A Note to E-learning "Nay Sayers"

E-learning is here to stay.  You may as well buy into it, get good at it, and add your voice to the

conversation.  "Nay Sayers" are viewed as obstructionists. You don't want to be "one of those people".

Is e-learning the magic bullet?  No.  The magic is in you. The magic is in your students.    

There are, however, some really good reasons to develop the e-learning option in your room.

• Front-loading content saves classroom time for activities and performance-based assessments.
• It allows students to explore and create.
• Online activities can be differentiated to meet student capacity.
• The quiet students in your classroom may feel more comfortable engaging with their peers (and you), in an online forum.
• Forget the copy machine.  Your carbon footprint just got smaller. 

These are just a few important reasons why jumping on the e-learning bandwagon makes sense. No, e-learning isn't a magic bullet. But, it just might prove to be an asset that improves student learning and engagement. Isn't that what your classroom is all about?

Flipping or Flipping Out?

What if we REALLY flipped it? What if our current workforce was infused with the ideas, gifts, and interests of today's students, instead of the other way around?

Currently,  unless a youngster is a gifted entrepreneur, it takes 40 to 50 years for the average person to have any sort of impact on the bureaucracy of business and government. For young people, this is a grueling and exhausting path that squashes motivation and desire.

The age of technology has shown that we are still a country of innovators and pioneers. Yet, we grind our children through a seemingly endless process of practice runs and assessments before we let them try out their own ideas. Honestly, our mistakes are really pretty glaring.  It doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out that we have a host of economic, political, and environmental problems.

We need to quit tinkering with education and find ways to engage students in solving the problems that face their generation, right now. We need to bring them to the table much earlier and reward them. 

Flipping, in this sense, requires a change in the way we overlap and infuse education and work. There needs to be multiple avenues into the real world that students can access at much younger ages.  We can't really afford to wait.  What we are doing now is simply wasting one of most valuable resources: the gifts, interests, and ideas of our young.