Before recording my response to Dan Meyer’s challengeBesides writing this now cements my obligation to get the recording done, which I never remember to do when presenting live. I’d do it now but all the kids, baby included, are sleeping and the house is just too peaceful. I must not risk disturbing this. I might as well continue what I started the other day. So we had a pretty brief section where we learned (surprise, surprise) that there’s a lot of new information in the world and most of it is on some form of magnetic media. There was conversation around those facts and maybe it changes what kids/we need to know and do and maybe it doesn’t. So we know there’s lots of information. Let’s take a closer look at both why this information is exploding and what kind of information is being put out there. I can publish anything I want right now – text, audio, video – or any combination of the three – and what’s more I can do it for free and I can reach a world-wide audience. (really not sure about this slide, I made probably four other versions and just went with the simplest one) There are great things about this personal publishing revolution but there are downsides as well. Huge amounts of […]

We’re on revision 3 of our attempt to describe the 21st century classroom and to make it accessible and actionable for teachers. It’s really easy to say “21st Century Classroom,” it’s much harder to break it down and describe the components in a clear and concise way. We’ve taken three stabs at it and I think we’re getting pretty close. Figure it might be useful to someone. Round 1 was about 3 years ago. It was a good document but hampered by massive size and too much technology terminology. This hampered adoption pretty severely. Round 2 was last year and we swung pretty hard in the opposite direction. The focus was on leanness and the technology terminology was dropped. Technology was mentioned but it wasn’t very direct. Round 3 is embedded below. We kept it lean but added an individual statement about technology and changed the layout to better emphasize how a student’s role changes as the classroom progresses. We also dropped individual documents on assessment and organization believing that both elements are now covered in other components. These documents can serve several purposes. Our goal was to provide a place to codify our views on 21st century practice- to show the mix of pedagogical changes, 21st century themes and sound use of technology. This allowed for teachers to self-reflect […]