How’s this for the biggest no-brainer of 2012: If you want to know what’s working – or not – in classrooms, ASK TEACHERS!

So if that’s so obvious, how come asking teachers isn’t part of the routine in our schools?

• Want to know how a math curriculum is working? Ask teachers.
• Want to know about great new Web 2.0 tools for classrooms? Ask teachers.
• Want to know best practices in blended learning? Yup, you guessed it. Ask teachers.

It’s high time that we treat teachers like the front line experts they are.

It’s high time that we pull together tens of thousands of their opinions to create a new “crowd-sourced” data set on what’s working in schools.

It’s high time for teachers to have a say in what tools, texts, and technology schools purchase and how publishers and ed tech vendors develop the next generation of great learning products.

Introducing TeacherView Report Cards

ClassroomWindow’s mission is to make teachers the new power-brokers in education.  So we’re thrilled to announce our inaugural TeacherView Report Card.

The topic of our first Report Card is Math Textbooks, a subject that creates controversy in almost every community in the US given how important math instruction is to our future.

We want to hear what teachers have to say about the curricula they use everyday.

• What’s working?
• What’s not?
• For which kids?

The results of this survey will be published by ClassroomWindow as the first TeacherView Report Card on Math Textbooks.

The first 1,000 math teachers that take this anonymous survey will receive a copy of the final report and a $10 gift card to Amazon to give you a jumpstart on your summer reading.

It takes just minutes to complete the survey — and just minutes to change the status quo!

What if you had an opportunity to start a school from scratch? And what if you could develop a curriculum for that school without having to worry about any state tests, SATs or the like?  What would your school be like and what would you teach your students?  Author J.K. Rowling had this opportunity – maybe we could learn something from her example.

For those of you who are unfamiliar with Harry Potter, Rowling “started” Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, one of a few schools in Europe that prepares the next generation of witches and wizards for life in the wizarding world.  If you have children over the age of 6, you’re probably familiar with the school’s curriculum, which includes core subjects such as Arithmancy (Math), Astronomy (Science), and History of Magic (History).  But it also includes Care of Magical Creatures (Environmental Studies), Herbology (Agronomy), Charms (Persuasive Speaking), Divination (Creative Problem Solving), Flying (Transportation Studies), Potions (Medical Studies), and Muggle Studies (International Relations).

If we roll with my “real world” version of the Hogwarts curriculum, we’d end up with students who have fundamental Math and Science skills with a firm grasp of history and its lessons for present-day.  But we’d also have students who are prepared to tackle some of the most pressing challenges of our time: protecting the environment, feeding and caring for an explosively growing population, creating cost-effective and energy efficient ways to move people from place to place, and resolving cross-border conflicts.  And what’s more, they’d have the ability to clearly articulate their solutions and convince others to join them.

A bit of a stretch?  Absolutely.  But Rowling is on to something with her Hogwarts curriculum that not only teaches the basics but also immerses students in hands-on problem-solving and practical skill development.  It’s amazing how far a little imagination can go.  We muggles have a lot to learn…

When early Christians were being persecuted for their disruptive new religious beliefs, they greeted each other in the street by drawing a simple fish in the sand with their feet.  That image of the fish has remained an iconic symbol of Christianity for 2,000 years, eclipsed perhaps only by the cross.  We’re on the cusp of another major disruption to orthodoxy and it has to do with the way children learn.  Until now we’ve had no choice but to accept a model of learning in which a few teachers teach lots of kids a homogenized curriculum.  And then we created homogenized tests to determine whether our homogenized teaching resulted in homogenized outcomes that would allow them to succeed in a homogenized workplace.

The recent uproar over the utterly nonsensical New York State test question about the pineapple and the hare comes at a perfect time. Emerging learning technology promises to fundamentally change the way students learn and teachers teach by allowing every student to follow customized learning paths leading to different outcomes. And this technology frees teachers to support each student’s unique learning needs rather than attempting to get every student to some mushy middle.  Rather than producing an army of youngsters who think alike, we can now develop students whose learning is constrained only by their ability and effort, not by the pages in a textbook.

But let’s be clear: revolutions are disruptive by their nature and threaten those who have power and are afraid to lose it.  Technology will enable a power shift to teachers and students and away from administrators and publishers.  This is good for learning but it’s going to be messy.  Perhaps this revolution, like those that have come before it, needs an icon.  Maybe it should be a symbol of the silliness of the current system.  How about a pineapple?

Calling all teachers, education administrators, students, and parents!

We need your help! We’re looking to compile the ultimate list of education technology resources and want to reward you for helping us out. This isn’t just a token $5 gift card to a gas station though, we want to give you an iPad 3! Yes, that’s a 3. As soon as the next generation iPad becomes available, we’ll send it to a lucky winner randomly chosen from all entries.

How To Enter

Just visit our contest entry form at Edudemic.com by clicking here.

It will walk you through the different ways you can enter. If you’ve entered but want a better chance at that iPad, you can share more education technology resources with us in the comments of that page on Edudemic. You can enter as many times as you like! Each resource counts as one entry.

The contest ends on March 31, 2012 or as soon as the next generation iPad is announced. Since Apple is super secretive about these kind of things, we’re estimating it’ll happen sometime in March. Therefore, we’ll do the drawing the day after the iPad announcement or 3/31/12, whichever comes first.