In Germany, the world’s largest interactive touch screen offers patrons of a racetrack a wonderfully engaging way to learn about the track, the cars and the area.
Now imagine such a wall in a classroom, with immediate input capability, as well as connections to the networks of your choice. Think about how you might teach biology or physics or history or art or music, drama, dance, debate, economics, forensics, forestry – even critical thinking.
ring°wall from SENSORY-MINDS on Vimeo.
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Seems our continued search for easy answers to complex questions has taken a new twist: Dog Training our Children.
The Times has an article about this, in which one parent says,
“When we started watching his shows, we had intended to apply his advice toward our dogs,” said Amy Twomey, a blogger on parenthood for The Dallas Morning News who is raising three children under 10 with her husband, Matt. “But we realized a lot of ideas can be used on our kids.”
While there’s truth in the idea that handing over authority to your children can reap some awful consequences, do we really want to use dog training as a model???
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This is from an AP report. There’s nothing surprising here, but what is missing, obviously, is the why and the what to do about it. As to the why, I don’t think it’s a real stretch to posit that as a society, we are all very removed from the cause of most effects: we don’t understand how our food is grown or raised, much less the labor that goes into it, we don’t understand how most of our appliances work (we don’t fix them when they break); we don’t see the long hours of tedious training most athletes go through – we only see the highlights of glory.
Put kids to work using their backs and their hands, and they’ll begin to re-learn the connection between work and result.
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BLOOMINGTON, Ind. — A new report by Indiana University researchers found that most high school students expect to go to college, but the work students do in high school doesn’t always match up to their perceptions or goals.
The report on the High School Survey of Student Engagement found that more than 70 percent of students thought doing homework and studying for class was important. But more than 80 percent of those surveyed said they spent less than an hour a day on those tasks.
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I read the articles like this all the time, and though I am suspect of the study (look at who underwrites it) I am not suspect enough to believe that it is not accurately describing a trend.
The real issue for me is, then what? We move all these kids online, and what do we have? There’s a lot of good that can come of this, but not if it happens wholesale, without planning, without a lot of thought given to unintended consequences – such as a dearth of mentors, role models and other adults with whom young people can form face-to-face relationships.
The article is from Education Week; the bold face is my emphasis.
More than half of U.S. states now operate online-learning initiatives for K-12 students, an increase over the 15 states that did so just two years ago, according to a new survey.
Most of the 26 states that have online programs have seen significant growth in enrollments in recent years, with a dozen of them reporting jumps of 25 percent or more since 2007, according to the report, “Online Learning Policy and Practice Survey: A Survey of the States.”
But funding and other issues are still roadblocks to the creation or expansion of such programs in some states, the survey concludes.
“Twenty-seven states indicate that online learning is in their strategy for reform,” the report says. “Within these states, online programs are used to enhance the curriculum offered to students, increase student access, and address teacher shortages or overcrowded classrooms.”
Enrollments in Florida’s online programs, for example, increased by about 24 percent over the two-year period, to 124,000. Mississippi’s enrollments grew from 5,000 students to 7,000 in the 2008-09 school year over the previous year.
The survey was conducted by the Center for Digital Education, a market-research firm in Folsom, Calif., with input from the Vienna, Va.-based International Association for K-12 Online Learning. It was funded by Blackboard Inc., a provider of a popular online learning-management system.
Some states are looking at ways to expand their offerings, including K-20 partnerships spanning different levels of education and licensure reciprocity to allow teachers to work in other state programs. Most of the states with online schools offer classes year-round, according to the report.
States were ranked on their policies and practices for K-12 online learning, with the most credit given to those that have initiatives created and administered at the state level and that offer full-time credit programs. Florida, which has gained a reputation as having a national model in its Florida Virtual School, was ranked first. South Carolina, New Mexico, Hawaii, and Michigan, in that order, rounded out the top five, according to the survey.
Of the states that do not have state-sponsored online programs, seven are planning such initiatives, while six others and the District of Columbia allow online charter schools.
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