Trying to Call this an Opportunity

I need some help getting excited about the Common Core State Standards. I'm trying to call this an opportunity for growing and moving the conversation with education forward, but I'm struggling with how this feels like an imposed effort to make education a very huge monoculture. These are really well done videos, and there are thirty more, but I wish the energy surrounding this was a bit more positive.

Charter Schools...The Bad are Swallowing the Good

I've been wading around in Charter School world this week. I talked with a person with a grand idea to build a charter school the right way for the right reason. It seemed like a grand an noble solution to the entrenched disfunction of our urban schools. I offered support, resources, and my time and energy to get things started right. Some people would say that I was abandoning the public school concept, but if schools are going to happen, they should at least be good places to learn. I then read the Roland Fryer article posted on the Freakonomics blog about the traits of successful charters. I was starting to see that there is a path of success for charter schools, which is hard to believe from all of the negative and failure in Saint Louis surrounding charters. Now, I watched this. This video talks about how big business is eating up public funding through the charter school movement. It is the worst possible scenario. The hope of an idea just a few days ago was crushed because the system is being stolen, and the bad is swallowing the hope of the good.

Green Jobs Infographic

Crowdsourcing Education Solutions

I first watched this video through the lens of learning about urban agriculture and surviving in a food dessert, but then I started to think about how educators should be using this R&DIY method described in the video to bring new ideas and solutions to the forefront in education. Watch the video and let me know what you think.

Doing it the Right Way

Why do you root for Garmin? My seventh year old asked me the other day. My answer was that I like to support organizations that do things the right way. I think that their story is one that shows a decade of doing something the right way produces results. This is true for schools, business, and in sport. Enjoy this great video about teamwork and success.

Gamification Holds Great Potential for Struggling Students

This is a thought-provoking TED talk about gamification, and the promise it holds to transform spaces in the education framework.

Five for Friday-Links and Ideas

Parker Palmer's interview on this blog touches an incredible number of things that have been a part of our greater conversation as a school this semester from: empathy, democracy, the right way to do education, space and time for reflection. Great read.

It appears that the work behind game based education continues to find its footing in a variety of areas. This article is another clear example that game based learning is another strategy to hook kids into high level learning.

Many of us have been talking about items that we need to explicitly teach to our students. One of them is digital citizenship. Here are 15 great resources for us to consider as we build capacity in this area.

In our quest for high levels of technology integration, it is essential that we know what tools are available for students. Here are the 2011 Top 100 tools as rated by Center for Learning and Performance Technologies. Try a new one, and share a few more.

Seeing the big picture. The Horizon Report is a great annual report about the future of technology in schools. Take a short look at the table of contents, a medium look at the executive summary, or the long look by reading the whole report.