Wednesday, June 27, 2012

Why Integrate Technology into the Curriculum?: The Reasons Are Many

This article originally appeared on edutopia.org. It takes a look at integrating technology into the classroom and why it's a good idea. This is a great read to share with your customers. Let us know what you think in the comments!

 

There's a place for tech in every classroom.      

"Technology is ubiquitous, touching almost every part of our lives, our communities, our homes. Yet most schools lag far behind when it comes to integrating technology into classroom learning. Many are just beginning to explore the true potential tech offers for teaching and learning. Properly used, technology will help students acquire the skills they need to survive in a complex, highly technological knowledge-based economy.

Integrating technology into classroom instruction means more than teaching basic computer skills and software programs in a separate computer class. Effective tech integration must happen across the curriculum in ways that research shows deepen and enhance the learning process. In particular, it must support four key components of learning: active engagement, participation in groups, frequent interaction and feedback, and connection to real-world experts. Effective technology integration is achieved when the use of technology is routine and transparent and when technology supports curricular goals.

Many people believe that technology-enabled project learning is the ne plus ultra of classroom instruction. Learning through projects while equipped with technology tools allows students to be intellectually challenged while providing them with a realistic snapshot of what the modern office looks like. Through projects, students acquire and refine their analysis and problem-solving skills as they work individually and in teams to find, process, and synthesize information they've found online.

The myriad resources of the online world also provide each classroom with more interesting, diverse, and current learning materials. The Web connects students to experts in the real world and provides numerous opportunities for expressing understanding through images, sound, and text.
New tech tools for visualizing and modeling, especially in the sciences, offer students ways to experiment and observe phenomenon and to view results in graphic ways that aid in understanding. And, as an added benefit, with technology tools and a project-learning approach, students are more likely to stay engaged and on task, reducing behavioral problems in the classroom.

Technology also changes the way teachers teach, offering educators effective ways to reach different types of learners and assess student understanding through multiple means. It also enhances the relationship between teacher and student. When technology is effectively integrated into subject areas, teachers grow into roles of adviser, content expert, and coach. Technology helps make teaching and learning more meaningful and fun" (www.edutopia.org).

Wednesday, June 20, 2012

Project Based Learning

The following article originally appeared on edutopia.org. It presents an inspirational story about a high school in Texas that uses Project-Based Learning. Take a look and think about how you can incorporate technology into schools that take this approach. Very insightful and a great read to share with customers!


What Makes Project-Based Learning a Success?

At one high school in Texas, where every class in every grade is project based, the answer is devotion to a consistent process, belief in relationships, and commitment to relevance and rigor. Results? Hard to beat.

There is a small town, about 12 miles east of Austin, Texas, where a high school devoted to teaching every subject to every student through project-based learning (PBL) opened five years ago. On its own, this would not have been a noteworthy event. The list of schools across America deepening the learning process through PBL has been growing for quite some time. But few schools have fine-tuned the process like Manor New Technology High School in Manor, Texas, where 98 percent of seniors graduate and 100 percent of the graduates are accepted to college. Fifty-six percent of them have been the first in their family to attend college.

Manor New Tech was started with a $4 million grant from the Texas High School Project as part of an initiative to develop schools dedicated to science, technology, engineering, and math in Texas. The school is part of the New Tech Network, a nonprofit with 85 schools in its nationwide network that provides services and support to help reform learning through PBL. Overall, the network is doing very well, with an 86 percent graduation rate; 67 percent of graduates apply to college and 98 percent of those are accepted. But Manor New Tech is a standout even by those standards. To find out what makes their ship sail so effectively, Edutopia followed one sophomore classroom for a few weeks to observe a project from start to finish.

What we found -- and what we believe is the key to Manor New Tech's success -- is a schoolwide, unwavering commitment to the design and implementation of a PBL model that includes evidence-based strategies and drives students to actively pursue knowledge. From the moment a project is introduced, students are responsible for figuring out what they need to know and for doing the legwork to find the information, analyze it, and present it. Teachers are there every step of the way to guide students through the process and to provide workshops to help clarify any concepts.
(See our article, "A Step-by-Step Guide to the Best Projects," for more details on Manor's PBL process.)

Relationships Before Rigor

Their PBL protocol is designed to put students in the driver's seat of their learning and is followed consistently throughout Manor. Some elements may be common, such as peer reviews and ongoing assessments, but it's the sum total of the process, as well as the fidelity with which it is followed, that are a big part of Manor's success.

No less important, though, is the school culture that supports it. It is a culture of enthusiasm and determination that begins with founding principal Steven Zipkes, whose zest and passion for his students and his school make him a one-man pep rally.

Zipkes begins with the three R's, which he is quick to note should be engaged sequentially, but not in the conventional order of rigor, relevance, and relationships. Rather Manor begins by building relationships, then incorporates relevance and rigor. "Many schools try to put the rigor in first, but then they've already lost many of the students," he explains. "If you don't have a relationship with the students, they're not going to do anything for you; if it's not relevant, you're going to bore them. But when you look at relationships and relevance and then rigor, you're going to hit all students."

Ownership and autonomy are also essential to Manor's PBL, and they operate on every level. Zipkes requires that all teachers start with the state standards and that they observe and stay true to the school's PBL model; beyond that, he leaves it to their creativity and expertise to design the projects and guide their students through the process. Similarly, teachers strive to give their students latitude in how they choose to demonstrate their knowledge, as long as they aim for the learning outcomes defined in the rubrics. This belief in each other's capabilities fosters trust and a kind of self-regulation that frees Zipkes to be the visionary leader rather than the heavy, the teachers to be facilitators rather than disciplinarians, and the students to be learners rather than test-takers.

One of the familiar refrains at Manor is, "This is our house." And they mean it. Everyone, teacher and student alike, is there because they choose to be. Not a single student has dropped out in its five-year history, nor has any teacher left due to dissatisfaction. At one all-school assembly we attended, Zipkes made his way through the crowd of students, bellowing into the mic like an inspirational speaker. The students cheered him on, genuinely enthused by his energy. With this unity of purpose, process, and passion, Manor New Tech's continuing success seems inevitable (www.edutopia.org).

To read the original article, click here.

Wednesday, June 13, 2012

Long Road to Simple

This article, published by Metropolis Magazine, takes a look at the extensive research Steelcase did when designing new solutions for the classroom. Steelcase reveals the laborious process it was to create a simple solution that was flexible, mobile and easily adaptable to the many modes of learning. Take a look and share these insights with your customers. Share your thoughts in the commetns below!

"Considering Steelcase’s new Verb classroom system, I am reminded of (who else?) Frédéric Chopin. “After playing immense quantities of notes, and more notes,” the composer declared, “then simplicity emerges with all its charm, like art’s final seal.” The product line, which makes its debut at NeoCon this month, seems, at a glance, to be simplicity itself: variations on a table for students, a “teaching station,” and individual whiteboards. Yet Verb is the outcome of immense quantities of research and more research—as well as prototyping and testing—all aimed at perfecting a classroom tool that supports nothing less than the future of learning.
The Verb saga begins with Steelcase’s unusual approach to product development, which starts with open-ended research. Typically, the company decides on a potentially profitable market—in this case, classrooms—then studies trends within that market to understand the direction in which it’s headed. “Four years ago, when we started to focus deeply on education, we discovered a growing outcry for greater student success,” Sean Corcorran, the general manager of Steelcase Education Solutions, recalls. “Then we asked, ‘How do we get there?’” According to Corcorran, Steelcase found that although “students have different backgrounds and experiences than they did fifty years ago, and they’re deeply immersed in diverse technologies and multimedia environments,” the classic sage-on-a-stage classroom model, with people fixed in columns and rows, still predominates. Coupled with the company’s secondary research into how information is absorbed—which revealed, Corcorran says, “that people learn best when they construct their own knowledge, as opposed to just having it given to them”—Steelcase came to the conclusion that the twenty-first-century classroom needs to be a more “flexible, active, multimodal” environment that helps students to learn in a broad range of ways.
Released in the summer of 2010, the first Steelcase product to respond to this need was Node, a tablet arm-chair with casters, a swivel seat, and, beneath it, a dish capacious enough to hold a backpack. These small but transformative changes to traditional classroom furnishings permitted students to look around easily and thus better relate to one another, to rapidly arrange themselves into small or large groups, and, thanks to the under-seat dish, to not waste precious time gathering up their things whenever they moved.
Yet, while Node facilitates the swift reconfiguration of a classroom to accommodate different styles of learning, it remains, says Lennie Scott-Webber, Steelcase’s director of education environments, “a chair-based solution. You need to provide different choices for different scenarios, and some people want a table-based solution.” Accordingly, Verb—the name is derived from Steelcase’s overarching focus on active learning—scales up the Node concept for situations requiring larger work surfaces, but does so without sacrificing flexibility. “It allows many different kinds of teaching modalities, as well as an easy switch between those modalities,” Scott-Webber says. Corcorran calls it “a classroom ecosystem.”
Verb’s signature component is a two-student table that’s V-shaped on one side, flat on the opposite, and slightly angled on both ends. “We tried hundreds of different shapes, and built prototypes and tested them with students, before landing on this one,” Corcorran recalls. This particular iteration carried the day because, as Steelcase discovered, it successfully balanced privacy, communication, and flexibility. The V-shaped side lets students sit next to one another at an angle, facilitating eye contact and collaboration, but preserving a sense of separation. Two Chevron tables (as they’re called) can be pushed together so that their flat sides touch, forming a four-person team table. And when they’re butted end to end to form rows—“we call that ‘lecture mode,’ ” Corcorran says—the angled table ends produce a gentle curve that enables students in the row to see and to communicate with one another more effectively. (In keeping with Verb’s goal of maximizing utility, student tables are available in five widths, three depths, and three shapes, including four-person “double chevron” and rectangular team tables. All come with casters, to facilitate quick shifts between individual, team, and lecture situations.)
The student tables can also be accessorized with side hooks and board holders, which allow students to hang up the Verb system’s individual whiteboards when they’re not in use, or to mount them for display. There are also small center troughs for stashing markers and erasers. “I call it a ‘team machine,’” Corcorran says of the fully equipped table. “When you move, everything can be stored and nothing gets in the way.”
As for Verb’s double-sided, ceramic-and-steel whiteboards, in Corcorran’s view, “they hold the whole system together,” enabling students to take notes or sketch individually, to share information with a desk mate or a team, or to make class presentations using Verb’s mobile easel or wall-track display systems (on which the boards can be hung singly or in groups). When I confess to Scott-Webber that I come from the pre-whiteboard age, and don’t grasp the boards’ value, she explains that the Verb version is actually a new take on a popular, preexisting Steelcase product called the Huddleboard, which caught on “because it was giving students permission to actually use different tools in the classroom.” The whiteboard stresses the continuing importance, in an increasingly digital world, of analog capture and display. “More and more, 3M Post-it pads are used in generative, team-based projects,” Corcorran observes. The whiteboard “gives you a non-disposable, quite ‘green’ alternative to that.” (The whiteboards can also be attached at the midpoint of the tables and used as screens when students are taking tests.)
The teaching station—perhaps Verb’s most elegant component—grew out of what Scott-Webber calls “our ethnography research, where we spend time in the classroom doing participant observation and taking photographs, so we can bring information back, code it, and look for patterns.” One of the things this Margaret Mead–meets–Mr. Chips exercise revealed was that the head of a classroom is often plagued by what might be described as teacher-station creep: “We noted that there was often a lectern on the floor or a half-lectern on the teacher’s desk, and then there was a table you might have for a student conference,” says Scott-Webber. Verb’s solution is an object with different zones: a standard writing surface, a built-in lectern, and an end designed to make it comfortable for a student to pull up a chair for a one-on-one powwow. “In a much smaller footprint, you are enabling a teacher to work in three separate modes,” Scott-Webber says. The lectern, in particular, reflects the thoughtfulness with which the product has been crafted. Mounted on a curved arm that rises from one side of the desk, the lectern can rotate 360 degrees, allowing a teacher to use it above or beside the desk, and it has ample room for papers and pens, because teachers, Scott-Webber observes, “are always losing their stuff.” The designers also added a cup holder, and a bag or briefcase caddy to provide quick access to books and papers during lectures.
“Our overall focus is on doing research that leads to insights that we leverage into solutions,” Corcorran says. Or, as Scott-Webber puts it, the products consist of “evidence-based information implanted into design.” Verb, an active-learning system meant to support and encourage classroom success, represents that philosophy in action" (www.metropolismag.com).

Wednesday, June 6, 2012

"8 Insane Schools, Playgrounds, And Libraries Of The Future"

Check out this great post by FastCo.Exist about the schools, playgrounds, and libraries of the future. Get ready to be inspired!

"School is a lot more fun when the entire building is covered in astroturf. Or when your playground is an abandoned oil rig. Architects and educators are finding new ways to engage kids in learning through the built environment, and the results are out of this world.

Gone are the days when schools and libraries were large, impersonal institutions of learning. Today, architects are pushing the boundaries of learning spaces, putting kids in environments that we may not recognize as a school. Instead of a drab classroom, students are now learning in bizarre environments, designed to stimulate their imaginations. When they go to the playground, it’s not to play on a simple jungle gym, but to interact with objects and materials that create new and exciting discoveries each time they’re outside.
Learn for Life: New Architecture for New Learning chronicles some of the most exciting of these projects, from an outdoor library in Germany to a park made of recycled materials from oil rigs. We’ve chosen some of the most fun and interesting of the projects, which you can see in the slide show above. Perhaps youth is not wasted on the young, after all" (www.fastcoexist.com).

To view all images, click here.

All rights 2012 Gestalten

Geopark: Stavanger, Norway

School Handmade in Bangladesh: Rudrapur, Bangladesh

Ecological Children Activity and Education Center: Koh Kood, Thailand

Open-Air-Libray: Magdeburg, Germany