Category Archives: Guest Posts
Innovating with The Electric Company — Words from a Cooney Center Prize Winner
September 27, 2010
I was asked by the Cooney Center to share my thoughts about winning this year’s Prize for Breakthroughs in Literacy Learning: Innovate with The Electric Company. When I found out we won, I immediately called my wife and kids to let them know. I have four kids and the three oldest — Hannah (7), Isaac (5) and Josh (3) — are huge, I mean really huge, Electric Company fans. My youngest, Gabriella (1), is too young for TV, but I’m…
Tech Supported Tools to Foster Kids Creativity
August 23, 2010
In our last post we described how theories of creativity and learning should be integrated with creative problem solving approaches to address our nation’s creativity crisis. Recent advances in technology are enabling creators of children’s digital media to design more experiences that foster children’s creativity and learning. Although children’s digital media producers are beginning to create products for children that are marketed as creative tools, there is still a lack of mechanisms that have fully captured the type of open-ended,…
Using Alternative Assessment Models to Empower Youth-directed Learning
October 23, 2009
This post originally appeared on the Breakthrough Learning in a Digital Age blog. Tashawna is a high school senior in Brooklyn, NY. In the morning she leaves home for school listening to her MP3s, texting her friends about meeting up after school at Global Kids, where she participates in a theater program, or FIERCE, the community center for LGBT youth. On the weekend she’ll go to church and, on any given day, visit MySpace and Facebook as often…