The Knight Rider gif has nothing to do with this post but it might make you feel better. If you’re here from #ds106, that image is for you, the post is likely to be depressing although it does at least reference Gardner’s digital facelift talk. What passes for deep thoughts on this blog Here’s my fairly simple idea. School systems are paying corporations/speakers/consultants millions in the hope of finding short term, instantaneous solutions – essentially elements of the digital faceliftAlthough this includes reading programs, magical consultants and all kinds of non-digital “solutions.”. That money should go toward improving teachers, building internal capacity, and creating teacher evangelists for concepts and tools. Instead we keep trying to buy shortcuts. We end up with tools/programs teachers don’t want and which many teachers don’t use. We end up paying companies to develop the expertise of their employees while our own employees lack funding for professional development. What if we stopped paying for cheap, easy fixes? Take Discovery Learning’s 150,000 “learning objects” for instance. Most teachers only use a tiny, tiny fraction of those videos. What if we just paid people to find videos on the web and tag them in a way that makes them accessible? If that fails, what if we paid teachers to make the videos that were needed? I know the […]