Reinventing Curriculum | Blog
Here you'll find analysis and views on technology, policy and curriculum in elementary and secondary education by two outspoken technology advocates, Elliot Soloway and Cathie Norris. Reinventing Curriculum is published twice per month. Below you will also find the archive for Elliot and Cathie's previous blog, Being Mobile.
CCSS and NGSS are driving curricula and pedagogical change. Coding those new curricular materials, imbued with the best research, in HTML5 will enable those materials to run on virtually every BYOD computing device in the classroom. You read that right: every computing device!
Over the past 20 years, boosters of several new technologies have promised to “revolutionize education.” In this week’s post, we review the various predictions about laptops, interactive whiteboards, iPads and Chromebooks. Ah, techies and their penchant for hyperbole....
There has always been a chasm between what educational researchers do in their labs and what educational practitioners do in their classrooms. There is no well-defined path for taking an idea from research and putting it into practice. In this week’s post, we discuss the different paths across the chasm that Logo (the programming language) and the graphing calculator took.
While educational start-ups are securing record amounts of investment, the percentage of computer science majors going into start-ups of any kind is actually quite small. In this week’s blog post, we argue that fixing the student loan problem would unleash innovation that would boggle the imagination.
The “competency learning" movement is gaining serious momentum. But, drawing on decades of research in the psychology of learning, we will argue in this week’s blog post that competency learning appears to be based on a fundamentally flawed model of how learning takes place and how learning needs to be assessed.
“Social” as an adjective — as in social gaming, social media and social networks — is everywhere these days, and for good reason! We constantly engage in social learning: learning from and with each other. So is K-12’s current love affair with “personalized learning” a mistake? Hmmm.
If collabrified apps are truly going to make a difference in the classroom, then teachers need curriculum that shows them how to use such technology. This week’s post is an open invitation to join our team of writers in creating a new generation of curriculum that explicitly leverages collaboration technology.
The mastery/competency learning movement is picking up massive amounts of momentum in K-12, but its reliance on an old method of instruction will, in the end, not result in creating students who can solve “uncharted problems” and learn how to learn.
The U.S. Department of Educational Technology has just published an excellent resource for educational software developers. In our review of the guide, we point out that it makes the case that the Rubicon has finally been crossed: Technology is making (and will continue to make) a profound impact on K-12 education.
Watching videos is fast becoming a canonized instructional method in K-12. But a young researcher from Australia has some provocative, scientifically based research that ought to give video proponents significant pause. But, all is not lost, as we report in this week’s post.