AASL education evolution..Heidi Hayes Jacobs

Heidi Hayes Jacobs challenges us to be the school R&D providers..looking at educating kids for the future. We need to think hard about learning spaces, connectivity, excellent pedagogy. We need to rethink how we group kids and teachers. We need to make learning more engaging and contemporary, while holding on to important classical teaching techniques (think Socrates) and strong, interesting content. Some great ideas....grade 1 community helper unit goes into the community and asks people in the neighborhood what sort of help they need and how children can help; grade 7 nutrition unit looks at and reacts to the documentary Food Inc. in a unit called "Food Fight." She compared looking at websites and apps as analogous to our approach to reviewing and selecting books. Just as we curate our book collections, we need to curate and tag good online resources and teach students to do this. Study quality film and media production to help students see how this impacts what they see and how it can lead to bias. She shared some incredibly compelling, but easily produced student videos created by elementary students to make the point that our laptops are free, powerful production studios that we need to be using to help our students share what they know both in school and beyond as they make their mark in our ever-more-connected world. Plan to set aside several hours to explore the resources on her website.