iPads, MakerEd and More in Education

"As a consequence of these lessons from Finland, I have often heard people wondering if the quality of their own schools and entire education system would improve if only they had teachers like the Finns have—just as having good teachers has improved schools in Finland, Singapore, and South Korea, for example. There has been a global movement to turn attention to teacher quality and how it might be improved. Indeed, the desire to enhance teacher quality comes from the lessons learned from education systems that score high on international student assessments.

Each of these successful systems has managed to create a

situation where teaching is regarding by young people as an interesting career choice. Most teachers in these countries spend most of their working lives serving schools. From the international perspective, however, there are three myths related to teacher quality and school improvement that often steer education policies in the wrong direction in countries where the teaching profession has declined in status (Sahlberg, 2013)"

Not everyone agrees on the value and importance of creative thinking in today’s society. Part of the problem is that there is no consensus on what it means to be creative. Different people think about creativity in very different ways, so it’s not surprising that they can’t agree on its value and importance. As I’ve talked with people about creativity, I’ve encountered a number of common misconceptions.

In the last post, I explored this idea that every student deserves a makerspace. In this post, I look at some of the most common myths I see regarding makerspaces. Also, I'd like to invite you to the Makerspace Webinar that I'm doing on tonight at 8:30 EST. We're going to focus on how you can design a makerspace when you don't have a ton of time, money, or technology. You can check it out here.

Isolating? Boring? Not so fast. We debunk four myths about distanced, online learning, speaking with Athabasca University's president Neil Fassina.

“Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.”

We should learn from experiences, particularly if those experiences show our previous beliefs to be untrue. So why are people so easy to fool when it comes to beliefs about learning?

For years, a stream of articles have tried to dispel pervasive but wrong ideas about how people learn, but those ideas still linger. For example, there is no evidence that matching instructional materials to a student’s preferred “learning style” helps learning, nor that there are “right-brain” and “left-brain” learners. The idea that younger people are “digital natives” who use technology more effectively and who can multi-task is also not supported by scientific research.