Monthly Archives: October 2013

How are you thinking about the “package” we call “school?” #MVIFI

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Do you ever wish you could choose the particular cable (or satellite) TV channels that you most want? Instead of having to buy the package service that comes with 361 channels or 902 channels, you could autonomously select, a la carte, the specific channels that you want to view.

Well, I’ve wanted to do that.

Listening to NPR’s Planet Money “Episode 488: The Secret History of Your Cable Bill” on a recent morning walk, I started to wonder how traditional school is like cable or satellite TV. Will student learners always have to “buy the entire package” of this class of math and that class of science, this class of English and that class of social studies? Or will we soon see student learners able to individualize their school subscription bundles?

It’s happened in music. We no longer have to purchase the entire album or CD. We can just buy the particular song we want and create our own playlists. It’s happened in news and broadcast journalism, and we now have the ability to create personal news stations and narrowcast our own story collections.

And it’s going to happen in schools. Well, it IS happening around schools. Think Khan Academy. Think Coursera and Udacity (Hat tip to EdSurge). Think Mozilla OpenBadges project. Think Juliette LaMontagne’s Breaker. Think Seth Godin’s Krypton Community College. Think of the future mashup of those ideas and ventures!

It’s highly likely that my 9 and 6 year-old sons will be able to autonomously aggregate courses and experiences (with badges and endorsements like on LinkedIn) and bundle their own “College Degree,” which I hope will include some residential, face-to-face relationship building in a particular physical community, too. (I imagine that it will.) But who knows?!

Learners entering MIT, Stanford, etc., will more and more be able to enter with NUMEROUS courses from those institutions already IN their digital portfolios. Will our schools require the seat-time, residential equivalents of those MOOCs? Or will they we build on the increased capacity that’s already been built when the learners reach them us?

How are you thinking about the way we package and bundle “school” in an age where people can increasingly pull and self-package the content-and-experience streams that best work for them, their passions, their interests, and their needs (with mentorship, of course!)?

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  • Howard Gardner: ‘Multiple intelligences’ are not ‘learning styles’

    “Gardner’s theory initially listed seven intelligences which  work together: linguistic, logical-mathematical,  musical,  bodily-kinesthetic, spatial, interpersonal and intrapersonal; he later added an eighth, naturalist intelligence and says there may be a few more.  The theory became highly popular with K-12 educators around the world seeking ways to reach students who did not respond to traditional approaches, but over time, “multiple intelligences” somehow became synonymous with the concept of “learning styles.” In this important post, Gardner explains why the former is not the latter.”

    tags: multipleintelligences Gardner learningstyles multiple_intelligences learning_styles #MustRead

  • How a Radical New Teaching Method Could Unleash a Generation of Geniuses | Wired Business | Wired.com

    “… anew breed of educators, inspired by everything from the Internet to evolutionary psychology, neuroscience, and AI, are inventing radical new ways for children to learn, grow, and thrive. To them, knowledge isn’t a commodity that’s delivered from teacher to student but something that emerges from the students’ own curiosity-fueled exploration. Teachers provide prompts, not answers, and then they step aside so students can teach themselves and one another. They are creating ways for children to discover their passion—and uncovering a generation of geniuses in the process.”

    HT @JamieReverb

    tags: sugata_mitra StudentCentered Control pedagogy School Change #MustRead innovation Curriculum engagement passion

    • “The bottom line is, if you’re not the one controlling your learning, you’re not going to learn as well.”
    • But when scientists build machines that are programmed to try a variety of motions and learn from mistakes, the robots become far more adaptable and skilled. The same principle applies to children, she says.
    • Peter Gray, a research professor at Boston College who studies children’s natural ways of learning, argues that human cognitive machinery is fundamentally incompatible with conventional schooling.
    • Gray points out that young children, motivated by curiosity and playfulness, teach themselves a tremendous amount about the world. And yet when they reach school age, we supplant that innate drive to learn with an imposed curriculum. “We’re teaching the child that his questions don’t matter, that what matters are the questions of the curriculum. That’s just not the way natural selection designed us to learn. It designed us to solve problems and figure things out that are part of our real lives.”
    • taught the kids about democracy by letting them elect leaders who would decide how to run the class and address discipline.
    • letting children “wander aimlessly around ideas.”
    • higher graduation rate than the city’s average for the same populations. They do it by emphasizing student-led learning and collaboration
    • Now that our society and economy have evolved beyond that era, our schools must also be reinvented.
    • “Intelligence comes from necessity,”

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The Cardboard Challenge @K4MVPSchool #MVPSchool

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mvcitybox

Today, Lower School students at Mount Vernon Presbyterian School participated in the Cardboard Challenge, inspired by Caine’s Arcade.

People from 41 countries took part – more than 78,900 participants. Only two organizations in the state of Georgia (U.S.A.) flexed their scissors, spread their tape, and exercised their design muscles for the Cardboard Challenge. Thanks to collaboration among the faculty at Mount Vernon, and thanks to the creative confidence of our students, the Mustangs were in that number!

Mary Cantwell (@scitechyedu) set up a time-elapse camera to record the coordinated, staged efforts of five grade levels working in 45-minute shifts. So, we should be able to see the action from start to finish before too long.

Here’s the message Mary sent to invite the architects and engineers:

The DEETS:

Challenge: Students will be challenged to imagine and create the metropolises of the world! (decided we needed more than just ATL)

Time: 45 min blocks of building/play time; Sign Up Here [link removed] if you want to participate

Do B4 Arriving: Partner/Trio groups – have them research famous/interesting buildings/structures from around the world, plan out what they want to build, sketch it (with boxes in mind), and arrive on the CityBox party with a Plan of Action

AND/OR The HR selects a city together – plans out what they will build to represent different aspects of the city.

AND/OR The HR decides to create and build a fictional city/town and plans out all they want and need in this city (could be connected to a novel study, a story being studied, a SS moment in history)

Show Up. Respect what has already been created. Stake out your space. Get your boxes, imagine, create, play.

Mary Cantwell

People, Needs, Empathy

Center for Design Thinking

What an amazing sight to see the buildings take shape and form! At carpool this afternoon, I asked my typical question to a bunch of the students: What was the most incredible thing you did and learned today?

Usually I get a myriad of responses. Today, though, they ALL talked about their buildings – the Coliseum, Hancock Building, Notre Dame, Hippodrome, and the Taj Mahal, just to name a few. Zach even explained to me how he built the Burj Khalifa – the tallest skyscraper in the world!

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