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Showing posts with label will richardson. Show all posts

19 bold (not old) ideas for change

At ISTE 2012 Will Richardson did an ignite session (5 minutes / 20 slides) where he shared 20 bold ideas for change. The presentation was powerful and fast.  In case you blinked or sneezed, below the video are his ideas with commentary intertwined from us both. 




  1. Forget open book / phone tests.
    Let’s have open network assessments where students can use the tools they own and love for learning. School should not be a place where we force kids to unplug and disconnect from the world.
  2. Stop wasting money on textbooks.
    Make your own texts with things like wikis.
  3. Google yourself
    If we’re not empowering ourselves and our students to be Google well, we’re not doing a good job.
  4. Flip the power structure from adults to learners
    Empower students with the tools and resources they need to go where they want to go and explore and develop their interests and passions.
  5. Don’t do work for the classroom
    Support learners in doing work that is worthy of, can exist in, and can change the world.
  6. Stop telling kids to do their own work
    That’s not reality any longer.  Support them in collaborating, interacting, and cooperating with others.  
  7. Learn first. Teach second.
    We must come into our classrooms knowing that we are learners first. If we think we are teachers first, we are not giving our students the powerful learning models they’ll need to be successful.  
  8. No more how-to workshops
    Educators should know how to find out how to on their own. When we come together it should be to talk about how we are doing.  
  9. Share everything
    The best work of you and your students should be shared online. This will help us all get better.
  10. Ask questions you don’t know the answer to
    The learning of high stakes tests with predetermined answers is not as powerful as the learning that comes from finding our own new and unique answers.
  11. Believe that you want to be found by strangers on the internet
    If you think kids aren’t going to interact with strangers on the internet, you’re wrong. Let’s embrace that and support kids in being smart when doing so and learning a lot about the minds they are meeting.
  12. Rethink the role of the teacher
    We should not be doing the same work that 20th century teachers did. Consider how technology can and should change our roles.
  13. Toss the resume
    No one cares about your resume anymore. The internet is the new resume. What will people find when they look at who you are online? That is what you should be focusing on.
  14. Go beyond Google to learn
    Build your personal learning network and learn with and from the people you know via places like Twitter and Facebook.
  15. Go free and open source
    We have a budget crises, yet schools are wasting millions on things that are offered for free.
  16. Create an UnCommon Core
    Don’t ask how you will meet the common core, empower kids to think about how they will change the world.
  17. Stop delivering the curriculum
    This is no longer necessary.  Information can be accessed without a teacher.  Move beyond delivery to discovery.
  18. Be subversive
    When Lisa (was he talking about me?) is told to do a standardized test, stand up and say NO! We have to be disruptive and push back.
  19. Stand up and scream
    Tell everyone that education is not about publishers and politicians but rather it’s about what students and parents want and how teachers can best give that to them.

So, what do you think? Which ideas resonate with you and how will you start to implement them in your environment?
You have read this article #ISTE12 / ISTE / iste12 / will richardson with the title will richardson. You can bookmark this page URL https://benncam.blogspot.com/2012/07/19-bold-not-old-ideas-for-change.html. Thanks!

All Children Left Behind - Common Standards for Our Student's Past


The common standards movement is underway in 48 states in our nation and these standards are set to be finalized this month. I’ve been reading what the smart educators I respect are saying about these standards. Here is the summation. These are poorly written standards being put in place with testing companies at the forefront of the decision making. These ed testing companies as well as other big educational businesses/curriculum providers have a huge financial profit to gain after the adoption of these standards because a nation can now adopt their curriculum. There is no alignment or recognition of the changing face of education and the digital worlds in which our students are existing, reading, writing, interacting, producing, and publishing.
What can we do? Provide feedback today about the standards by visiting http://tinyurl.com/fixthestandards. It literally takes less than five minutes. You can use my words above, the words of others below or write your own.
Below are excerpts from other educators about their take on the standards, links to each resource, and where to visit for more information.
On Common Standards
16 Oct 2009 07:18 am
Will Richardson
One look at the reading standards and you can’t help but be left with the impression that the authors have never “read” anything much beyond words on paper and that the idea of “remix” and even links are outside of their experience. There is nothing here about how reading and writing in online and digital spaces changes the interaction, nothing about the social interactions that readers and writers will have around texts that are changing rapidly and substantially.
In all of this, the thing that most frustrates me both in the talk about national standards and national assessments and the whole “Race to the Top” bunk that is coming out of the administration is just a total lack of vision, this sense that nothing has fundamentally changed, that this is the same old classroom with the same old expectations and the same old ways of proving them that we’ve had forever. I’m not saying we don’t need assessments, but there’s a lot of required learning right now that few if any standards are addressing.
Weblogg-ed Comment by Gary Stager
2009-10-19 03:51:17
Replacing one externally-created checklist with another undoubtedly more voluminous one will not help one child.
You cannot have “core” standards without additional standardized testing. Now districts already addicted to testing will have a more potent hallucinogenic with which they can poison public education.
Teachers and students are terrorized by testing and externally-imposed curricular mandates.
Core Standards - Sound Bites and Standardization
Saturday, October 10. 2009
Chris Lehmann
This Core Standards movement should scare everyone who believes that meaning and learning is still most powerfully made in the spaces that students and teachers share. More than teachers, students, state administrators, the group that stands most to gain from national standards and a national test is the education-industrial complex.
This isn't about whether or not people think that all students should be able to write a thesis statement. This is about how students are taught that information, how they are assessed on that information, and on the role of big business in teaching and assessing them.
I find them hard to read, because I think they are poorly written, but standards often are.
10 Reasons you should care about the Common Core State Standards Initiative's Draft English Language Arts Standards
Wednesday, September 30, 2009
Tom Hoffman
We are inviting testing companies to determine the future of our schools with virtually no accountability or public input.
These standards were developed by two testing companies, the College Board and ACT, with help from a nebulous non-profit, Achieve, Inc. It is essential to understand this when reading the Common Standards; it explains many of their odd choices. In the example above, the obvious interpretation is that they chose to define the standard as "support or challenge assertions" rather than "construct a response or interpretation," as every international example they cited did, because the former is much easier and cheaper to score reliably on a standardized test.
No high performing educational system in the world would consider giving testing companies this much control over their standards and curriculum. It is absurd.
These standards are specifically designed to not be the sole responsibility of English teachers, so any data system properly linking student performance on related tests to teachers would attribute the results to all subject area teachers.
The idea that these English Language Arts standards are "internationally benchmarked" to those of high performing countries is a farce, except insofar as the benchmarking demonstrates the low level and quality of our proposed standards.
No country with high reading scores in international assessments conceives of the discipline of Language Arts as being limited to literacy skills, or "college- and career-readiness," as the Common Standards do. Thus, the Common Standards are narrower, lower and shallower than the English Language Arts standards of high performing countries.
Catching Up or Leading the Way
Saturday, October 10. 2009
Yong Zhao
Zhao describes how schools have to keep pace with a world that is being dramatically transformed by globalization, the “death of distance,” and digital technology. Instead of falling in line with mandates for standardization, his prescription is for educators to
  • Expand the definition of success beyond math and reading test scores.
  • Personalize schooling so that every student has opportunity to learn.
  • View schools as enterprises that embrace globalization and digital technology.
Gotham Schools in New York City is running this series on the Common Standards:
Standards: Demystifying, Debunking and Discrediting

I encourage you to read the full articles, take a look at the standards for yourself and provide feedback at http://tinyurl.com/fixthestandards.
For Further Reading
You have read this article chris lehmann / common standards / will richardson with the title will richardson. You can bookmark this page URL https://benncam.blogspot.com/2009/10/all-children-left-behind-common.html. Thanks!
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