edbuzz.org

The end of another school year has arrived for most educators, bringing with it a flurry of closing activity.  With summer enticing and vacation beckoning, it’s easy to understand how teachers often fail to conduct deliberate reflection on their past year’s performance. Reflection provides valuable insight into your performance and allows you to create a schedule or road map for change. Not conducting deliberate reflection quickly leads to stagnant teaching with ineffective lessons and the teacher being little more than a highly paid baby-sitter.

Effective reflection should involve four steps: Assessment, probing deeper/looking for meaning, planning and review. (more…)

I’m feeling motivated…

The future of mobile learning!

If educators plan to transform their schools into institutions that promote 21st century learning skills, systemic change must occur. This sort of change will not only require significant resources,  but the type of transformation we are looking for demands highly effective leadership– leadership that fosters meaningful change.

I came across this graphic while reading Darren Kuropatwa’s blog which I think wonderfully summarizes the sorts of leadership principles that are necessary to promote meaningful educational reform. Effective change requires a clear vision, appropriate skills, meaningful incentives directly related to outcomes, necessary resources, and a well thought out action plan.

When a lack of vision exists, organizational confusion occurs. This is why it’s important for school leaders to work with administrators, faculty members, and parents to construct a meaningful vision and expend the necessary time and energy to clearly articulate it to the school’s community.

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Pew recently conducted a survey of 895 technology “stakeholders,” comprised of both technology experts and individuals who represent the Internet savvy public. The survey presented “potential-future scenarios to which respondents [reacted] with their expectations based on current knowledge and attitudes.”  According to Pew,

“Respondents to the Future of the Internet IV survey, fielded from Dec. 2, 2009 to Jan. 11, 2010, were asked to consider the future of the Internet-connected world between now and 2020 and the likely innovation that will occur. They were asked to assess 10 different “tension pairs” – each pair offering two different 2020 scenarios with the same overall theme and opposite outcomes – and they were asked to select the one most likely choice of two statements. The tension pairs and their alternative outcomes were constructed to reflect previous statements about the likely evolution of the Internet.”

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