Learning Futures on I.C.E. - Innovation, Creativity and Entrepreneurship

We’ve taught you that the earth is round,
That red and white make pink,
And something else that matters more — 
We’ve taught you how to think.”

Survey results published Tuesday reveal that ongoing professional development and keeping up with the “future of work” are the top challenges K-12 technology educators will face in 2019.

The survey, part of the Consortium for School Networking’s “Driving K-12 Innovation” initiative, asked nearly 100 teachers, administrators and and stakeholders to comment on three aspects of their K-12 classroom experience related to technology: the “hurdles,” the “accelerators” and the “enablers.”

“By highlighting the key challenges and opportunities — with an eye toward future implications — our findings should encourage meaningful discussions on the actions needed to enhance teaching and learning environments,” Irene Spero, chief external relations officer for CoSN, said in a statement.

Genius Hour has three rules:

Students must start with an essential question that cannot be answered with a simple Google search.
Students must research their question using reputable websites, interviews, and/or print resources.
Students must create something. Their product may be digital, physical or service-oriented.

Indiana University's Mosaic Initiative, a program that supports innovative learning space design, research, and comprehensive support across the institution, regularly brings faculty voices to the design process when creating our active learning classrooms. To give those conversations a formal home, Mosaic recently held the inaugural Mosaic Design Symposium, a day of workshops and brainstorming about the future of IU's learning spaces.

In a first for education, Vector is exploring the use of “digital human” technology in its energy education programmes in primary schools.

In conjunction with New Zealand’s leading AI company Soul Machines, Vector has created Will, a “digital teacher” being trialed in its award-winning ‘Be Sustainable with Energy’ schools programme, which is offered free of charge to schools within Vector’s Auckland electricity network. The schools programme was launched in 2005 and has since educated more than 125,000 children about energy.

The newest students are transforming the way schools serve and educate them, including sending presidents and deans to Instagram and Twitter.

The project, which HP said has over 85,000 participants worldwide, brings together engineers, designers, artists, and students to address issues with a human colony on the red planet.

Part of Sydney Science Festival in National Science Week, The Innovation Games is a free event full of new ways to taste, touch and see science and technology in ACTION!

“Every great improvement has come after repeated failures. Virtually nothing comes out right the first time. Failures, repeated failures, are finger posts on the road to achievement. One fails forward toward success.”
Charles F. Kettering

"Data collection and management needs to be efficient and not a burden for teachers
The use of data must have a clear and positive impact on teaching and learning"

“It is about creating systems and cultures that enable organisation to learn from errors rather than being threatened by them.”
Matthew Syed

“Teaching needs an ecosystem that supports evidence-based practice. It will need better systems to disseminate the results of research more widely, but also a better understanding of research, so that teachers can be critical consumers of evidence.”

“We have to be very collaborative here,” agrees Sue Fletcher, a biomedical researcher at Murdoch University, also in Perth. “We’re a smaller city. We don’t have the same number of institutions with big expensive equipment, so the universities work together really well to access each others’ facilities.”

Data support this perspective. A 2016 report by Nature Index, which tracks scientific-article author affiliations, found that Curtin University and the University of Western Australia (UWA) formed Australia’s strongest collaboration between two research institutes, coming 73rd globally. No other Australian university made it into the list of the top 100 partnerships.

The data also showed that Curtin was the most collaborative Australian university overall.

“Collaboration comes naturally here,” says Robyn Owens, deputy vice-chancellor for research at UWA. “It’s only by doing that that we can ensure we have the appropriate research infrastructure in Western Australia.”

In future-focused learning, learners strive together to find and solve real-world problems that matter, and I’m thrilled to take part in seeing this remarkable transformation happen in schools all over the world. Making the shift to future-focused learning should be a joyful and curious experience for both you and your learners, after all.

This November, we invite you to join us Monday Nov. 19th to Tuesday Nov. 20th. in beautiful Richmond, British Columbia for a special 2-day workshop entitled Future-Focused Learning: 10 Essential Shifts of Everyday Practice. It’s designed to help guide you in your own shifts of practice and explore future-focused learning in a fun collaborative atmosphere with like-minded educators from all over the world.

As the education world continues its discussions about transformation and how it can meet the future needs of the businesses we own or run, it is helpful to know the personalities that are responsible for that transformation. One of the people that you should know–an industry heavyweight that has led the charge to transform our antiquated education system into a fully functioning real-world modern education system–is Samantha Adams Becker. Her influence is felt at every level in education, helping those who work in the trenches to win the war on complacency. She is a tireless promoter who writes and directs the narrative for the changes we demand in the business of education.

Three hundred audience members at the University of Southern California left their seats. They stood up, gathered into small groups, received decks of colorful cards, talked, and wrote. The groups comprised members from fields spanning education to urban planning and game development to linguistics. Over the course of the ten-hour workshop, a website filled up in real time with writing, photos, and artwork with as much diversity as its creators’ backgrounds — all describing the island nation of Rilao, which, strictly speaking, does not exist.

An Australian university team is creating a 3D-printed toolkit to assist with living and working on Mars.

Design is Not Going to Save the World: How Human-Centered Design is Failing Us. Human-centered design has become the go-to operating system for innovation. Unfortunately, it is inadequate to help us solve the really big…

Excerpt from You, Your Child, and School: Navigate Your Way to the Best Education by Sir Ken Robinson, Ph. D and Lou Aronica, published on March 13, 2018 by Viking, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. Copyright by Ken Robinson, 2018.