Nassau BOCESDepartment of Curriculum, Instruction and Technology

The Open Innovation Portal is a collaborative community designed to identify, improve, and implement innovative solutions to educational challenges.

The Portal is a Web 2.0 application that combines elements familiar to most Internet users.

- Rate solutions and fellow members.
- Connect with other members.
- Post classifieds to seek or offer services.
- Earn points for participating.

The Portal works by having members post their ideas to a variety of different innovation challenges. Other members in the community ask questions, contribute helpful comments, and rate the ideas. The best ideas float to the top, where they attract the attention of other innovators, potential funders, or contributors of in-kind resources. The feedback also helps innovators improve the quality of their ideas, for submission to other Portal challenges or external grant programs.

Visit the site here: https://innovation.ed.gov/

A big Thank You to Paula Pisano for sharing this amazing resource!

Featuring the heartbreaking stories of young people across the country who have been pushed to the brink, educators who are burned out and worried students aren’t developing the skills they need, and parents who are trying to do what’s best for their kids, Race to Nowhere points to the silent epidemic in our schools: cheating has become commonplace, students have become disengaged, stress-related illness, depression and burnout are rampant, and young people arrive at college and the workplace unprepared and uninspired.

Race to Nowhere is a call to mobilize families, educators, and policy makers to challenge current assumptions on how to best prepare the youth of America to become healthy, bright, contributing and leading citizens.

See the trailer below and/or visit the site here: http://www.racetonowhere.com/

This thought-provoking film offers unique insight across generations and nations, and reveals a very inconvenient truth about education. The world is changing rapidly – but our education system is not keeping pace.

The film, titled ‘We Are The People We’ve Been Waiting For’, was inspired and guided by Lord Puttnam and Sir Michael Barber and explores the education system in the UK and asks whether the current system provides young people with the opportunity to develop their talents. High-profile figures sharing their personal experiences and views include Sir Richard Branson, Germaine Greer, Henry Winkler, Bill Bryson, Sir Ken Robinson and a wide range of education experts from around the world.

‘We Are The People We’ve Been Waiting For’ follows the lives of five teenagers and the challenges they face during their education in the UK.  It reveals the dislocation between the education system and the rapidly changing, globalised world which is increasingly dominated by digital technology, and focuses on the need for fundamental change in teaching and learning.  The movie parallels much of what exists in the US education system as well.

View the trailer below or watch the entire film here: http://www.wearethepeoplemovie.com/

Conversation with Bernard Trilling, Charles Fadel, Tony Wagner, Sir Ken Robinson, Tim Magner and Daniel Pink are just a few of the folks that have and will participate in this ongoing interview series.  Free to participate in and occurring every week, these conversations are fun and enlightening.

The Future of Education Ning network is a site that hosts an interview series and community devoted to providing an opportunity for those who care about education to share their voices and ideas with others.  It is a place for thoughtful discussion and dialog on an incredibly important topic.  The highlight of the site are the interviews conducted with leaders of thought, innovation and education.

All the sessions are recorded in multiple formats, including Elluminate playback and MP3 for portability.  This site is a must visit.  One page tells it all.  The main page (linked below) has a list of both upcoming “conversations” as well as the recordings of ones past.  Of course all of this is open and free to participate.

Find the network here: http://www.futureofeducation.com/

You can also subscribe to the Google Calendar here.

The Department of Education has developed this Portal as an online forum where key stakeholders in education can share their innovative ideas and collaborate to turn those ideas into a new reality.  By connecting an idea from a teacher in Maine to a principal in Oklahoma, or a teacher-entrepreneur in North Dakota with a foundation in New York, the Portal will be a national marketplace of ideas of how we can ensure that every American child will graduate ready to succeed in college and the workplace.

The Web Portal is designed to engage all stakeholders in education: teachers, school administrators, parents, foundations, nonprofit organizations, and the American public.

You can find it here: https://innovation.ed.gov/index/

Shared by Fred Podolski.

The annual Horizon Report describes the continuing work of the New Media Consortium’s Horizon Project, a qualitative research project established in 2002 that identifies and describes emerging technologies likely to have a large impact on teaching, learning, or creative inquiry on college and university campuses within the next five years. The 2010 Horizon Report is the seventh in the series and is produced as part of an ongoing collaboration between the New Media Consortium (NMC) and the EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative (ELI), an EDUCAUSE program.

In each edition of the Horizon Report, six emerging technologies or practices are described that are likely to enter mainstream use on campuses within three adoption horizons spread over the next one to five years. Each report also presents critical trends and challenges that will affect teaching and learning over the same time frame.

The web version of the report is here: http://wp.nmc.org/horizon2010/

The PDF version is here: http://www.nmc.org/pdf/2010-Horizon-Report.pdf

I sent a link to this conference out to the listserv a little while back and now some of the video has been posted which I thought would be a nice follow-up.

Forty years after the “War on Poverty” and twenty-five years after “A Nation at Risk,” a new forum has been designed to advance a new paradigm for learning by harnessing the largely untapped potential of digital media. Breakthrough Learning in a Digital Age brought together 200 of the nation’s top thought leaders in science and technology, informal and formal education, entertainment media, research, philanthropy, and policy to create and act upon a breakthrough strategy for scaling-up effective models of teaching and learning for children. The forum showcased cutting edge research, proven and promising models to challenge decision-makers in key sectors to help “refresh and reboot” American global leadership in education.

Video(s) from the conference are below.  Enjoy!

Opening Remarks — Session 1 — Session 2 — Session 3 — Session 4 — Closing

In the December issue of Learning and Leading from ISTE, there is an interesting article discussing the changes technology has made in education and some strategies for educational leaders to foster its inclusion and growth in the classroom.  These five considerations are aligned with the ISTE NETS for Administrators and focus in on creating a shared vision of technology integration and success.

Click below to read this short article, or click here if you have trouble.