More Than A Wake Up Call

Did you know that in 2016, the youngest of the Generation We will reach voting age?  And that--politicians take note--they will be the largest voting bloc in the country?!  Listen to what they have to say.

 

 

There is increasing evidence that the way we school children in this country is becoming more and more irrelevant and we must all stand up and shout no more! Over at Will Richardon's blog--a leading thinker in transforming schooling for digital learners--we are alerted to the just released study from the MacArthur Foundation titled “Living and Learning with New Media: Summary of Findings from the Digital Youth Project” (pdf).  According to Richardson, this is the money quote:

"New media allow for a degree of freedom and autonomy for youth that is less apparent in  classroom setting. Youth respect one another’s authority online, and they are often more motivated to learn from peers than from adults. Their efforts are also largely self-directed, and  the outcome emerges through exploration, in contrast to classroom learning that is oriented toward set, predefined goals."

Perhaps we should use these tools to work both ends towards the middle--send a wake up call to the policy makers at the global level and the educators on a school district and school  level that we need to think very differently about how we build schools, how we decide what students should know, how we assess whether they know it or not.  We now have the most technologically advanced administration ever in the White House.  The modeling is happening at the national level.  Hopefully, this will spark deeper conversations about providing Internet access as a utility for anyone, anywhere, building an infrastructure that can support the vision we have for teaching digital learners so we move on into changing how we school this new generation--we need it sooner rather than later.