Worth Three Minutes of Your Time

Posted by Brian Greenberg on Jun 29, 2012 in Blog, Silicon Schools Fund

At BlendMyLearning, we are not in the business of advertising or promoting blended learning per se. We prefer to focus our lens on actual educators and have them write in their authentic voices about the real ups and downs of personalized learning.

But this little gem of a video is good enough that I’m going to take the risk in posting it.

Intel made a great three minute video that does as good a job as anything I’ve seen to show some of what the future of education could look like. Thanks to some Photoshop/CGI they’ve skipped a few years of real school R&D to show us a lot of the elements of good blended learning that many of us are championing: using tech tools in meaningful ways, getting students to truly interact with each other through projects, “bridging” the gap between home and school, creating makers lab spaces, bringing outside subject expertise into the classroom, and generally integrating technology for powerful results.

Now, for the reality break. This scenario is a long way off and well beyond the budget of most schools. And yes I know there are lots of things this video does not do. For example, it still supposes many of the traditional elements of school remain in place (27 students to a class, teacher in front of the “board”, traditional four wall classroom, etc.). In short, it focuses more on technology itself than on school redesign. But for a corporate entity, I’ll take my hat off to Intel. This is a compelling vision of what blended learning could start to look like.

Now let’s make it happen.

Written by Brian Greenberg

Chief Executive Officer for the Silicon Schools Fund