“When I see global collaboration in many classrooms, it’s a project of one video conference with all the kids watching a big screen,” November said. “It’s not 15 to 20 times a day. The use of technology in schools is fairly far removed from the use of technology in the workforce. My sense is that you need the 15 to 20 times a day [to have an impact.] … We need teachers who really have ongoing relationships with other teachers all around the world, where there’s a constant checking-in with other students, and that’s what seems to be missing even when people have the tools.”
“It’s no longer about learning the curriculum,” DiScipio said. “It’s how students will apply and share what they’ve learned in a global digital economy and how that will impact what they do later on.”
“We have the opportunity every day to have authentic conversations with students in any country,” November said. “I want to be wrong on this, but I just don’t think this country has the urgency, and I’m going to say that maybe we don’t even have the capacity, to innovate [like] other countries do. I think part of it has to do with our culture. American education doesn’t prepare teachers the way other countries do.”
Referring to Harvard’s Eric Mazur, who performed some of the first flipped learning work in the country, he said: “Mazur says the single most important information any teacher can have to [create] lesson plans are the questions of students.”
He added: “If you have an online community, it is so essential that teachers collect questions every day from every student, to do an analysis on how to organize the learning ecology for the next day.”
Professional development for social learning communities should extend beyond the technical, November said, and delve into “what we can do with information and relationships that we could never do before.”
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