12/11/14

"As technology begins to change things, we naturally want to fit it into what we know and do. Unfortunately, we have reached a point where that no longer works. We need to revisit how we do things in education,” said former educator Tom Whitby, who urges educators to stop trying to fit digital age tools into a 20th (or in some cases 19th) century teaching model.

“When it comes to teaching students in the 21st century I have come to believe that it is more important to teach kids how to learn than it is to teach them what to learn.”

Make room for higher-order skills.

Communication, collaboration, creativity, critical thinking: These and other higher-order thinking skills outlined in the Common Core and ISTE Standards are the ones students will need to adapt to a changing and unimaginable future. Yet we’re still so busy adhering to the Industrial Age model, teachers are hard-pressed to incorporate the types of learning experiences that allow these skills to flourish.

“The curriculum is already overburdened with content, which makes it much harder for students to acquire — and teachers to teach — both knowledge and skills via deep dives into projects,” said Charles Fadel, founder of the Center for Curriculum Redesign.

“There is a strong global consensus on what the skills are and how teaching methods via projects can affect skills acquisition, but there is little time available during the school year, given the overwhelming amount of content to be covered.”

While teachers may not be able to control the amount of content they are required to cover, what they can do is find new ways to connect the content to students’ real-world experiences and explore new ways to guide students toward deeper learning while encouraging them to flex their higher-order skills.

http://www.iste.org/explore/articleDetail?articleid=229&category=ISTE-Connects-blog&article=Time%20to%20redesign%20curriculum%20for%20the%20digital%20age

To implement BYOD successfully, Gartner Research Director Bill Rust says every school must do the following:

• revamp their curriculum to integrate technology;
• resolve equality issues by ensuring that students who don't own devices aren't left out;
• build a solid technology infrastructure to support the influx of mobile devices; and
• create an acceptable-use (or responsible-use) policy to set rules, expectations and responsibilities for students.

http://www.edtechmagazine.com/k12/article/2012/04/one-one-or-byod-districts-explain-thinking-behind-student-computing-initiatives