Follett Challenge Competition—$200,000 in Prizes

The Follett Challenge recognizes educators who use and design innovative teaching and learning programs that help students master 21^st century skills and abilities.  Individual school prizes range from $5000 to $30000. According to the rules, entries must show how a school or district has created a 21^st century curriculum. An application and a 3-5 minute video describing the project must be submitted by February 28, 2014.  Winners will be announced in April and May.

Today’s Leaders in Education

Profiles in Leadership, sponsored by Tech & Learning, HP, and Intel focuses on creating effective leaders who can bring about change in today’s schools. Information from superintendents, directors of technology, directors of information services, and principals is included in a brochure you can download. Other resources include links to sites such as Digital Learning Environments, Digital Learning blog, Tech & Learning, School CIO, K12 Blueprint site, and Project RED.

Project RED: How to Implement Tech Programs

In Project RED’s 2010 study of schools and tech, 997 schools in 49 states and the District of Columbia were represented. The study found that the leadership of the school principal was highly important in whether programs were successful; “online collaboration increases learning productivity and student engagement”; schools that put the key implementation factors to work outperformed other schools; and to get the best results, tech should be used every day. Based on research results, Project RED Community was launched to help transform education.

Be sure to take a look at the key implementation factors.  Those should benefit all schools.

Take Part in ISTE Research

The International Society for Technology in Education (ISTE) encourages you to take part in the Speak Up 2013 Survey.  You can share the link to the survey with peers, parents, and students. Your answers, along with those of other educators, parents, and students will become part of the Speak Up 2013 National Research Project. The survey closes December 20, 2013 and in February 2014 national and state data results will be available.

Make a Difference

Teachers, administrators, and technology specialists and coordinators can enter Tech & Learning’s 2013 Leader of the Year Program. If you use technology in innovative ways to help teachers teach and students learn, make sure to share your ideas on the Tech & Learning site. Entries are due by October 31, 2013. Award winners and prizes will be announced in the December issue of the magazine.

Invent to Learn

The book Invent to Learn: Making, Tinkering, and Engineering in the Classroom, by Sylvia Libow Martinez and Gary Stager, helps you bring the excitement of exploration and invention into your classroom. If you want to create an exciting classroom environment in which students learn by doing, this book gives you the inspiration, as one reviewer said, to trust children by giving them the opportunity to explore, create, and experience both success and failure.  The book is available on Amazon in paperback ($28.84) and Kindle editions ($9.99).

Moving Students Ahead in STEM Subjects

Students entering Deptford High School and many other high schools throughout the nation can select a program that includes college-level courses in engineering, robotics, and Computer-Aided Design. The Deptford program will follow the Project Lead the Way (PLTW) curriculum, which is now used in schools in all fifty states and the District of Columbia.  The PLTW program considers classrooms as innovation zones where hands-on learning and critical thinking take place.

Innovators Under Age 35

MIT Technology Review has released its annual list of innovators under age 35. It’s a “celebration of people who are driving the next generation of technological breakthroughs”.  The list of inventors, entrepreneurs, visionaries, humanitarians, and pioneers is sure to motivate your students. Problems addressed by the innovators include identity theft, 3-D moving images, prediction of events, cyber attacks, jobless economic recovery, personal robotics, recessive genes, inputting of text into computers, underdeveloped nations, disease, and energy.

Is There a Creativity Crisis?

In 2010, Po Bronson and Ashley Merryman challenged us with the article, “The Creativity Crisis” (Newsweek). They reminded us of Torrance’s creativity assessments and how he and his team followed students tested in 1958 for the next 50 years.  In 2010, Kyung Hee Kim, a researcher at the College of William and Mary, used the Torrance scores of over 300,000 children and adults to focus on how our children today compare in creativity to those of the past. He found that the scores of children tested from 1990 on were declining.  While a number of other countries are focusing on development of creativity in their children, researchers fear that America’s insistence on standardization is hurting our students and our nation’s future. According to the authors, “While our creativity scores decline unchecked, the current national strategy for creativity consists of little more than praying for a Greek muse to drop by our houses.”  Bringing creativity and problem solving into all subject areas will help, as will considering such ideas as choice-based art and bringing STEAM (science, technology, engineering, art & design, and mathematics) into the projects and activities of our youngest students.

Encouraging Creative Kids

Research often tells us what we educators already know. This time, it’s about creative kids—they are the ones who not only do well in academic assessments such as the SAT and ACT but also in the ability to take apart and put together objects. These are students who do well on Differential Aptitude Tests, which measure spatial ability.

The problem is that spatial ability, “sometimes referred to as ‘orphan ability’” often goes “undetected”.  To solve this problem, researchers at Vanderbilt suggest that SAT, ACT, and other tests should include more questions involving spatial ability.  If we were better able to identify students with excellent spatial skills, these students could receive improved career guidance. Considering the world’s needs for the future, we should encourage those young people with spatial competence as part of their makeup to prepare themselves to become the innovators of the future. In the meantime, before the tests are changed, we know that teachers who detect signs of spatial ability in their students will continue to encourage them to move forward with this seemingly innate talent.