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’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.
Dorothea's Closet Vintage
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?
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.
In the mid 1990s, Jim Pelkey asked me to help him with his book on the history of computers and communications technologies. Jim had interviewed the men and women involved in the development of the key companies and organizations that led to the availability of computers and Internet communications that we could all use. Jim connected the history of these industries with the real voices of the people who posed the questions, solved the problems, took the risks, and created the future we take for granted today. Reading these stories helped me understand that the rapid change and innovation we see today is not unprecedented, you just have to know where to look for it in the past. Jim’s humbly titled A History of Computer Communications is a fascinating Web site for anyone who wants to know how we got here and where we might go next. When we talk about preparing our students for the 21st century, keep these innovators of the 20th century in mind. I don’t think problem solving and critical thinking are new skills. They have always been a part of the skills set of innovators and entrepreneurs.