school kills creativity - ken robinson
via youtube.com
Great video summarizing the issue of education today...
Great video summarizing the issue of education today...
A Learning Community
A three-year program designed to build an innovative and sustainable school-museum partnership and bring art into the lives of students, teachers, and families is celebrated in a new documentary short, A Learning Community, which is available on YouTube.
The program—an in-depth partnership between the Frye Art Museum, Roxhill Elementary School, and Visual Thinking Strategies (VTS)—includes innovative professional development in which teachers practice VTS in the classroom and in the museum, and students engage in art viewing and discussion as a tool for collaborative learning and critical thinking.
After three years of training, Roxhill teachers now lead their own school visits at the Frye and feel empowered to use the museum as a resource for learning. Students engage in art discussions, make observations and inferences, provide evidence for their ideas and respectfully agree and disagree with each other.
As a fourth-grade Roxhill teacher reflected during a recent training session at the Frye, “VTS is one of the opportunities for struggling students to feel success. Those who don’t usually participate will [now] get involved.”
This partnership was made possible with support of the Frye Foundation and the Wyman Youth Trust.
We would like to thank all of the participating students, teachers, and staff at Roxhill Elementary School.
Happy Labor Day, America! You better not be working! Speaking of work, what will school work be like in 10 years? New York Times, do you have an answer?
What's that? You spoke with a bunch of experts and educators and asked them that very same question? What a wild Labor Day miracle! Let's sample a few of the answers before everyone who's not working today jumps on over to the Times for the full audio clips:
Karen Cator, director of educational technology, United States Department of Education, sees a huge shift taking place when digital media finally usurps tree-killing textbooks and other printed materials. This is good! Books are great, but trees are better. Have you ever seen a book take carbon dioxide from the air and give it back to you as life-granting oxygen? The fuck you have! Case in point.
Larry Cuban, emeritus professor, Stanford University School of Education, basically says everyone should hold their damn horses. Progress is coming, but it's really slow! His buzzkill answer is all about how things will drag on for a while before flying schools and virtual reality classroom headset conference calls with Asian moonbases become the norm.
Eileen Lento, education strategist, Intel, predicts that rural areas will become ripe testbeds for new technologies and experimental approaches to education. Why sully our urban and city folk with tests that could go terribly wrong, right Eileen? Saddle the farm folk with that burden, and let us city slickers zip around Manhattan in our robo taxis. Oh, and she says online classes are going to do something or other a lot more in the future too. I bet it involves Intel chips!
There are a few more educational brainiacs making predictions about schooling over at the NYT beyond these few, so take a look! Just don't work yourself too hard today, ok? [NYT]
The first reaction among many educators is that Google+ could work well. As a post on the Apps User Group points out, there is a lot of potential with Google+: better student collaboration through Circles, opportunities for blended learning (a combination of offline and online instruction) with Hangouts, project research with Sparks, and easier school public relations with targeted photo-sharing, updates, and messaging.
This animate was adapted from a talk given at the RSA by Sir Ken Robinson, world-renowned education and creativity expert and recipient of the RSA's Benjamin Franklin award.
For more information on Sir Ken's work visit: http://www.sirkenrobinson.com
But our main point isn't to suggest specific changes on campus or in the classroom. Nor is it to diminish the significance of the new technologies. It is simply this: Our aim as educators is to nurture vital, engaged learning on our campuses. Collectively, we are investigating how best to engage the new technologies in this endeavor. But our students are already deeply immersed in these technologies, and—as we have been discovering—are eager to engage with us in discussion about the role of technology in their lives. Such conversations themselves constitute a form of engaged learning. Don't we educators have a responsibility to inaugurate such conversations and to pursue the opportunities for learning and innovation that they open up?
