Recommended Reading
Smarter Than You Think: How Technology is Changing Our Minds for the Better
Clive Thompson
In Smarter Than You Think Thompson shows that every technological innovation--from the written word to the printing press to the telegraph--has provoked the very same anxieties that plague us today. We panic that life will never be the same, that our attentions are eroding, that culture is being trivialized. But as in the past, we adapt--learning to use the new and retaining what's good of the old.
Thompson introduces us to a cast of extraordinary characters who augment their minds in inventive ways. There's the seventy-six-year old millionaire who digitally records his every waking moment--giving him instant recall of the events and ideas of his life, even going back decades. There's a group of courageous Chinese students who mounted an online movement that shut down a $1.6 billion toxic copper plant. There are experts and there are amateurs, including a global set of gamers who took a puzzle that had baffled HIV scientists for a decade--and solved it collaboratively in only one month.
Change Forces with a Vengeance
Michael Fullan
8 Forces for Leaders of ChangeMichael Fullan, Claudia Cuttress and Ann Kilcher
Fullan et al. propose eight drivers which are key to creating effective and lasting change:
1. engaging people's moral purposes
2. building capacity
3. understanding the change process
4. developing cultures for learning
5. developing cultures of evaluation
6. focusing on leadership for change
7. fostering coherence making
8. cultivating tri-level development.
Change Forces with a Vengeance
Michael Fullan
Change Forces with a Vengeance leads us into the big questions of how large-scale improvement can be made understandable and tractable, and how the institutional context of public schooling can be changed to support powerful learning for students and teachers.
Conditions for Classroom Innovation
Y. Zhao, K. Pugh, S. Sheldon and J. L. Byers
This article reports on a study of the complex and messy process of classroom technology integration. The main purpose of the study was to empirically address the large question of "why don't teachers innovate when they are given computers?" rather than whether computers can imporve student learning.The study found 11 salient factors that significantly impact the degree of success of classroom technology innovations.
Disrupting Class: How Disruptive Innovation Will Change the Way the World Learns
Clayton M. Christensen, Curtis W. Johnson, Michael B. Horn
Clayton M. Christensen and coauthors Michael B. Horn and Curtis W. Johnson apply Christensen's now-famous theories of "disruptive" change to education, using a wide range of real-life examples.
Handbook of Technological Pedagogical Content Knowledge (TPCK) for Educators
Joel Colbert, Kim Boyd, Kevin Clark, Sharon Guan, Judith Harris, Mario Kelly, Ann Thompson
This handbook addresses the concept and implementation of technological pedagogical content knowledge--the knowledge and skills that teachers need in order to meaningfully integrate technology into instruction in specific content areas. Recognizing, for example, that effective uses of technology in mathematics are quite different from effective uses of technology in social studies, teachers need specific preparation in using technology in each content area they will be teaching.
Leadership & Sustainability: System Thinkers in Action
Michael Fullan
Extends and amplifies Fullan's thinking in very powerful and practical ways, by developing a topic that hasn't seen this kind of elegant, integrative, and comprehensive treatment before. It uses real-world examples and research literature to tackle, head on, the question of sustainability - how organizations move into the future and endure over time, as well as the equally challenging question: what about an organization is worth sustaining long term?
Leadership: What's in it for Schools?
Thomas Sergiovanni
What makes a good leader? Does good leadership matter in helping schools be more successful? This concise and accessible book examines leadership in a practical way by helping principals, heads, teachers and parents establish their roles and responsibilities and get to grips with the unique leadership requirements of schools.
Learners as Customers
Mr. John Findlay, Dr. Robert Fitzgerald, and Mr. Russell Hobby
This paper reports on what teachers say when presented with the results of online surveys of what students think about their pedagogical performance and classroom climate and then go on to invent a new and better world for learners. The paper also reports on what students feel about the use of ICT in their classrooms and what they might do to re-invent school.
Learning by Heart
Roland S. Barth
This monograph examines the meaning of true educational reform and offers concrete strategies for achieving fundamental, systemic school transformation. In keeping with his earlier work (Improving Schools from Within), Barth argues that school improvement requires significant changes in the culture of schools, a task best accomplished by school professionals.
Learning in the Digital Age
John Seely-Brown
Seely-Brown considers learning not as a response to learning but as a of a social framework that fosters learning and posits that, to succeed in our struggle to build technology and new media to support learning, we must move far beyond the traditional view of teaching.
Millennials Rising. The Next Great Generation
Neil Howe and William Strauss
Building on the concepts they first developed in Generations and 13th Gen, Neil Howe and William Strauss now take on Generation Y, or, as they call them, the Millennials. According to Howe and Strauss, this group is poised to become the next great generation, one that will provide a more positive, group-oriented, can-do ethos. Huge in size as well as future impact, they're making a sharp break from Gen-X trends and a direct reversal of boomer youth behavior.
Scan this Book!
Kevin Kelly
The author provides an enlightening picture of the transformation in the knowledge base that is occurring via the book scanning projects currently being undertaken by various organizations, Google included. The creation of this truly democratic library, offering every book to every person, provides a significant conrexy for educational debate about the nature of schooling.
The Art of the Start
Guy Kawasaki
Whilst this book is primarily intended as a guide for starting a new business, very many of the strategies Kawasaksi recommends apply equally well to getting a laptop initiative started. If you believe that a one-to-one program is like a startup then the ideas presented will resonate for you.
The Kids of the '90's: Learning to Learn with Multimedia Internet Technologies
Idit Harel
Idit Harel discusses the nature of children who are growing up and learning with multimedia technologies. What is different and special about these children? And, most importantly for educators, how can we build the best multimedia learning experiences for them?
The Understanding by Design Handbook
Jay McTighe and Grant Wiggins
This handbook is the companion book to Understanding by Design (ASCD, 1998). Understanding by Design provides the conceptual foundation for a theory of understanding that is based on six facets of understanding. The handbook offers the practical side: a unit planning template, worksheets, exercises, design tools, design standards and tests, and a peer review process for learning and applying the ideas in Understanding by Design.
Transforming Learning: An anthology of miracles in technology-rich classrooms
Bruce Dixon and Jenny Little
This book is about a learning transformation that started in one classroom in 1989 and has grown to impact more than 150,000 students in more than ten countries around the world. The book is both a collection of the experiences of some great educators as they passed through a very challenging time in their professional careers, and also a snapshot of learning in so many more classrooms. Transforming Learning is built around three main themes; sharing tales from the classroom, reflections from teachers on the change processes that they had to go through, and some analysis of learning styles and the way in which learning must change as a result of having this type of access to technology.
Transforming Schools with Technology
Andrew A. Zucker
This book provides readers with dozens of illustrations of constructive ways that schools are using computers, the Internet, and related digital tools. Zucker's book uses a framework of six educational goals as a way to better understand how schools use technology to meet the multiple aims policymakers have established for them. One of the important consequences of using these goals as a framework is to clarify thinking and conversations about the important roles technology is playing in schools.
