Jason Schmidt's List: Internet in the Learning Process

• core subjects
• students need to know more than core subjects.
• thinking criticall
• applying knowledge to new situations, analyzing information, comprehending new ideas, communicating, collaborating, solving problems, and making decisions
• Recommendations include moving beyond standardized testing as the sole measure of student learning
• To some degree, the recommendations are not all that new," says Chris Dede, professor of learning technologies at the Harvard Graduate School of Education and an education advisor to the partnership, "and that, in itself, is newsworthy. The fact that educators and business leaders keep returning to many of the same findings means we have a lot of confidence in them-that they're not part of a temporary fad.
• social studies teacher and media coach Marco Torres laments the fact that his students, who create outstanding multimedia projects that demonstrate both knowledge and creativity, are forced to attend four-hour Saturday "drill-and-kill" sessions if they fail to pass a weekly test

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• he finally walks into a schoolroom, the old man knows exactly where he is. "This is a school," he declares. "We used to have these back in 1906. Only now the blackboards are green."
• Kids spend much of the day as their great-grandparents once did: sitting in rows, listening to teachers lecture, scribbling notes by hand, reading from textbooks that are out of date by the time they are printed.
• whether some fraction of our children get "left behind"
• whether an entire generation of kids will fail to make the grade in the global economy
• we need to bring what we teach and how we teach into the 21st century.
• Right now we're aiming too low.
• Knowing more about the world.
• Thinking outside the box.

  • This kind of focus on innovation and creativity is key to imrpoving education and schools.
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• think across disciplines
• schools have become less daring in the back-to-basics climate of NCLB
• Becoming smarter about new sources of information
• Developing good p
• eople skills.
• we add new depth and rigor to our curriculum and standardized exams, redeploy the dollars we spend on education, reshape the teaching force and reorganize who runs the schools
• is retooling its high schools, instituting what are among the most rigorous graduation requirements in the nation
• The state of Michigan
• those exams barely scratch the surface of what Stanford students learn.

  • What does this say about the tests that we are giving?
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• dozens of U.S. school districts have found ways to orient some of their students toward the global economy.
• few would argue that an American child shouldn't learn the causes of the Civil War or understand how the periodic table reflects the atomic structure and properties of the elements
• kids need a substantial fund of information just to make sense of reading materials beyond the grade-school level
• Many analysts believe that to achieve the right balance between such core knowledge and what educators call "portable skills"--critical thinking, making connections between ideas and knowing how to keep on learning--the U.S. curriculum needs to become more like that of Singapore, Belgium and Sweden
• Depth over breadth and the ability to leap across disciplines
• information literacy,
• he Educational Testing Service unveiled a new, computer-based exam designed to measure information-and-communication-technology literacy
• half could correctly judge the objectivity of a website
• Curriki.org
• It aims to give teachers classroom-tested content materials and assessments that are livelier and more current and multimedia-based than printed textbooks
• putting a greater emphasis on teaching kids to collaborate and solve problems in small groups and apply what they've learned in the real world

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• I have been a strong critic of so-called “21st century skills,” but that didn’t stop NEA from selecting me as its honoree. I certainly haven’t changed my view that the push for these “skills” is a weak refrain of the same activity-based approaches that have been popular in ed schools for a century. And, to the extent that it is about pushing more technology into the schools, it is pointless, as technology will never take the place of good teachers.

  • I agree with Diane here, to a point. The single most effective variable in the classroom is the teacher. However, technology can be a great enabler to help make good teachers into excellent ones.
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• I talked about the way that test prep was reducing time for the arts, history, civics, science, foreign languages, and even physical education, I was drowned out by cheers and applause before I could get through the list of subjects that are minimized by the pursuit of higher scores in basic skills

  • This is a great point. Too much of what is done in schools seems to be one extreme or the other. Our curricula need balance so that our students have the opportunity to develop their whole personalities, brains, interests, and abilities.
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• Analyze your topic to decide where to begin
• Pick the right starting place
• VARY your approach

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