7 Essential Principles of Innovative Learning

A recent article on Mind Shift titled, "7 Essential Principles of Innovative Learning," by Katrina Schwartz talks about principles to keep in mind to engage students in learning. In her writing she includes a few very good observations about the need to learn how to be a self-directed lifelong learner. Below are a few excerpts. “Adaptive expertise tries to push beyond the idea of mastery,” said Jennifer Groff, an educational engineer and co-founder of the Center for Curriculum Redesign. “You may be proficient, but without adaptive expertise you can get stuck very quickly as the world shifts.” “You may be proficient, but without adaptive expertise you can get stuck very quickly as the world shifts.” She ends the article with a brief description of an innovative learning environment, "Students aren’t broken up into grade levels, instead they learn in mixed-age groups as well as in groups of roughly the same age. Learning is directed by students, often project-based, evaluated primarily through writing and projects, self-assessments and peer-assessment. The schedule is periodic, focusing on a topic like geography or history for three to four weeks and crossing into multiple disciplines. The teacher is seen as an active mentor and coordinator and the school has active parental involvement."

Contact us know if you discover a TOEP resource that should be added or removed

For today's exercise I chose to explore the blog/wiki section. Since TOEP is a collaborative project among a number of SUNY campuses there are individuals who are writing up the content and curating the resources that come from a variety of backgrounds and experiences. This collaborative development is a very rewarding process and we are all learning quite a bit from each other as we pool our knowledge bases. 

Through TOEP I discovered the Chronicle of Higher Ed Blogs where I stumbled onto an idea I plan to try out.

"When I sit next to a friend in a conference audience who has never collaboratively written anything in Google Docs and suggest we take notes together."

I anticipate that this experiment may lead to some insights about the conference sessions that I may not discover on my own and to new thoughts about the collaborative writing process.

As I was reviewing the content of the blog/wiki section I made further refinements to tweak and narrow down to just the very best resources. If anyone ever has input regarding a link that may not have be most relevant or up-to-date, or better yet if you stumble on a tremendous resource that is not included, make sure to contact the TOEP team to let us know. This is the best way to make the TOEP pilot project the most effective learning resource for everyone involved.

Use Google searches to access custom Tech Support

I found this cartoon titled, "Tech Support Cheat Sheet," created by XKCD, a webcomic of romance, sarcasm, math, and language. 

This cartoon gives great advice. One of the best ways to get your own customized tech support is to do a Google search for a few key words relating to your problem. If you are getting an error, include a few words from the error in your search. Enclose a phrase from the error in quotes to narrow down the results. Another trick I use is to use the Search Tools to limit the time period to just results in the past year. This helps ensure I get results that are for a current version of the software or tool in question.

Follow me by email

I added the Google Gadget to my blog to allow others to follow my posts by email. This is one way you can keep up to date. I'll add posts about TOEP and inclued tips about some of the tools. You can also bookmark or subscribe using RSS. If the TOEP team needs to share critical info we will send out email.

The order of the TOEP sections have been modified to move the more difficult concepts later on. The section on RSS and social bookmarks are now further down in the list. If you already finished these sections that's great. We also made the RSS discovery excercise simpler.

These changes came about as a result of feedback we received. Please continue to let us know what changes you think would make TOEP the most effective for your professional development needs, which is the goal of this TOEP pilot.