Developing a School Culture Around Design Thinking The tides of a paradigm shift in education are on the shore. It is imperative that we prepare our learners to be confident in their abilities to adapt to a rapidly changing world. To instill an innovator’s mindset into all that we do. To get to this point, though, we must create systems of thought and actions that support our values. It is our mission “to inspire students to reach their highest level of personal and academic fulfillment. To reach that goal, we are not afraid to chart a different path if we believe it will clearly benefit our students.” Innovation does not come from new ideas that suddenly pop into your head, but from ideas that are developed, tested, questioned, and reworked. To best support this innovative mindset, we will be working on integrating the theories and practices of Design Thinking in all aspects of what we do here at Alcuin. It is not our aim to change the role of the teacher i...
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How Innovative Schools Are Finding Success Tim Wilson Endicott College Introduction The need for truly transformational education reform has been continually building in my mind as my experiences in education grow. I have always had the idea that there was a better way to learn than what in the industrialized method that nearly every school is modeled around, but I didn’t yet see a path to what that different system would look like. In March of 2015, I was lucky enough to be in attendance at the Innovate conference at Graded School in Sao Paulo, Brazil. The coordinators of the conference were careful to make sure that Innovate was not just another tech conference. I was introduced to some of the techniques and practices that innovative teachers and administrators are utilizing that are the next stage on from just using technology because it’s ...
Anchor is a new social media platform where the discussion happens completely in audio recordings. Users get 2 minutes to introduce their topic and then anyone listening can respond with a 1 minute recording. It's sort of a mix between blogging, twitter, and podcasting. Here's my first go, I'd love to hear what you think. Let's make some waves!
A. Based on your experience and passion, what is your personal vision of education? My vision of what education should and can be is informed by my personal experience and is inspired by the beliefs and views of such educational thinkers as Sal Kahn and Sir Ken Robinson. I have seen that in the current system that we approach learning through leaves too many students with large holes in their understanding of varied content areas. This occurs as a result of the pressures to push through a large amount of curriculum. Students must move on to the next, generally more difficult, stage before fully understanding the concepts that have just been covered because the class is moving on. Students are also forced into programs of study that neglect to take into account their interests and furthermore their passions. These programs place great importance on math and science, in some cases completely removing artistic options from students’ schooling. When...
Current Event Paper Background The article What is virtual reality’s role in education?: An interview with Nearpod cofounder Filipe Sommer, written by Blake Montgomery and posted by www.edsurge.com on February 24, 2016, discusses a new addition to the Nearpod educational toolbox. Nearpod is a web-based presentation tool that pushes the presentation directly to the students’ devices allowing for the teacher to pose questions and set tasks for the students to respond to within the presentation. The presentation can be given in a live session or sent as homework in a flipped classroom setting. Nearpod presentations can include text, audio, video, weblinks, polls, quizzes, and drawing content. Nearpod allows teachers to create their own content as well as provides numerous pre-created model lessons for teacher to use. Summary The article is an interview with Nearpod cofounder Filipe Sommer about the company’s latest release on February 17th o...