Category: Perspectives "From the Zones"

In this guest post Bob Bilyk, founder and former director Cyber Village Academy, a charter school in Saint Paul, envisions technology’s capacity to customize education for students. Now, the founder of LodeStar Learning, he argues most vendors’ curriculum is so expensive that teachers cannot mix and match curricula. He argues for a new type of school, and a new attitude that focuses on integrating the full capacities of technology to help both teachers and students access and effectively utilize Web-based information.

In this video Linda Peters, a lead teacher at the Advanced Language and Academic Studies (ALAS) bilingual high school in Milwaukee, describes how the school makes management and finance decisions by including teachers. ALAS has been able to function as a school run collectively by teachers because the Milwaukee school district and the local union agreed to grant the teachers autonomy and authority. The teachers saw the opportunity, and took it.

During this Great Recession a system that was already being squeezed is following the instinct of centrally-managed systems to harden. This may be the precise wrong thing to do. In this post a teacher-manager of a school argues more discretion should be given to the ‘users’ of the system to figure out how to best meet learning goals with the resources available.

Two professionals from the School of One sat down recently for a discussion with Education Innovating, about their experiences starting and working in an entirely new learning environment, merging newly-created software with unorthodox learning model and classroom design.