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.
Reportedly some 30,000 Chromebooks come online in K-12 each day. There are positive and negative aspects to that, though, as far as we can tell, the Chromebook invasion is mostly a good thing for education.
- By Cathie Norris, Elliot Soloway
- 02/16/16
This blog post kicks off a new blog theme: Reinventing Curriculum. Like teacher and pedagogy, curriculum is one of the keys to a successful learning experience. Due to three trends, we will argue, curriculum – its development, its distribution, and its use — is in a state of real turbulence. The educational community, in general, and educational technology, in particular, needs to focus on the “next turn of the crank” in curriculum!
- By Cathie Norris, Elliot Soloway
- 02/02/16
No question: the future of educational technology is blended learning enacted in 1-to-1 classrooms. But: exactly what instruction will be delivered? In the past, textbooks played the role of providing teachers with the day-by-day, week-by-week, instructional roadmap. Current lesson marketplaces, however, provide supplemental lessons; there is a huge need for basal/comprehensive, blended learning curricula. Curriculum developers: Listen up!
- By Cathie Norris, Elliot Soloway
- 12/01/15
Unlike a previous blog post where we pooh-poohed blended learning, in this blog post we do a flip-flop and hail blended learning as the model for the future of ed tech. Now our formulation of Blended Learning may diverge from the orthodoxy, but so what: We see a future where K-12 students, with their 1-to-1 computing devices, will be engaging in lessons that are computer-based and computer-mediated. You can take that prediction to the bank!
- By Cathie Norris, Elliot Soloway
- 11/17/15
In this week’s blog we ask YOU a question: What are the obstacles – the barriers – that prevent K-12 teachers from using technology in their classroom?
- By Cathie Norris, Elliot Soloway
- 11/03/15
On the way to Personalized Learning 3.0, we may well need to “pass through” Personalized Learning 1.0. But we mustn’t tarry! Educational automation is not an interesting goal! The vision of a personalized “bicycle for the mind” for each and every child must drive us to "informate" – to create Personalized Learning 3.0 environments!!
- By Cathie Norris, Elliot Soloway
- 10/19/15
Without question, children need to develop reading fluency. Commonsensically, having kids read lots and lots should help in developing such fluency. Well, the data from U.S. classrooms on methods such as “Sustained Silent Reading” and its cousin, “Drop Everything and Read” are equivocal, that’s not stopping the Taiwanese. In 3 short years, 10 percent of its 2,700 elementary schools have adopted the “Modeled Sustained Silent Reading” Program! The data be hanged! Commonsense is winning in Taiwan.
- By Cathie Norris, Elliot Soloway
- 10/13/15
On 28 October 2014, the W3C approved a standard version of HTML5, a programming language for the web. For K-12 at least, HTML5 is totally disruptive – in a GOOD way! Educational app developers can now write highly interactive apps that will run on virtually all end-user-oriented, computing devices, i.e., on all the crazy computers that kids bring into their BYOD classrooms. Finally, BYOD makes good sense; finally, teachers can FULLY exploit the affordances of the kids’ BYOD computing devices!! HTML5 is nothing short of a sea change in educational software.
- By Cathie Norris, Elliot Soloway
- 10/05/15
The Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development just released a detailed study of the use of computers in the classrooms in 70 countries. It was no surprise that he study did not find improvement in student achievement due to computer use. It was a surprise, though, that OECD Director Andreas Schleicher named what he saw as the root cause of that failure!
- By Cathie Norris, Elliot Soloway
- 09/21/15
Charter schools, vouchers and now venture capital! Uber is the model: Squeeze out cost relentlessly, use software and everything will be wonderful! Where do teachers fit into this model?
- By Cathie Norris, Elliot Soloway
- 09/08/15