Perhaps in the near future we’ll hear a loud popping sound that will indicate that the state education gurus and the legislative mules have pulled their heads from their posteriors.
Category Archives: Edu – Admin & Leadership
Implementing the Virtual High School Program: Online Learning for the 21st Century
Here’s one dude’s story of implementing a virtual program using Virtual High School as a provider.
How—and why—to teach innovation in our schools
This article makes compelling arguments for teaching innovation. The entire time I was reading this, one thought kept pushing forward…how is this going to get done in an age where we, on balance, don’t ask the administrators we hire to possess these traits? “That’s the way we’ve always done it,” also know as TTWWADI, is a safe way for administrators to meander through their careers. It’s safe, and likely not to be questioned by people in the tiers above. To produce innovators, we need administrators that are innovators. Of course we need teachers that are innovators also, but until we put people in positions of power that adopt this mindset and conduct themselves as such, this is nothing more than another pie-in-the-sky idea that won’t get legs. If education is going to change, and it must, we need innovators in decision-making positions, not TTWWADI clones that never venture out away from the still waters of the harbor.
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How—and why—to teach innovation in our schools
Call for innovative society raises important questions about education
By Alexander Hiam
It’s wonderful to hear President Obama call for a nationwide emphasis on innovation, but it raises an interesting challenge: Where will all those innovators come from? Currently, we are chasing testable competency in academic core skills. It is quite a different thing to try to educate future innovators. We don’t test for that.
An innovation curriculum requires an emphasis on what I am going to call, for lack of a preexisting term, the Five I’s: Imagination, Inquiry, Invention, Implementation, and Initiative (the latter being a foundational trait that enables the other four). Here is my take on how to teach each of the Five I’s of innovation in our schools.
Report: Blended learning could hit or miss
This article, based on a report titled, “The Rise of K-12 Blended Learning” points out the potential ‘dangers’ of cramming blended learning into our current environments. These paragraphs succinctly outline this danger:
“There is a significant risk that the existing education system will co-opt online learning as it blends it into its current flawed model—and just as is the case now, too few students will receive an excellent education,” the report states.
“Today’s education system is a monolithic one that was built to be like a factory system,” Horn explained to eSchool News. “Rather than measure learning and move individual students along to new concepts as they master previous ones, it measures seat time and moves students along when they hit certain dates on a calendar.”
“Time is fixed,” he continued, “and the learning is variable. This system worked really well in the past. But now that we are asking it to educate every student to his or her highest potential, it was never built to do this job.”
The big danger with integrating technology into education, said Horn, is “that we do what we’ve always done, which is to implement it as a sustaining innovation rather than a disruptive one—that we simply layer technology over the traditional system, which would then co-opt it.”
The above quotes are from Michael Horn, author of a fantastic, thought-provoking book titled “Disrupting Class.” In the article linked below, there’s a short video with Horn that’s worth the few minutes it takes to watch.
The article is here.
Obama to push for new ed-tech agency
More than 30 years after the bloated, purposeless formation of the U.S. Department of Education, here they are as usual: Late to the game and likely to screw-up the soup by piling on more bureaucratic impediments to something that will flourish on it’s own. I’m not the lone jaded skeptic in the room. Read the article to hear the voices of others with the same concerns I have about this.