Bold Schools Wrap-up: HS PTA Coffee

At yesterday's PTA coffee Gila Fregonesi and I presented information on academic program changes that we believe will positively impact students in the classes of 2015 and 2016. We also discussed Will Richardson's concept of Bold Schools. Below is the presentation from yesterday's coffee and a summary of some of the comments from our discussion. Feel free to watch Will's TEDxMelbourne talk and respond to the following survey.


 A brief summary of the comments from yesterday's meeting is below:

• The world is changing and technology must be embraced and integrated into education. We cannot teach the way that we did before.
• In today's world students are connected to a larger world. A classroom without walls. Helps students become citizens of the world.
• Learning is constant and it happens anytime, anywhere for students, teachers and parents. 
• Learning in schools has to be connected to real life. Have to look for ways to integrate studies into real world work.
• We need to make a paradigm shift that teachers to focus on learning, not teaching.
• Questioning is constant and students have to take a systemic view instead of focusing on specific content. 

 What are your thoughts on the Bold school ideas that Will Richardson presents? Feel free to join the conversation by commenting and/or taking the survey.

November 28th HS PTA Coffee - We're Flipping the Meeting

Many of you have probably heard about "Flipping" instruction in the classroom and some of you have seen what this means for your son/daughter at home. This month we are going experiment with flipping the HS PTA Coffee. As I have mentioned in several Gazette posts the topic for the meeting is Graded as a Bold School. The idea of the Bold Schools comes from Will Richardson who will be presenting at the Innovate 2013 Conference.  Your assignment is to watch Will's video from TedxMelbourne (see below) and to read his short blog post on Bold Schools.

To start the discussion you can submit comments, here, on the blog. You don't even have to attend the meeting to participate in the conversation. The blog then serves as a tool for extending the conversation outside of the traditional PTA meeting. The learning doesn't only have to happen on Wednesday and you don't even need to be there to participate. This is one aspect of blended learning and the "Flipped Meeting".

Meeting Note: We'll be using laptops for part of the meeting so bring your laptop (we will also provide school laptops). Looking forward to learning together on Wednesday, November 28 from 8:30 - 10:00 am in room E12.