a well-crafted website with a thoughtful teacher acting as a curator to the links can produce a body of knowledge superior to textbooks.

10 things I think teachers should unlearn…

1. Teachers know all the answers.

2. Teachers have to be in control of the class.

3. Teachers are responsible for the learning.

4.  Students are obliged to respect teachers.

5.  Learning can be measured by a letter or a number.

6.  Teachers should plan activities and then assessments.

7. Learners need to sit quietly and listen.

8. Technology integration is optional.

9.  Worksheets support learning.

10.  Homework is an essential part of learning.

The creativity of the digital world is vastly different from the analog environment. There, creative is typically a static commercial art piece (or a "portfolio" of these). Creativity represented by great copy, an idea that makes a twist on a popular culture or "captures the zeitgeist," or as a piece-of-art logo and print ad, may indeed belong to the same era as those media that defined it.

In the digital world, that approach doesn't cut it. The best creative is the creation of relationships, connections and interactions. It connects tools with behaviors, locations, and objects. It creates networks or systems. To be creative there, you need to be strategic: you need to figure out who connects to whom, when and why and to what result. Simply, you need to plan for a chain reaction. These networks then give way to a collective creativity that becomes visible to all to use it, build upon it, change it, and add to it.

Ooohh... I like this!

if we haven't defined the teachers' knowledge, skills and attitudes that are needed to successfully support a different technology-enriched learning environment, how can we provide a preservice teaching program to address these needs?

A Teacher Education program needs to identify what skills and tools need to be mastered to effectively work in a 1-to-1 learning environment and then they need to teach/use those methods in the classes they teach.  It's as simple as that.

My kid, who is "just average" according to his teacher at school, blossoms outside the traditional school environment, away from all the worksheets, behavior charts and bathroom schedules. I wish more of what he did at school brought him to life

The Texas Board of Education proposed...

Calling the country’s slave trade the "Atlantic triangular trade." That refers to the trade system that included the American colonies, Europe and Africa, which, if drawn on a map with arrows from place to place, certainly looks like a triangle. The proposal is correct on the geometric merits.

On historical and moral merits, however, it fails miserably. Trying to whitewash the country’s ugly past is itself ugly, and dangerous.

This proposal was approved and then later rescinded.

with more than 300,000 teacher layoffs expected around the country, it's teacher vs. teacher.

In one corner, older and more experienced teachers who, having spent their whole career accumulating power in their school district and influence with the union that represents them, are calling in those markers to save their own skins.

In the other, younger and less experienced but often more idealistic teachers, some of whom were sought out and recruited by districts only to be the first fired in times of layoffs. The unions are backing the older teachers and throwing their younger members to the wolves.

Eating our young at the expense of the future of the teaching profession?

They’re telling you with their mistakes what you as the teacher are doing wrong. . . . you need to look at their mistakes for qualitative information about what you need to change in your instruction to teach it right.

We need assessments that gauge students' understanding and require them to demonstrate what they know, not tests that allow students to rely solely on guessing and picking one among four canned answers.

why are we still so keen on having our students memorize facts when we have no idea whether they can develop informed points of view of what those facts meant, mean or might mean to the future. Why are we using one dimensional textbooks when the stories we wish to tell can be brought to life with the multi-media experiences available to anyone with a modem and a computer? Especially, since the textbooks are coming out of Texas which wants our students to believe that evolution is a theory like creationism and that the civil rights movement created unrealistic expectations for minorities. Do we really want to codify that kind of thinking?

this article offers a good example of what so many school reformers (and journalists) get wrong:  They assume that “good teaching” consists of disgorging information to students.  The only challenge, then, is to become more skillful at “getting and holding the floor,” making kids do whatever they’re told, and avoid “veer[ing] away from the lesson plans.”  The nightmare scenario from this perspective is one where “the kids are running the classroom.”

Notice that this kind of instruction does nothing to help children think critically, understand ideas, or (heaven knows) become excited about learning.  Notice, too, that it’s an approach mostly applied to poor kids of color.  As Jonathan Kozol has observed, “Children of the suburbs learn to interrogate reality,” while “inner-city kids are trained for nonreflective acquiescence.”

If you want to talk about authentic accountability, then we have to start asking the kids if they like school. Then we have to care about their answer. And then we have to stop blaming them and reflecting on our own practices.

the restriction of learning to the moments we spend in the classroom with our students is disrespectful of our students time. Why should we set parameters on their willingness to engage in learning?

if the students fail to learn the material as shown by the usual measures, it is the students’ fault, except that the students think it’s the teacher’s fault.

When Rhee took over the D.C. schools in 2007, "8 percent of our eighth graders were on grade level, but all the adults in our schools were rated as exceeding expectations," Rhee recalled to NEWSWEEK. "How can all the adults think they are doing an excellent job but producing at an 8 percent success level? There's a wild disconnect there.

What's this look like in your school district?

To reshape pedagogy, Tapscott says that we must consider eight norms for the Net Generation: freedom, customization, scrutiny, integrity, collaboration, entertainment, speed, and innovation.

You know what I got to do today? I got to talk to young adults about science. I got to pick their brains, and they picked mine.

I ate basil grown in my classroom.

I dragged a human skeleton through the hallways, eliciting the usual stupid jokes.

I helped a student teacher become even better than she already is.

I found a rattlesnake bean in our classroom, cultivated by a student who grew up in an urban town. He planted it in November. It grew, using our breath to make the stuff we can now eat. Communion.

I got to sing, to teach, to dance, to play, and I got paid to do this.

In teachers' lounges, I've heard teachers complain about kids who are poor and disadvantaged. But I've also heard other teachers complain about those who are spoiled and overly advantaged.

Why? Because that's what teachers do. They complain. They can't help it. It's in their professional DNA. Everything is always someone else's fault. They never want to accept responsibility for kids who drop out of school but they're the first in line to claim credit for the kids who wind up in the Ivy League.

What I’m finding more and more as I visit schools that are getting more serious about “change” is that they have someone at the top who is willing to focus on the learning and not on the other crap. And you can pick these people out in a heartbeat; they are leaders AND learners, and they’re not ashamed to share the driving questions they have about their schools with those around them. They have a passion not for making AYP or top schools lists as much as they do supporting their teachers to be learners, allowing them to look at their own teaching as a deep learning experience and share that learning with others.

I’m willing to argue that even with time and training, interactive whiteboards are an under-informed and irresponsible purchase. They do little more than reinforce a teacher-centric model of learning.

Found via Russ Goerend, http://opt.posterous.com/teacher-magazine-why-i-hate-interactive-white

On the great homework grading debate, a teacher says:

"But I want to give them credit for doing it.  They did it, so they deserve something for it.  I don't think I would do it if I didn't get credit!"

How about making the task something worth doing?

The power of grades to impact students’  lives creates a responsibility in giving grades.

the promising use of technology in education is not about creating gimmicky video games or virtual worlds, but about using software and hardware to rethink the business of teaching. In that regard, technology is most effective when it can do one of three things: 1) Replace costly and inefficient activities, such as spending long amounts of time grading multiple choice questions, 2) Make it easier to manage and oversee a class, such as course management software that makes it possible for professors to see which questions students frequently got wrong; or 3) Make students more active and responsible for their learning, such as programs that tailor exercises to areas where students need help and then generate repeated problems so students can keep working on an idea until they really understand it.

Relatively small improvements in the skills of a nation’s workforce can have a big effect on its future economic well-being, concludes a new international study that seeks to quantify those benefits.

For the United States, the research suggests, modest gains in student achievement as measured by one international assessment could cumulatively boost the country’s gross domestic product by tens of trillions of dollars over the coming decades.

“There’s almost a one-to-one match between what people know and how well economies have grown over time,” Andreas Schleicher, the head of indicators and analysis for the education directorate at the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, said at a briefing held here last week to discuss the findings. “It’s not the quantity of schooling that drives success in countries, it is the quality of [learning] outcomes that we see that is explaining the relationship.”

At a CALI conference a few years ago there was a presentation by a law student (U. Cincinnati, I think) who went beyond the idea of distributing outlines of his classes on-line: he took his class notes, the readings, etc., and created his own podcasts - audio files that he distributed on-line - that consisted of his own lectures/discussions of the material covered in his classes. He was essentially creating his own on-line courses based on what he was learning in class (and he said he had 50,000+ people downloading and, presumedly, listening to these podcasts). BUT, before his first year of law school started, he met with each of his professors and told them of his plans - he wasn’t asking PERMISSION because he already had a good idea of what the law in this area was - and only one of his professors had any qualms about it, and, ultimately, there were no efforts to stop him from what he was doing and by now, I think, he probably has an entire law school education’s worth of podcasts on-line.
Having these outlines on-line just changes the scale of what our students already had available to them: the internet long ago made the exchange of all manner of information and data much easier. And, yes, this is probably why more students these days may seem to anticipate your lines of discussion and questions in class but, again, its really just a change of scale from fifteen years ago when students had to physically exchange floppy discs containing course outlines that they had written or that they had obtained from upperclassmen.

Brian Huddleston

I minimize memorization. My classroom walls are filled with posters that give key relationships and formulas. Why memorize material that is literally at their fingertips with their smart phones, textbooks, and computers?

Jerry Brodkey, via Larry Cuban

Woods (1994) observes that students forced to take major responsibility for their own learning go through some or all of the steps psychologists associate with trauma and grief:

1. Shock: "I don't believe it-we have to do homework in groups and she isn't going to lecture on the chapter before the problems are due?"

2. Denial: "She can't be serious about this-if I ignore it, it will go away."

3. Strong emotion: "I can't do it-I'd better drop the course and take it next semester" or "She can't do this to me-I'm going to complain to the department head!"

4. Resistance and withdrawal: "I'm not going to play her dumb games-I don't care if she fails me."

5. Surrender and acceptance: "OK, I think it's stupid but I'm stuck with it and I might as well give it a shot."

6. Struggle and exploration: "Everybody else seems to be getting this-maybe I need to try harder or do things differently to get it to work for me."

7. Return of confidence: "Hey, I may be able to pull this off after all-I think it's starting to work."

8. Integration and success. "YES! This stuff is all right-I don't understand why I had so much trouble with it before."

Just as some people have an easier time than others in getting through the grieving process, some students may immediately take to whichever SCI method you're using and short-circuit many of the eight steps, while others may have difficulty getting past the negativity of Steps 3 and 4. The point is to remember that the resistance you encounter from some students is a natural part of their journey from dependence to intellectual autonomy (see Kloss 1994).

Found via http://twitter.com/blairteach/status/7967365119