Reinventing Curriculum | Blog
Here you'll find analysis and views on technology, policy and curriculum in elementary and secondary education by two outspoken technology advocates, Elliot Soloway and Cathie Norris. Reinventing Curriculum is published twice per month. Below you will also find the archive for Elliot and Cathie's previous blog, Being Mobile.
David Thornburg, our guest blogger, looks back and looks forward – and sees Chromebook’s DNA in the history of computing and forecasts all sorts of provocative software that this "new" platform will engender.
- By David D Thornburg
- 06/06/16
There are some that use technology to support construction-oriented pedagogies — maker movement, project-based learning — and some that use technology to support instruction-oriented pedagogies — personalized learning. Instruction may well be less costly to deliver — but the loss of the opportunity to develop our children’s creativity is inestimable.
- By Cathie Norris, Elliot Soloway
- 05/16/16
The evidence drought is over! A recent methodologically rigorous meta-analysis shows that in 1-to-1 classrooms, there is an increase in student achievement. Yay! Here’s the justification for all those 1-to-1 Chromebook roll-outs!
- By Cathie Norris, Elliot Soloway
- 05/09/16
Expanding the conversation around "Reinventing Curriculum": In this week’s blog post, Superintendent Dan Lawson explains how his district is creating OER curricula. Dan's post is a thought-provoking response to our earlier blog post about the challenges teachers face in creating OER materials.
On the one hand, the role of the teacher in a 1-to-1 classroom is relatively unchanged from what a teacher has always done. Now for “the but”: but on the other hand, 1-to-1 introduces a huge change in what teachers have always done! This week’s blog post discusses this critically important and timely dilemma.
- By Cathie Norris, Elliot Soloway
- 04/25/16
The term “blended learning” accurately describes the pedagogical practices that are taking place in 1-to-1 classrooms. This week’s screed (aka blog post) describes the following unfortunate fact: the term “blended learning” is being used by some to mean “adaptive, personalized learning.” Grrr! Join us in keeping “blended learning” to mean the teacher-friendly, common-sense definition.
- By Cathie Norris, Elliot Soloway
- 04/18/16
OER – Open Education Resources – are being touted by the Department of Education as the key to future of K-12 curriculum. While there is no question that OER are a component of the new digital curriculum, in this blog, we answer the question raised in the blog post’s title.
- By Cathie Norris, Elliot Soloway
- 04/05/16
First the educational need, then the technology! Dialogue, not monologue, needs to be a primary learning activity. Supporting dialogue in the classroom, then, is a real educational need. The Collabrify Suite of Apps – free, device-agnostic, and designed expressly for grades 1-8 – meet that real educational need. Read this week’s blog post, increase dialogue by collabrifying your classroom.
- By Cathie Norris, Elliot Soloway
- 03/28/16
This week’s blog post is about how CN un-traumatized ES after his professional development "experience." Without CN, he presided over a 50-minute session on how to use our Collabrify Apps in the K-12 classroom, at a one-day professional development event at a regional high school. ES thought that telling teachers how to use technology in their classrooms was a '90s strategy — not a today's strategy.
- By Cathie Norris, Elliot Soloway
- 03/21/16
The dominant pedagogy in classrooms today is still direct instruction, the pedagogy underlying so-called computer-based, “personalized learning” environments. But, we argue in this week’s blog that truly 1-to-1 implementations, which are only now becoming feasible, are the opportunity needed to transform classrooms and support educators in moving to an inquiry pedagogy, a pedagogy that develops students’ critical thinking, creativity, communication, and collaboration.
- By Cathie Norris, Elliot Soloway
- 02/23/16