Education 2.0 & 3.0

’ve long used Instagram as a way to reach out to my students.  It started back when I first got an iPad through DonorsChoose at my previous library (before I had a personal smartphone).  Some of my former students (now adults) still follow that account and keep in touch.  When I started at Tampa Prep, I created a new account for the library (@TPrepLibrary) separate from my personal account (@dianalrendina) to help conform to the school’s social media policies.  

During the lockdown and virtual learning time in the last quarter of the 2019-2020 school year, the library Instagram account became an essential way for me to keep in touch with my students and share with them.  During this time, I also had more time for PD, so I watched several AASL conference sessions on Instagram and took the fantastic eCourse, Dare to Grow: The Instagram Lab (called Grow Your ‘Gram at the time).  While that eCourse is geared more towards solopreneurs and not everything applied to the school library, I found SO many actionable tips in this course that I’ve utilized in my school library Instagram account.

For at least a decade now, the driving force behind education reform has been data. We talk about collecting data, analyzing data, and making data-driven decisions. All of this data can certainly be useful, helping us notice patterns we might not have seen without aggregating our numbers in some way, looking for gaps and dips and spikes, allowing us to figure out where we are strong and where we need help. In terms of certain academic behaviors, we can quantify student learning to some extent and improve our practice as a result.

And yet, we know this is not enough. We know our students bring with them so many other kinds of data. So many other factors contribute to academic success: the atmosphere in their homes, the demands of their out-of-school school schedule, the physical concerns that distract them, the passions and obsessions that consume them. These things are much harder to measure, so we don’t even try, focusing instead on the things we can convert to numbers.

What is the difference between a teacher-centered and learner-driven classroom?

We’ve taken a look at examples of student-centered teaching before. It’s both a subtle (in theory) and dramatic (in function) shift in the entire ecology of a classroom, curriculum, and sense of student identity in the process of learning. This idea isn’t new in and of itself. John Dewey espoused many of these same ideas century ago. It’s an idea that continues to pick up steam with proponents of ‘progressive education.’

Sylvia Duckworth–who has created dozens of useful, minimalist sort of sketch notes/illustrations that convey ideas in education–has taken the thinking from Barbara Bray and Kathleen McClaskey  and created a complimentary visual. (In fact, you can go straight to the source and read more from Bray and McClaskey on Choice is More than a Menu of Options.)

What happens when you empower students with choice and purpose? What do the new roles and responsibilities look like? The overview below (from the image above) offers some clarity on what changes. The biggest takeaway might be the change in focus from content delivery to purpose discovery.

Are you looking for some new ways to keep students engaged through the end of the school year?

Here are 6 tools that I have found to be quite helpful as this school year winds down. More importantly, these are also some of the student favorites, in no particular order.

With so many classes online during the pandemic—many of them taught by professors still struggling to figure out how to teach in the format—student

onsistently getting the best work from your students

Typical strategies for getting the best work from students focus on extrinsic motivation and gamification—points, grades, badges, certificates, stars, trophies, glowing feedback, encouragement, pep talks, ‘pressure,’ and other ways to ‘motivate students.’ That these strategies are underwhelming in effect—and tend to not yield the life-long learners education seeks to create—shouldn’t be surprising.

Below, I’ve offered 20 strategies for getting the best work from your students. Some are obvious (provide student choice) and many you may already do. The idea here is to clarify the kinds of teaching practices and learning strategies that give your students the best chance to do their best–to consistently do their very best work, and grow the most as students over the course of a school year.

There are two technologies that have really captured the attention of educators as well as futurists. These are artificial intelligence an