What's a good way to encourage ed-tech in schools and reform the way students think about education? Make tech nerdiness cool, says this article from Wired magazine.
Alex Grodd, who runs BetterLesson.com, which allows teachers to share their lesson plans with each other, argues that the driving force behind most students is a desire to be "cool" and fit in with the crowd. "The best schools," says Grodd, "are able to make learning cool, so the cool kids are the ones who get As. That's an art."
The article goes on to describe some of the techniques that schools have used to make geekiness hip, like encouraging students to create lots of projects and displaying them around the classroom as well as eliminating the separation between teachers and students by taking out teachers' lounges and bathrooms, in order to give students plenty of interaction with potential role models.
It sounds sort of silly on the surface, but at the heart of it, any environment in which being smart and doing well in school is valued is certainly a positive educational atmosphere. Check it out here.
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