Dangerously Irrelevant

Erin Olson’s student, Tanner, shares his thoughts on the purpose of education in this new video. Happy viewing!

Does your school organization have a vision for technology-enriched learning and teaching? If so, is that vision one that is shared by the larger community? Many school systems are turning to video to help facilitate a shared vision across various constituent groups. Below is one example, A New Design for Education, created by the Farmington and Spring Lake Park school systems in Minnesota.

Has your school or district made a video like this? If so, please share it in the comments area by Tuesday, April 2. If there are enough submissions, I’ll compile them and make a second post. Happy viewing!

I love to visit schools that are trying to live on the cutting edges of deeper learning, student empowerment, and digital technologies. But, like most of you, I don’t get to do that nearly as often as I’d like. So I’m jealous of folks like Barbara Levin and Lynne Schrum who get to do case studies of innovative school organizations around the country. And of whomever at Edutopia gets to work on the Schools That Work series.

Now I’ve got a new target of envy. Here’s a video of Grant Lichtman describing what he learned from his 3-month, 21-state, 64-school tour of innovative educational systems. Except for the time away from my family, that sure sounds fun to me. Happy viewing!

Area Education Agency 267 recorded a number of my thoughts on leadership, learning, and technology one afternoon last fall. The result is a new video, Education in a Digital World. I think it came out extremely well. Happy viewing!

David Warlick says:

The fallacy of competitive education is its obsession with remembered right answers. The fallacy of right answers is that today success depends less on right answers and more on finding good answers and using them to accomplish meaningful goals. What does the game of school do to children who are more inclined to find and invent good answers than memorize correct answers?

….

As long as we race [to the top], scoring points by teaching the same answers for the same tests to every child, then we’re perfectly preparing a generation for its own history.

via http://davidwarlick.com/2cents/?p=3967

Here are two amazing videos that highlight ways that educators can empower kids to make a difference in the world. Happy viewing!

Schools That Change Communities

The Future Will Not Be Multiple Choice

Love. Create. Dream. Three inspiring videos by Sam Fathallah, a Linn-Mar (IA) High School student. More on Sam and his transparent whiteboard here. Happy viewing!

If you’re interested in international schooling comparisons and what education is like in high-performing countries, here’s a video of Amanda Ripley’s talk at Pop Tech 2012 that’s well worth your time. Amanda’s book, The Smartest Kids in the World, is coming out this August. Happy viewing!

Hat tip: Alexander Russo

“If education is the key, then school is the lock. Because it rarely ever develops your mind to the point where it can perceive red as green and continue to go when someone else says ‘stop.’ Because as long as you follow the rules and pass the exams, you’re cool. But are you aware that examiners have a checklist? And if your answer is something outside of the box, the automatic response is a cross. And then they claim that school expands your horizons and your visions.” [1:58]

“There’s a saying which says, ‘If you don’t build your dreams, someone else will hire you to help build theirs.’ Redefine how you view education. Understand its true meaning. Education is not just about regurgitating facts from a book or someone else’s opinion on a subject to pass an exam.” [4:13]

Suli Breaks, Why I Hate School But Love Education

“This September, TEDx was being introduced at a local middle school. The technology integrationist explained that the students’ topic was to be of their choice. The faces in the audience were contemplative and everyone appeared a tad thrown off. One girl raised her hand and confirmed, ‘Anything?’ she asked. ‘Anything. It’s your talk. You get to choose,’ the teacher replied. The students could not believe that there was no teacher assigning them a topic, nobody to tell them exactly how their presentation should go, and nobody evaluating their work after the presentation.”

“After the TEDx introduction, the teacher asked if there were any questions. For a solid 15 minutes, hands shot up from students in awe of what they had just heard. A solid 25 percent of the questions asked were students looking for some sort of affirmation that they were completely free to learn about something solely because they found it interesting. Clearly, and unfortunately, learning for the sake of learning is an anomaly in this society. Students spend their entire day in school, but the way our schools run now does not allow students the intellectual freedom to pursue their interests. As I think you’ll see, there is a direct correlation between our old-fashioned system and the scarcity of a love for learning.”

Noa Gutow-Ellis, high school sophomore, at TEDxYouth@ISASEmeryWeiner

What would schools look like if we were organized around the idea of students as empowered, passionate, interested, self-directed learners?

Hat tip: Ben Stern, True Learning is Not Standardized: TED Talk

See also: Blah blah blah life long learning blah blah blah