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Bury your head in the sand One change I would like to see schools embrace is a commitment to educating tomorrow’s citizens with the tools those citizens will need during their lifetimes. Every private school is essentially a business. The clients are parents of students, who will shop elsewhere if they are not offered a competitive, 21st century education for their children. This lack of strategic thinking is due to the industrial age focus of many schools.

Unfortunately, the feelings of frustration reach throughout many schools, and already several teachers, staff, and students have expressed their intent to go elsewhere in subsequent years. Albert Einstein is known to have said, “Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.” That is industrial education. We have different needs, a different era, different jobs, a different playing field, but we are preparing students over and over again using an outdated model. There are zero efforts to work on this change in most schools.

Instead of adhering to an outdated paradigm, schools could consider how they could contribute to societal change, how they could attract and keep families, and how they could influence faculty, staff, and students. Although evidence of paradigm shifts are currently seen elsewhere in society, organized K-12 education is still holding onto the outdated model. Those private schools that shift paradigms will attract paying customers (parents) and will be successful in the long term. Those that hid their heads in the sand will lose economically.

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Posted by Lisa Durff at 9:36 PM 0 comments Links to this post 
We are our brothers' keeper

This young man says it succinctly

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NetGenEd Keynote by author Willow Dea Willow Dea, M.S. OTR, will deliver the NetGenEd Keynote on May 18, 2011 at 8:06am Central Time or Wednesday, May 18, 2011 at 13:00:00 live in Elluminate. Willow holds both a BA and an MA in Occupational Therapy as well as several certifications in her field.  Willow is passionate about transformational practice and its impact on education.   She is the editor of Igniting Brilliance: Integral Education in the 21st Century and currently works as an administrator at the Khabele School in downtown Austin, Texas.
The Flat Classroom™ Projects are global, collaborative projects which focus on the use of Web 2.0 tools to foster connections, communications, collaborations and creations. These award winning, international, wiki-centric projects include the Flat Classroom™ project, the NetGenEd™ Project, the Eracism Project™, the Horizon project, and Digiteen™ all founded by Julie Lindsay,  E-Learning Coordinator at Beijing (BISS) International School, China and Victoria Davis, teacher and the IT director at Westwood Schools in Camilla, Georgia.  These two ladies are the cofounders of the Flat Classroom Conference, which convened in Beijing, China during the past two years in February.

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Paint the Grid Purple 2011 technorati tags: RFL Redheads SL

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All Shook Up!

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