Karen Greenwood Henke is a professional writer and speaker on emerging technologies and their role in education. She is also the founder of Grant Wrangler, a free grants and awards listing service.
I attended a workshop at the American Architecture Foundation on Great Schools by Design to talk about how to design learning spaces for schools in Los Angeles and New York City. Listening to architects and school leaders talk about the actual shape and functionality of classrooms and school spaces, I realized that the architecture of the virtual learning space is as important as the physical space.
These students created a centralized web site for their school and recently won a Digital Open award, a tech expo for teens.
I’m a writer who specializes in writing for the Web and I’m a reader. Lately, I feel like I’m going out of fashion. I feel like my grandmother who lived to be 100 years old and could no longer find comfortable shoes. Her feet had conformed to a certain heel height and shoe width sometime during the first 60 years of her life. Shoe makers stopped making it–no market.
We all spend a lot of time online and learn navigation by the text and visual clues used by the Web sites we frequent most. What about school district Web sites? They are particularly challenging to design, organize, and maintain. Here are a few reasons why:
In Gates Foundation: Good teachers trump small schools, eSchool News reports that the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has determined that billions of dollars in grants to support a range of initiatives shows that the key to better education is effective teachers, not necessarily smaller schools. Of course, this begs the question: who are effective teachers and how do we determine their effectiveness?
PBS TeacherLine Peer Connection is a great example of the rise of social networks as professional learning communities. Social networking is not just about sharing your latest thoughts, it’s about developing a network of peers who help you learn faster and become better at what you do.
These networks support long tail learning for teachers. It helps teachers find and share expertise on specific areas of interest that they might not find in the same school building or district. Barbara Bray’s eCoach Web site is another great example of this phenomenon. eCoach also offers professional coaching services to help teachers develop their coaching skills or improve their own instructional skills.
