I loved the variety of experiences last night’s panelists brought to their EduCon discussion about why innovation matters. The panelists were
Matt Berg – a community-project leader working in Africa.
Aaron Gross – a animal farming ethicist .
Neeru Paharia – a costumer behaviorist working at Harvard.
Trung Le – a learning space designer working for Canon.
Stanford Thompson – [...]
I asked my 7-year old son a simple #blog4reform question: If you could change school so that you’d love to be there, what would you do?
Here’s what he said before going back to drawing:
Don’t tell people how long they should write their sentences. Let them pick out what they want to write so they [...]
If we can teach kids to make fun learning games (fun can indeed be measured, and learning can indeed be fun), then we’ll be helping them create experiential learning opportunities for others that have characteristics of narrative (plot, characterization) and informational texts (GUI, games manuals), as well as scripted expository texts that rely heavily on [...]
I wanted to share a few updates on our arts-infused work.
First, here’s an example of a completed citizen-artist project.
Here’s is the student’s writing about corporate citizenship – the student wrote about a video game production company as a citizen-artist.
Bioware Is a Canadian electronics company. It was founded In February of 1995 by Ray Muzyka, Greg [...]
Next week I facilitate a discussion of arts-infused curriculum at my school. In November I join my coworkers in presenting our school’s work to an audience of colleagues from within our division. To prepare for both conversations, I’m asking myself, “What is arts-infusion?” and “What is not arts-infusion?”
In planning for next week, I’ve been a [...]
[An original contribution to Hacking the Academy.]
The academy should hack itself to transform public education. Here’s how:
1. Stop complaining about public education.
Since Sputnik, American schools have been anxiety-driven to produce “college-ready” students. Standardized testing, A Nation at Risk, the No Child Left Behind act, the Race to the Top Initiative, and the upcoming Elementary [...]
It doesn’t surprise me that iPods are popular, or that I like them as much as my students do. Our iPods are our 1:1 music devices, customizable reflections of our interests and emotions. They are our 1:1 identity, expression, and need-fulfillment devices. When we need to feel big, we find big music. [...]
Chad teaches humanities at a charter school and blogs on reforming classroom practice and democratic education.
