There is a commercial for the United States Marine Corps showing Marines running towards a conflict or the chaos of the moment rescuing and leading the way for others. I believe that is the perfect theme for what some believe is happening in education. The chaos or the dragon in the distance is the oncoming approach of change in 21st Century Learning methods.
"Google announced Wednesday that its Play store will offer digital textbooks through partnerships with several major K-12 publishers. Laura Hazard Owen at GigaOm reports that, beginning in early August, students will be able to buy or rent textbooks from Google Play..."1
The headline above is typical of the push to capitalize on the digital textbook phase of transitioning to 21st Century Schools. This fall more and more schools are moving to 1:1 learning models distributing tablets, netbooks, and computers for students to actively use in their classrooms. Online Learning Systems will be the way for the future, not the oneway instructional model so many have advocated in the past.
Learning will become more experiential, more active, and classrooms will be flipping faster than hotcakes on a breakfast griddle. There is a storm brewing on the horizon of public education, and while more and more schools are actively pursuing this mode of learning and instruction, others will still be wrestling with the efficacy of such a change in learning.
While these schools and states ruminate on the fate of to go digital or not, other schools will be leading the way because of visionary thinkers in the classrooms that are reading the writing on the wall.
Kudos to those teachers and school leaders paving the way for the others.
1. K-12 Publishers Will Sell Textbooks via Google Play. (2013). Retrieved from http://blogs.edweek.org/edweek/bookmarks/
"Google announced Wednesday that its Play store will offer digital textbooks through partnerships with several major K-12 publishers. Laura Hazard Owen at GigaOm reports that, beginning in early August, students will be able to buy or rent textbooks from Google Play..."1
The headline above is typical of the push to capitalize on the digital textbook phase of transitioning to 21st Century Schools. This fall more and more schools are moving to 1:1 learning models distributing tablets, netbooks, and computers for students to actively use in their classrooms. Online Learning Systems will be the way for the future, not the oneway instructional model so many have advocated in the past.
Learning will become more experiential, more active, and classrooms will be flipping faster than hotcakes on a breakfast griddle. There is a storm brewing on the horizon of public education, and while more and more schools are actively pursuing this mode of learning and instruction, others will still be wrestling with the efficacy of such a change in learning.
While these schools and states ruminate on the fate of to go digital or not, other schools will be leading the way because of visionary thinkers in the classrooms that are reading the writing on the wall.
Kudos to those teachers and school leaders paving the way for the others.
1. K-12 Publishers Will Sell Textbooks via Google Play. (2013). Retrieved from http://blogs.edweek.org/edweek/bookmarks/
