended learning offers the possibility to significantly change how teachers and administrators view online learning in the face-to-face setting. “The widespread adoption and availability of digital learning technologies has led to increased levels of integration of computer- mediated instructional elements into the traditional F2F [face to face] learning experience,” write Bonk and Graham, in the Handbook of Blended Learning." ----- This is why I say there is a 'transformation' going on! It's not about things 'not working' or being 'broken', it's simply a necessary shift from doing things in a traditional school setting to doing things in a meaningfully different way. It's not about adding technology to teaching, it's about a transformation in what teaching means today. Exciting stuff! Matt Locke originally came up with the concept of the Six Spaces of technology (test.org.uk/2007/08/10/six-spaces-of-social-media/). I added a seventh earlier this year, Data Spaces, and have played around with how education could harness these spaces, and the various transgressions between them, for learning. This short presentation tackles the potential of adjusting our physical school environments to harness technology even better. What happens when we map technological spaces to physical ones? You can see more of the detail behind these thoughts over on the blog: 
Our 21stC life is a result of innovation. Innovation differs from improvement because it disrupts. It messes with the way we do things, it can be uncomfortable, but ultimately, if it is truly innovative it will change our life for the better.
...How can we bring innovation to education? Develop the innovators’ DNA – practise the five “discovery skills” of true innovators... 1. Associating... 2. Questioning... 3. Observing... 4. Experimenting... 5. Networking...
[via @AnneKnock] 
Training Industry Quarterly - Fall 2011 - (33) Digital Edition... pg. 33-35 |
Here are ten trends in online education that are currently materializing in the field that we can expect to continue onward into the near future:
A shift to open source... Being considered more valuable by employers—Online educational degrees... Hybrid courses are surfacing—Blended classes that feature some online education and some face to face... Enrollment growing exponentially compared to brick-mortar-schools... Shared data, collaborative functionality... Shift from books and closed texts to digital content distribution... Social learning systems to be cloud-based... Podcasting is on the rise... Better technology is emerging... Social media becoming educational... 
Question: How do we help schools understand the students who want to be in the pebble-business?
Answer: Think like a start-up.
Innovative breakthroughs come from start-ups with no money...
World changers are disruptive...
Encourage curiosity and passion...
Provide conditions for innovation to flourish...
Flatten the leadership that will enable decisions to be made at a faster rate...
...A key way that we can rethink school is to learn from the Betahaus. As Harold Jarche, author of The Working Smarter Fieldbook said: Work is learning and learning is work… as we start empowering people to adapt to increasing complexity, the difference between work and learning will blur. This will mean that we will move away from the singular-discipline model of teaching and start integrating learning. 
Pre-service teacher education:...
Ongoing and innovative educational research:...
Exemplary evidence-based education for children: The Laboratory School is an elementary school for children in Nursery to Grade 6 that is based on an inquiry-based philosophy of education. Academic faculty, Lab School teacher-researchers, and staff are dedicated to setting the highest standards for children's education and development by connecting research and teacher training to practice. One of the distinct purposes of The Laboratory School is to explore what is possible in education through research and practice, and to share those possibilities with the broader, public education community.
This video shows how old and dysfunctional school buildings can be brought back to life inexpensively to meet the needs of 21st Century learners.
"In his recent post, Driving Innovation in K-12, Chris Kennedy raises what for me is the starting point for all of the changes within the BC Education Plan: "Teachers need to know where to begin – “personalization” and “digital literacy” are broad and ambiguous terms, so we need to narrow the framework."
"Value of the teacher; impact of the classroom experience; personalizing all of this for the student: where do we start?
"Personalizing education? It’s a four step dance set to a culture of learning beat and anyone can groove to it if they are willing to learn it now."
> Step One: What s a "Need to Know" - Determine what the primary learning outcomes will be. > Step Two: Assessment - Consider "Strinberg's new construct in "The Rainbow Project": creativity and expression through narrative. > Step Three: "Personal" Talk - "Instead of creating adult initiated curriculum to match a specific assessment, we now engage in one to ones (virtual and face to face) with students to determine what “passion” they wish to pursue in their “inquiry” to demonstrate mastery." > Step Four: The Teachers of Tomorrow are in Our Classroom Today - Bringing together the expertise who are passionate about inviting others on a path of inquiry-based learning.
http://jo-online.vsb.bc.ca/bondi/?p=1401 ~@gmbondi
http://cultureofyes.ca/2012/02/09/driving-innovation-in-k-12/ ~@chrkennedy Via Kathleen McClaskey 
If we are to make use of these important findings from the learning sciences, inquiry should be viewed as a highly-structured and thoughtfully designed-endeavour. As contrasted with ‘minimal-guided’ inquiry which has been shown to be marginally effective as a teaching technique, (Hattie) classroom tasks that are worthy of students time and attention, relevant, connected to the world and organized around the ‘big ideas’ of a subject can develop understanding and intellectual interest and engagement with students.
For inquiry to be effective requires significant intellectual investment on the part of teachers to design learning tasks that are connected to the disciplines, to their students’ lives, and to the world, while focused toward clear and achievable learning targets. It requires that teachers see themselves as learners and researchers of both the subjects they teach and their professional practice as a whole.
by Neil Stephenson : @neilstephenson
One exemplary organization who focuses on inquiry is the Galileo Educational Network from Calgary, Alberta. In addition to providing research, resources and professional development on teaching and learning from an inquiry stance, the Galileo Network has also created the Galileo Inquiry Rubric. http://www.galileo.org/research/publications/rubric.pdf Designed with purpose of making inquiry more concrete and accessible, the Galileo rubric is intended to be used by teachers in the design and evaluation of inquiry-based teaching. Inspired by friend Neil Fara and his ProjectREAL, I allowed my students greater choice and voice in their final project. The project was called ‘Cause We Care’ – a pun I thought particularly witty, since the Driving Question was
‘How can we raise awareness in our local community about a charity or cause we feel passionately about?’
Whilst I did develop the driving question the students were responsible for the following: deciding on team members and team name, selecting a charity/cause to focus on, their investigation sources and mode of sharing findings (focus questions can be on this document: Cause We Care), the products to demonstrate research, raise awareness and legitimate contribution to cause/charity, their presentation of learning, including sharing learning with experts, defending ideas and celebrating their chosen charity, the Habits of Mind to master for the duration of the project and the outcomes from the Stage 5 English Syllabus they will master during the project ( I gave them a list of the 11 outcomes and the related dot-points, was an eye-opening experience for them!). 
The Inquiry Hub Connect - Create – Learn * Community and global issues
-Instruction which blends classroom and online experiences in a hybrid model
Q & A - http://www.inquiryhub.org/q-a/ Instructional Program Overview:
Stephen Heppell offers advice on how teachers can work in and thrive in agile learning spaces. The Quest provides a window into one of the programmes undertaken by the Sydney Centre for Innovation in Learning (SCIL). It is part of the “Tomorrow’s School Today” project. SCIL is the research and innovation unit of Northern Beaches Christian School (NBCS) in Sydney, Australia. NBCS, through SCIL, is seeking to create models for 21st century education that change the focus from teacher-directed paradigms to self-directed engaged learning. 
Many schools held up as shining examples of reform are transitional, not transformational, according to a prominent education activist.
The foundation illustrates a model that classifies schools as "traditional," "transitional," or "transformational."
Chaltain says traditional schools "assume the student bears the primary responsibility for learning," while transitionals school put the responsibility on the teacher—the direction of "just about every recently proposed accountability policy in the U.S.,"he says. A transformational school shares the responsibility "via a learning team that includes, and extends beyond, teacher and student." In terms of student achievement, a traditional school emphasizes test results, a transitional school works toward broader curriculum goals, and a transformational school focuses on students' aspirations and life options. Student investment at a traditional school is based on fulfilling requirements, while at a transitional school it’s centered on engagement. Transformational schools take investment to the next level, working to build passion for learning in all students. |
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