Tuesday, June 7, 2011

Breaking Free From The Boring Prison of School

Former students like me and Aaron Iba felt like school was a sentence.  This Prezi gives some insight into why.


4 comments:

  1. Very inspirational. Keep up the great work that you do, in your fight to make the education system fit the needs of the students and not the students fit the needs of the educational system.

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  2. I was familiar with Aaron's story, as it had made the rounds among those I follow on Twitter. I really like how you've made the case for change in education through his story.
    The next step, is a bit harder. It requires us to show examples of students who ARE engaged, who haven't fallen through the cracks, and who are inspired to do great things at school. We need to promote the PBL activities and authentic assessment that we know are more effective ways to demonstrate student learning. I saw this today that might be a start. I think the challenge is for all of us to share examples like this to help change the narrative.

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  3. @Jo-Anne Tracey, how exciting to get a comment from you on my blog. I love the work you're doing at http://discoveryportalactivelearningcommunity.yolasite.com and it's a pleasure to receive kudos from someone doing such fantastic work. Thank you!!!

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  4. @Michael Walker, thanks for the wise insight. I agree. I have been collecting some such examples of schools doing this work using the tag "best practices" http://theinnovativeeducator.blogspot.com/search/label/promising%20practices -Of course, I need to remember to do that :-)

    I don't think the answer is just PBL which generally involves the educator creating the project. If we replace the "P" for "Project" with the word "Passion" I think we'd be on to something. The key is with passion based learning, personal learning networks, personal success plans, personalized portfolios, and personalized demonstration of mastery in learner-selected areas.

    Although the global conversation is on common standards and college for all, I think the answer is in personal standards and mastery and college for those who believe it will help them achieve that.

    Thanks for the link. I'll take a look at it now.

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