The innovative classroom

There is a growing disparity between youth technology consumption inside and outside of school. Reading the study “ Generation M2: Media and the Lives of 8-18 Year Old, ” made me realize quite how stark that disparity is. Understanding how youth are engaging with technology outside of the classroom will be key to understanding how to leverage it within the classroom to promote learning. Here are some highlights from the study: 8-18 year-old spend 7.38 hours a day, seven days a week with media (TV, Internet, video games, songs, websites), this is an increase of a of 1.2 hours from 5 years ago When you account for multi-tasking youth spend 10.5 hours a day with media (!) For the first time since 1999 (when they started doing this research), the amount of time that young people spend watching regularly scheduled television has declined (by .25 hours a day from 3:04 to 2:39 hours). The total number of minutes watching TV or movies has actually increased (by 38 minutes) due to t...

I had dinner the other night with a friend who raved about Davis Guggenhiem's (creator of An Inconvenient Truth ) new film Waiting for Superman. The film debuted at Sundance last winter and took home the audience award for US documentary. One review of the film reads,"Full of refreshingly honest insights and some powerfully upsetting statistics, the film seems angry and critical, but never hopeless. We'd like to think that every kid in America has his own fair shot at a strong education ... but we know they don't. Not really. Movies like Waiting for Superman would like to change that." I'm looking forward to the film's September release.

Susan Patrick, president and CEO of the International Association for K-12 Online Learning (iNACOL), explains why she believes the time is ripe for online learning in K-12.

In a speech delivered at the National Charter School Conference last summer Secretary Duncan pledged 5 (now 3.5) billion dollars to support the turnaround of the lowest 5 percent of schools. “We need everyone who cares about public education,” he stated, “to take on the toughest assignment of all—and get in the business of turning around our lowest-performing schools.” It is not surprising that Duncan chose school turnarounds as a focal point in his national education plan. Over 5,000 schools nationwide, according to a study by Mass Insight Education, were designated to enter some form of restructuring by 2009-2010. School improvement programs, which support more incremental methods of change, simply have not worked in the nation’s most underperforming schools. Duncan’s call to action, however, fell on a vastly underdeveloped market place. According to New Schools Venture Fund, at the time of Duncan's speech, there were less than ten organizations engaged in turnaround w...