When I first started this blog, I had a weekly post that was entitled, “You Should Read”, which shared some of the articles that I have read that have influenced my thinking or else inspired more questions. This year, in my work as Division Principal with Parkland School Division, I share links with staff similar to that series. I would also like to share them in this space as well.
If you missed these articles, they definitely will inspire some thoughts, if not actions. Please check them out below:
1. Interview with the Teenager – Royan Lee is an extremely innovative and progressive teacher located in Ontario, and in this blog post, he interviews a student asking about the connection with technology and learning in school. You may or may not be surprised with the response from the student, but this post shows that all of us (students and staff) have a long way to go in connecting mobile devices to learning in the classroom. There is definitely potential but this is something that we will need to learn alongside our students. I enjoyed this question and answer that ended the interview:
” If you were the boss of all the schools what would you change first?Instead of making us use paper and pen for everything, I’d want them to use more technology and computers. I just wish they’d give us more freedom.”
2. If school isn’t for collaborating, why does anyone come? – Ira Socol, someone who does some amazing work in Universal Design for Learning, discusses learning environments and what we could do in schools to ensure their relevance in our current world. Ira truly believes that we need to open up the digital tools that we use in our schools to prepare our students for their future, let alone our world today:
“A technological environment which supports collaboration across every barrier. Sorry, if you have purchased a single device for all of your students – you’ve made a major mistake. If you don’t have open internet access in every room …you are denying your students basic tools. If you prohibit student-owned devices or block social networking, you are failing your students in the most basic ways. Students need to learn how to function in this world, not the one your grandma grew up in. Every place they go, people will be using a flood of differing devices. Every place they work people will be Skyping, Twittering, Chatting, Texting, working together in Google Docs,translating, searching for information and data, and building social networks. If they are not learning the best ways to do all this, your school is a failure, because your students will lack essential knowledge and social skills.”
3. The Single Best Idea for Reforming K-12 Education – In this very interesting Forbes article, you can see a focus on the importance of truly shifting our organization to focus on inspiring our schools to become communities of active and lifelong learners. From this very detailed article, the following quote sticks out:
“.. I believe that the single most important idea for reform in K-12 education concerns a change in goal. The goal needs to shift from one of making a system that teaches children a curriculum more efficiently to one of making the system more effective by inspiring lifelong learning in students, so that they are able to have full and productive lives in a rapidly shifting economy.”The article has some very clear cut suggestion for what to change in education and some of the changes that should happen. It is definitely an interesting read.
cc licensed ( BY NC SD ) flickr photo shared by l_hilt
