WorkReadyClassroom Blog

A focus on education and entrepreneurship has been seen recently as a means to prepare youth for careers as well as engage young adults in injecting innovation into the marketplace. Just last week Small Business Administrator Karen Mills and Secretary of Education, Arne Duncan, engaged individuals in a twitter conversation on starting a new business, loan repayment options and funding for entrepreneurs.  In addition another entrepreneurial program gaining national attention is the Euro Challenge.  The Euro Challenge is an experiential learning program and contest engaging high school students in real world international economic issues while offering interactions with international economic leaders.  Both initiatives are clearly supporting marketplace innovation and learning through collaborative media and  unconventional methods.

Understanding educational attainment- from transfer patterns to effective instruction methods has been a noticeable trend seen in both secondary and post-secondary education. How do students learn? What increases depth of knowledge? How do students achieve their educational goals?  These are just some of the key questions around some of the recent work.

In terms of what’s happening inside the classroom the launch of Harvard’s Initiative on Learning and Teaching (HILT), has engaged instructors in examining effective methods of ensuring the highest level of knowledge acquisition. HILT looks to encourage instructors to pilot innovative and engaging teaching strategies that encourage greater depth of knowledge for students.  One such strategy currently being explored is peer instruction.  Peer instruction focuses on teaching through questioning and collaborative interaction.

How about a student’s path to a degree? The trajectory of individual degree attainment was the focus of a study by the National Student Clearing House Research Center, “Transfer and Mobility: A National View of Pre-Degree Student Movement in Postsecondary Institutions”. The report looked at transfer trends and found that a third of all college-goers transfer before graduating and many transfer to Community Colleges. Student mobility is just one aspect of degree attainment currently being examined.

Who knew your doodling is actually an impactful learning tool.  Multiple sectors, including the education and business fields, have taken note of the new ways learning and communicating are occurring in our information saturated digital world.  Visual literacy is being touted as a new 21st Century learning skill and the implications and applications for embracing visual strategies for learning and communication are diverse.

In a previous post infographics were examined as a strategy to communicate information, however this is just one way to think about visual literacy and the opportunities for utilizing visuals in learning and messaging. Doodling is another form to consider.  Mind Shift highlights a recent article by Science, where doodling was studied and identified as an effective means for students to grapple with science topics and to garner a fuller understanding of concepts. The linking of observation and application is not a new idea as seen in work out of MIT, “Drawing to Learn Science: Legacies of Agassi”.  Additional studies, as noted in Mind Shift, have highlighted other educational benefits of encouraging students to engage in learning through doodling. For example the study noted above found that individuals increased their information retention by doodling while listening to a speaker.

Doodling and creating visualizations have other implications as seen in the business fields embrace of drawing to convey messages, organize projects and convene key stakeholders. The Doodle Revolution highlights these uses as seen in numerous doodle postings.  One in particular that stands out is the featured doodle work from the Rockefeller Foundation where a multi-sector team, the Rockefeller Foundation and CEOs for Cities, convened and thought through local city-centered issues. Zappos and Dell are among a number of others implementing strategic doodling.

From creating opportunities to provide greater depth of knowledge to a means to convene and create, doodling has many uses to consider both inside and outside of the classroom. Try a doodle, a drawing or a story board and see the value of visual literacy and learning.

Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, Google+… the list goes on and on in terms of the social media outlets available to engage audiences and to disseminate information. With the advent of 21st Century Skills and Learning come a multitude of options at educators fingertips to jump start the creative and innovative instructor within. Though it may appear daunting to keep up with the latest and greatest the opportunity each new tool poses and the opportunity to truly engage youth in a new way is worth the continual exploration.

Facebook, known best for the ability to follow friends’ activity, is also a platform for creative instruction. In a recent article by MindShift, 50 reasons for incorporating Facebook into your curriculum and teaching are explored.  Some of the highlights include the ability to keep students engaged in the work, share a common calendar and keep students who might miss classwork in the loop. The social networking site has also been seen as a means to ease post-secondary transitions allowing for pre-orientation inquiries and providing an opportunity to form connections before freshmen reach campus.

The launch of Google+, the latest social networking platform released by Google, is another option. Just a few ways Google+ is being seen as a vital 21^st Century learning tool include: the ability to organize communications groups via the “circles” feature allowing for class-specific content dissemination; Spark, a way to engage students in the latest news on predefined topics and a downloadable feature making student portfolio creation easy to engage students and share information as well as promote collaboration.

Tumblr, provides yet another platform to allow for student input and sharing in a new easy-to-use format. One key aspect of Tumblr is it allows for multimedia sharing.  The uses for education are endless from creating student portfolios to having a place to post and respond to projects and more.