My Recent Readings…

I found this blog post by a teacher who is also trying to find ways to assess students better than traditional grading.

This teacher from Alberta, Canada, has been blogging about topics such as grading and student assessment for a while now. Here are a collection of his blogs on these subjects.

Etta Kralovec on The End of Homework â€“ How Homework Disrupts Families, Overburdens Children, and Limits Learning

Here’s an article on 21st Century Learning: Our Children Are Telling Us How They Want to Learn.

Here’s another good article on how students learn in the 21st Century: Reaching Digital Natives on Their Terms.

Why all the articles on 21st Century learning? Because education changes slower than society. The world has moved past the assembly line model but education is still stuck there for the most part. Read Assembly-line schools from a bygone era for an interesting look at this dilemma.

This is a must see Ted Talk, only 8 minutes, by this incredible young speaker: Adora Svitak: What Adults Can Learn from Kids.

Here’s a blog by a teacher written after a record number of attendees to a webinar with Sir Ken Robinson on his book The Element – Guest Blog: How Passion in Education Can Drive Change. Finding your passion is the not only the way to truly be successful and happy in life, but what I got from the webinar is that by finding our passions we can learn to enjoy the things in life that we must do but may not always want to do. Think of how that relates to education. 🙂

Here’s another teacher’s blog after the #edchat and the webinar (we had our regular #edchat on that day about passion in education): Passion in Education and How it can DriveÂ Change.

A group of educators that make up my Twitter PLN (professional learning network) had a twitter discussion through #edchat on education reform. We’ve been discussing the changes that need to be made to our education system to best help our students be successful once they graduate. Tuesday night’s discussion via #edchat focused on what changes are most important in light of shrinking budgets and resources. Here’s an article about the need to change from ESchool News: eSN Special Report: Convergent Education.

And here’s an article with ideas on what can be cut from school budgets – Guest Blog: What Should We Cut?

Here are one principal’s thoughts on school reform: More Thoughts on School Reform.

Here are some things to think about: 21 Things That Will Become Obsolete in Education by 2020.

Enjoy!

Al GonzÃ¡lez