I love Megan’s comment about Khan academy etc as being glorified textbooks. At the end of the day these resources still promote direct instruction so where is the collaboration and developing communication skills with this type of learning. I would call this “individualized” learning rather than personalized. I am not a fan!

At this point I had to go find out a little more about this individual and listened to this interview https://soundcloud.com/deadpundits/ep-13-class-war-in-the-classroom-socialist-education-policy-w-megan-erickson-kilpatrick-kenzo-shibata with her. So largely, she is not going to like skinner’s theories or Khan Academy, private schools, one parents ability to by their kid a baby Einstein item over another who can’t, or anything that might make a distinction between the ability of students. Everything is class warfare…as a matter of fact that was the interview title I listened to. She is entitled to her opinion but she has such a large bone to pick it is difficult to take her seriously.

I found this section a little hard to follow, but I think at one point they talked about how tuition was upwards of 25% of the average families income to attend these charter schools. These schools have a lot more funding and therefore resources as far as tech and quality teachers. The costs also confine the availability to a select few of higher income families which automatically increases the likelyhood of success for the students. This pressure on families to find a way to pay for “better” education is what has been fueling the college increase in cost and will do the same for k-12 if charter schools are given public funding.

She starts this by saying the adoption rate of technology is low because teachers can’t do it basically because of the testing regime then, says well, really the problems was how they implemented the technology, no PD and 40 min lesson on how to use it. After this she talks about the dystopian future as laid out by Skinner and the teaching machine. This is one of the few points with which I agreed with her. She furthers this with the discussion of the need for collaboration and that the use of technology is only marginally personalized in its current use. This would be easier had I picked up on the grade level. But my suspicion is that at lower grade level a non-quantifiable amount “small” is probably acceptable in "personalized"learning for students and probably reduces the instructor burden in order to achieve focused learning for groups appropriate to their ability. I don’t see that as so bad. For a brief period of time some kids are in a small group setting with the teacher receiving more personalized attention. Where’s the problem?

Megan describes a class design that promotes no interaction- students sitting in isolation. We need to be teaching students 21st C skills and this type of classroom design is still “individualized” learning which is not necessarily a good thing. How does social constructivism fits in? Are we just trying to encourage students to absorb and regurgitate knowledge?

There are a small number of people worldwide who are leading the education reform however unfortunately the majority of teachers are teaching the way they were taught. I love to use this example of how little progress has been made in education:
If a doctor from 50 years ago was to visit a hospital now, operations, procedures and equipment would be hard to recognize because of the exponential growth in technology in medicine. If a teacher from 50 years ago were to visit a classroom now what differences would they see? I think very little, sadly!