Changing Education Paradigms: Do schools destroy creativity?

Changing Education Paradigms: Do schools destroy creativity?

Now knowledge--not minerals or agricultural products or manufactured goods--is this country's most precious commodity, and people who are information literate--who know how to acquire knowledge and use it--are world's most valuable resources.


Changing Education Paradigms: Do schools destroy creativity?

To respond effectively to an ever-changing environment, people need more than just a knowledge base, they also need techniques for exploring it, connecting it to other knowledge bases, and making practical use of it.

Information Literacy is defined as the ability to access, evaluate, and use information from a variety of sources. As students prepare for the 21st century, traditional instruction in reading, writing, and mathematics needs to be coupled with practice in communication, critical thinking, and problem solving skills.

In an information literate environment, students engage in active, self-directed learning activities, and teachers facilitate students' engagement through a more adventurous style of instructional delivery. Students involved in information literate activities.

Example of effective Video Education in Math

Salman Khan talks about how and why he created the remarkable Khan Academy, a carefully structured series of educational videos offering complete curricula in math and, now, other subjects. He shows the power of interactive exercises, and calls for teachers to consider flipping the traditional classroom script -- give students video lectures to watch at home, and do "homework" in the classroom with the teacher available to help.

In 2004, Salman Khan, a hedge fund analyst, began posting math tutorials on YouTube. Six years later, he has posted more than 2.000 tutorials, which are viewed nearly 100,000 times around the world…

Why you should listen to him:

Salman Khan is the founder and faculty of the Khan Academy (www.khanacademy.org)-- a not-for-profit organization with the mission of providing a free world-class education to anyone, anywhere. It now consists of self-paced software and, with over 1 million unique students per month, the most-used educational video repository on the Internet (over 30 million lessons delivered to-date). All 2000+ video tutorials, covering everything from basic addition to advanced calculus, physics, chemistry and biology, have been made by Salman.

Prior to the Khan Academy, Salman was a senior analyst at a hedge fund and had also worked in technology and venture capital. He holds an MBA from Harvard Business School, an M.Eng and B.S. in electrical engineering and computer science from MIT, and a B.S. in mathematics from MIT.

The Secret Powers of Time: How the young people learn?

Teachers trying to create an information literate environment for their students have given up the view that teaching is telling, that learning is absorbing, and that knowledge is static.

They engage in collaborative activities, which enrich their own professional development and their students' learning experiences. They seek the expertise of their school library media specialists as partners in the curriculum planning process.