Reflections on Education

Social Media in education is a tricky subject. It is a powerful tool used by our students and their families and can be an important way to get our message as a school out there. At the same time there are privacy concerns, misuse, and many other issues that can arise with its use. One area that I struggle with is that I am not a very active Social Media user. At one point I was on facebook, but it was mostly lurking and I realized what a waste of my time it was to see what other people did during the day. My new social media to view is Twitter, but this isn't just so that I can keep up with friends, actually about 90% of the people that I follow I have never met, but to keep up to date on trends in education. There are a ton of people that post resources all of the time, and it keeps me up to date. There is actually a twitter chat this Wednesday (7/17/19) evening at 8:08 using  # 808educate  about the use of social media in our schools. Enough about my social media use, let

Due to twitter and my graduate class I recently came across two articles from a few years ago that really made me start to think about active learning versus lecturing. The fact that we have the data and evidence to show how ineffective a method that lecturing is and it still happens in our high schools and colleges is astounding. In a meta-analysis of 225 studies the evidence was so heavily weighted in favor of active learning that it was stated “If the experiments analyzed here had been conducted as randomized controlled trials of medical interventions, they may have been stopped for benefit—meaning that enrolling patients in the control condition might be discontinued because the treatment being tested was clearly more beneficial.” However, in education we keep doing it that way because that is the way that we were taught and it is the way that education has worked for 600 years.  In a second article I read from Eric Mazur , Harvard Professor, he summarizes the shift that need

The future of work and the future of school are forever changing. After watching a Vice episode " The Future of Work " I started to reflect on what education will look like as all of these jobs are automated. It is no longer just the low skill level, repetitive jobs that are being automated out, but even higher level jobs like paralegals and even journalists. If all of these entry level jobs will be gone, what are we educating our students for? We need to start looking at creating problem solvers, critical thinkers, leaders and people that can adapt to this changing world. School should be about so much more than the memorization of facts. As this world shifts we also need to shift education to meet the needs of the future workforce. More and more companies are looking at an applicants skill sets and not education level, including Google and Apple.  The big problem with the way that AI is impacting our economy right now is that the rich are getting richer and the lower