iPads, MakerEd and More in Education

These top image and clip art sites provide an extensive supply of moderate- to high-quality visuals for cost-conscious schools.

Companies are starting to flock to Snapchat.

McDonald’s and Taco Bell are using it to get Snapchatters interested in their products.

The NBA and MLS are giving behind-the-scenes footage from their sports worlds.

CNN is reporting news content, and The Food Network is providing an extension to its programming.

They’re providing content that’s interesting.

They’re surprising their audience.

And they’re having some fun along the way.

If companies can do it, teachers and schools can, too … and we can learn some lessons about how to engage students by watching how they engage their customers.

U.S. Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos recently told the Wall Street Journal that schools need to change because by the time current kindergarteners reach the job market, 65 percent of jobs will be newly invented. The XQ Initiative to reinvent high school claims that the “jobs of tomorrow will look totally different than those of today or the recent past.” A special report in Education Week on the future of work says that “technological change, globalization, and climate instability are happening at an accelerating pace all across the world.”

These warnings of dramatic change are increasingly being used to promote advocates’ favored solutions for improving schools, and the results are trickling down into real classrooms — not just through the expansion of established career and technical education programs, for example, but with calls to upend traditional schooling altogether.

Dig into these claims about our changing economy, though, and you end up knee-deep in mixed messages and muddled statistics. While there is good reason to think that America’s job market will look different in the years to come, some of the data being used to make that point in the education world is overstated or misleading.

That’s leaving educators and policymakers wondering how best to prepare students, especially since one commonly promoted strategy, expanding the use of technology in schools, may be promising but is largely unproven as a way to improve learning.

Preparing students to be “college and career ready” is a catch phrase in many schools, but those same institutions often block large swaths of the internet in an attempt to protect students from acting inappropriately online. While well-intentioned, blocking useful digital tools prevents educators from guiding students through appropriate online behavior while still in the relative safety of school. College and job recruiters are seeking students who are creative problem solvers, collaborative workers and independent thinkers, but in many cases, rules prevent students from practicing those skills online.

‘If we trust them to engage with the content then we have the power to teach them the digital citizenship.’
“When you try to use a computer in a school, it’s shocking what is blocked,” said Michelle Luhtala, head librarian at New Caanan High School in Connecticut during an edWeb webinar. “That is not 21st century learning.” Luhtala doesn’t believe schools can make good on their promise to prepare kids for the world that awaits them outside school walls if they don’t first prepare them to use the tools to operate online in safe ways. She acknowledges that letting students direct their own learning in virtual spaces can be scary and that it takes a lot of trust.

Standing at the front of her classroom this past February, the public high-school English teacher Jana Rohrer wrote the words “American Flag” on the board and asked her ninth-grade students to tell her what came to their minds.

Over the past six years Rohrer has used the exercise as part of a lesson to help explain symbolism in Harper Lee’s classic To Kill a Mockingbird. And over the past six years, the students’ answers had become routine: Freedom. Independence. Patriotism.

This time, there were new words mixed among the more familiar responses: Hate. Racism. Danger.

“It was like when you hear a record scratch and the music stops,” said Rohrer, recalling the moment from the classroom exercise. “I was just floored.”

Danish primary school pupils returned to classrooms four weeks ago – this headteacher explains what happened next

Corporate leaders aren’t the only ones who need to consider how to adjust to the new world the 4th Industrial Revolution is ushering in. Educators, schools, government officials, and parents must re-think education and how to prepare the next generation to take advantage of the plethora of opportunities and overcome the challenges enabled by ever-increasing technological change. Here are some of the changes happening because of the 4th Industrial Revolution and eight things every school must do to prepare for the 4th Industrial Revolution.

Look at this, y'all! It's the cover of a top secret project I've been working on with my friend Darren Hudgins for the last year(ish!)

I'll go into the why and how of this project at some point in the future, but for right now, we really need your help. Part of what we're doing with this book is collecting data on how educators (of all stripes, not just school librarians, but certainly school librarians, too!) are teaching media literacy in the age of "Fake News." We're seeking to find out how/if schools are grappling with this problem, while also identifying what strategies are currently working in the field.

This is where you come in!

To help us, will you please take a few minutes to fill out this brief survey? It would mean the world to us!

Earlier this year at the BETT Show Adobe announced that they would launching a new version of Adobe Spark designed specifically for school use. That new version is finally here. Earlier today Adobe launched Spark for Education.

Spark for Education is a free service that Adobe has launched to address the concerns that schools have had about Spark since it's launch a few years ago. The biggest of those concerns being use by students under the age of 13. Spark for Education is designed for school-wide deployment (much like G Suite for Education) in a manner that is COPPA compliant. The school will be able to manage student and teacher use of Spark including access to the service itself. Additionally, Spark for Education will provide students and teachers with free access to all of premium features of Adobe Spark.

When Orville Wright, of the Wright brothers fame, was told by a friend that he and his brother would always be an example of how far someone can go in life with no special advantages, he emphatically responded, “to say we had no special advantages … the greatest thing in our favor was growing up in a family where there was always much encouragement to intellectual curiosity.”

The maker movement has expanded greatly in recent years and much of the attention has focused on cities with high population density and large well-funded school districts. In rural districts, teachers are also developing maker projects to help students gain the benefits that come from hands-on experiences, while better understanding the needs of their communities.