Ramsey Musallam: "3 rules to spark learning"

 
As we enter the spring, the last months of the academic year hang blissful and ominous before us.  Will we have the energy to endure? Will our students succumb to senioritis?

Fortunately, an answer has come from our personal learning network in the form of Ramsey Musallam (@ramusallam).  Chemistry teacher at Sacred Heart Cathedral Prep in San Francisco, CA, Ed.D. recipient, and manager of the Cycles of Learning blog, Musallam has had time to consider this question across fifteen years of teaching.  In a TED Talk delivered in 2013, Musallam critiques contemporary trends in education and argues that teachers must assign themselves a very specific purpose:  cultivators of curiosity.

You know, questions and curiosity like Maddie's are magnets that draw us towards our teachers, and they transcend all technology or buzzwords in education. But if we place these technologies before student inquiry, we can be robbing ourselves of our greatest tool as teachers: our students' questions. For example, flipping a boring lecture from the classroom to the screen of a mobile device might save instructional time, but if it is the focus of our students' experience, it's the same dehumanizing chatter just wrapped up in fancy clothing. But if instead we have the guts to confuse our students, perplex them, and evoke real questions, through those questions, we as teachers have information that we can use to tailor robust and informed methods of blended instruction.

What did you think of Musallam's presentation? Please post in the comments section below.

Donald Clark: "More pedagogic change in 10 years than last 1000 years" @ TEDxGlasgow

CEO and one of the founders of Epic Group PLC, Donald Clark (@DonaldClarke63) is committed to the idea that #technology does - and must - play a role in education (passages taken from Clark's bio).  Having spent "30 years experience in online learning, games, simulations, social media and mobile learning projects," Clark had this to say about technology in education during a 2012 @TEDxGlasgow event:

The real scalability in education comes with the Internet because it gives us a world of digital replication for free.  A world of digital abundance where some aspects of learning content are available for anyone, anywhere, at any time.  It absolutely frees us from the tyranny of time and location. ... And that's the trick:  freeing education from a place, from a specific time.

Now if - as is clearly the case - the Internet and #socialmedia can lead young people to change the tyrannical and corrupt governments, can we really say that social media will have no role in education? How do you think those kids in Tahrir Square (@3alTahrir) learned to avoid tear gas by using Pepsi Cola (@pepsi)? How do you think those revolutions arose first through blogging, then through Facebook, then through Twitter, then through YouTube, and the ubiquity of mobile devices? We'd be fools to ignore the pedagogic lessons that are right in front of our eyes, politically and in terms of education.

What do you think? How can we use social media outlets such as Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube educationally? Please post in the comments below.

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Will Richardson at TEDxNYED (2011)

American educator, parent, author, speaker, blogger, and co-publisher of Educating Modern Learners (EML) Will Richardson (@willrich45) at @TEDxNYED.

For a post discussing Richardson's "Education Leadership" at TEDxMelbourne, please click here.

Will Richardson: "Education Leadership" at TEDxMelbourne

 
American educator, parent, author, speaker, blogger, and co-publisher of Educating Modern Learners (EML) Will Richardson (@willrich45) has been called "a trendsetter in education" by The New York Times.  He has spoken to tens of thousands of educators in more than a dozen countries about the value of online learning networks.  Two years ago, he presented at TEDxMelbourne (@TEDxMelbourne), an event that encouraged educators, parents, and students to think about the "changing nature of education and how technology can shape the future of learning" (passages taken from YouTube description of Richardson's talk).

Richardson raises some valid points that we in education must begin to discuss:

We have to start thinking differently about what school is. There's a great quote that I read by a guy by the name of Justin Reich (the Richard L. Menschel HarvardX Research Fellow, based in the Office of the President and Provost at Harvard University: @bjfr) who's a teacher at Harvard.  And he said, 'You know, the problem right now is that we're paying so much attention to the measurable part of learning that we risk neglecting the immeasurable part of learning."  And it's that immeasurable part that - right now, in a world where we have access to so much stuff - it's that immeasurable stuff, that hard-to-measure stuff that's much more important. It's that creativity, that gritty problem-solving, that persevering disposition that we have toward learning.  All that stuff that's really hard to measure? That's the stuff that our children need right now.

For a post discussing Richardson at TEDxNYED (2011), please click here.