למידה, אינטרנט ... ומה שביניהם

שורה של יזמים ותיקים, ומפתח פלטפורמת למידה בספרים דיגיטליים על גבי טאבלט. את החברה הקימו ב-2011 היזם והמשקיע רני כהן (מנכ"ל), היזם דב מורן (יו"ר), מריוס נכט ממייסדי צ'ק פוינט (חבר במועצת המנהלים), הח"כ לשעבר דדי צוקר (סמנכ"ל שיווק ומכירות), ואורי קפלן (סמנכ"ל תפעול).

הפלטפורמה משמשת גם מורים כמערכת לניהול השיעורים ומעקב אחר התקדמות התלמידים. המורה מקבל תמונת מצב המשקפת מי מתלמידי הכתה קורא בספר בזמן שיעור ומי משתמש בטאבלט לשימושים אחרים.

זה לא סוד שתלמידים באים לבית ספר ומתים משעמום. החלטנו לנסות לעשות שינוי בחינוך.... המטרה שלנו היא להעצים, להעשיר ולגרום לחוויית הלמידה להשתנות ולהיות הרבה יותר מעניינת, חברתית וטכנולוגית.

I’d love to hear far more discussion about “schooling” and far less about “learning.”

"I do not believe in the institutional structure of public schooling anymore," Elmore said, noting that his long-standing work at helping teachers and principals professionalize their practice is "palliative care for a dying institution." Elmore predicted "a progressive dissociation between learning and schooling."

His comments reflected his concerns that technology, and the networked learning that is emerging in the 21st century, is a key reason for the collapse of institutional schooling....

Anyone can teach! Who needs a degree. Just need to know how to make and post a video.

a) what should an education degree or a teaching certificate require when increasingly anyone with a connection can be a teacher of content, and, b) more importantly, what changes when the world begins to accept a definition of “teacher” as someone who knows “how to make and post a video”?

There are lots of people who I really believe would love to do away with the idea of schooling. And if they can maintain test scores and content consumption as the goal, they might just do it.

What bothered me the most was the following statement: "Educational videos on YouTube represent a return to the essence of what education should be." Putting it bluntly, THIS... is a load of crap. The essence of education cannot be distilled to watching videos - I don't care who makes them.

Second Grade Teacher’s Dream Fulfilled With the Arrival of the Nexus 7 Tablets

September 24, 2012 marked the beginning of this amazing journey for my second grade class with the arrival of our classroom set of Nexus 7 tablets. We had been following the shipment via UPS with their tracking system, so when we saw that they were in Colorado at a UPS depot just miles from our school, the class could hardly sit still! The school office was alerted to make the phone call once the truck arrived with this very special delivery. Beth and I knew our world was about to change in a matter of hours.

This had to be the best day ever for my second graders! The addition of these tablets is going to change the way my students learn this school year and beyond into their futures. The 21st century has arrived in my classroom, and I cannot wait to see where it takes us.

I believe if used judiciously, in the right context, the flip can free up valuable class time and provide the background knowledge that is fundamental for students to then go forward and wrestle with higher order thinking.

Here's the thing. When I recently re-read the post, I didn't disagree with anything I'd said. Yet my brief love affair with the flip has ended. It simply didn't produce the transformative learning experience I knew I wanted for my students.

We never moved to an entirely flipped classroom that required my students to watch lecture after lecture, day after day, by video. Even so, when we did "flip," it felt more like we were juggling the traditional lecture around than moving forward into a new learning paradigm.

As this new way of learning played out over time, my students found they didn't need me to locate or create videos for them. Instead, they learned how to learn, and they were able to find their own resources. For me, this was a much more important skill than following my directions or using the resources I told them to use.

As this shift occurred, the flip simply disappeared from our classroom. It took almost a year for me to notice it was gone. Instead, our classroom had become a place where students discovered and shared their own resources, while engaging in projects with each other. There was no need for me to assign video homework or create portable lectures. It all happened during class.

As my students worked with me to invent our own version of student-centred learning, we realized that the three questions every student in our classroom had to answer were: What are you going to learn? How are you going to learn it? How are you going to show me your learning? This became our mantra — our framework for learning. This is what it means to give students "control over their education."

I think that's only possible if you think the most important, or sole, job that I perform in my classroom is content dispenser. I don't believe that at all.

I also challenge them, encourage them, believe in them, love them, and offer correction when necessary. The most important thing I do in my classroom is show students how to dig deep, solve problems, and reflect carefully on the constant stream of information that inundates us all.

We decided to restore articles summing up only the most read and arguably the most important stories published last week, which were largely sound bites - speeches at the UN General Assembly - rather than actual news events. There was no point wasting time writing up yesterday’s news. But there was a dissonance in making such a decision, as though not only had we lost a week’s work, but that the work itself had been irrelevant. If it wasn't worth restoring, was it worth writing in the first place?

Apart from preventing last week’s crash from re-occurring, the bottom line is that the news is a living, breathing, dynamic creature, and attachment to both the ways and the stories of yesteryear – or indeed yester-hour – is likely to limit journalists’ ability to report the news of tomorrow. Some would argue that these new technologies bring down the standard of journalism, but it doesn't need to be that way. Journalists and editors alike need to adapt to the changing environment and find new ways to get the news to the people – such as tweeting on breaking stories for their Internet desks to write up, publishing short version of stories as they break and longer write-ups in print editions and utilizing social media for updates, photos and videos from the field.

a state and government run monopoly which in essence doesn't align incentives with outcomes.

there's no external incentive making you change

And really, that’s what much of the technology blogs do. It really struck me — no surprise — at Techcrunch Disrupt, watching speakers be handled with kid gloves by the moderators on stage as well as by the bloggers who wrote up the proceedings of each session. There were no tough questions. There was no context. No critique. It’s not journalism. It’s marketing.

what Union Square Ventures has published isn’t “research.” It’s not a literature review. It’s not a history. There's no explanation of the problem(s) of education -- their causes and what online education can solve. It’s not even a particularly good overview of online education in terms of potentials for learning (LOL "learning") or making money. It feels like the results of Googling “online education" -- maybe "education technology disruptive innovation."

... when we made this switch to internet-based resources, we somehow left a gap in education and made no real focus on teaching kids how to find valid, credible, useful resources online. The result is our frequent frustration with a generation of kids who will still type in the word “Egypt” and grab the first search result that pops up on Google when studying anything remotely related to the topic.

Getting kids to really focus on what exactly they are searching for, and then be able to further distill ideas into a few key specific search terms is a skill that we must teach students, and we have to do it over and over again. We never question the vital importance of teaching literacy, but we have to be mindful that there are many kinds of “literacies”. An ever more important one that ALL teachers need to be aware of is digital literacy.

איננה מצליחה לעורר את הסקרנות הדרושה כדי להפוך את המיומנויות האלה לשימושיות