Although this is years away for public schools (due to cost), we can't wait to introduce and share this type of technology with our students.

Love the quote from this video:

"Anytime you change the way that you see things, it changes the way that you understand them.  As soon as you can change someone's understanding, then they can change the way that they see the world."

Of course, there is the "budget" way of doing this as well:

1. We have an information fetish that causes us to confuse education with media. Better digital ‘interactive learning content’ is great, but anyone who says it’s a fix-all is trying to sell you something.

2. We’re obsessively infatuated with our own technological creations. We forget that although our tools have gotten very sophisticated, our ways of thinking haven’t really changed so much.

3. We are really good at throwing away obsolete tech toys, but we stink at throwing away thought paradigms. This is the shadow side of our archival genius.

4. We’ve taught our kids that life is boring. And if they’re not excited and passionate about life, it really doesn’t matter how much ‘content’ they’ve memorized or how many ‘skills’ they’ve mastered.

5. Grown-ups have an inferiority complex. We’re so scared of losing our authority that most schools are set up as big lies to trick kids into thinking adults are experts.

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"What are the biggest obstacles to changing education? Some are economic. Others are infrastructural. Few are technological. The most significant challenges are philosophical. We are wedded to particular ways of thinking about school and learning and life that are limiting our ability to best serve our children.

The way we live in the world is changing. Therefore, education also needs to change. Don’t believe the popular rhetoric, our schools are not “failing.” But they are also not..."

Read more @ Forbes

Milpitas Unified embarked on our journey to build our new elementary school and with our student, staff, parent, and community input, we will see the realization of the question: "If you could build any school, what would you build?"
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"When I got the call 18 months ago from Achievement First to help design a “next-generation” school model, it was a school designer’s dream. Achievement First has been running great schools serving low-income kids in New York, Connecticut, and Rhode Island for 15 years. They embodied the profile of the “successful incumbent”: well-established schools which rarely want to take big innovation risks. And yet, a place like Achievement First has built such incredible wisdom and capacity for running great schools, what might it mean to combine that wisdom with a fresh approach to doing school? And so, we began our journey to design and build the “Greenfield” model. Imagine an open, green field with nothing on it; if you could build any school what you build?"

Read more on edSurge

"A growing number of American schools are ditching the 19th century—when it comes to the school calendar that is.  Twice as many schools today have a longer school day or year than just two years ago and, for the first, more of them are traditional public schools than charter schools, according to a joint report released Thursday by the Boston-based National Center on Time and Learning (NCTL) and the Denver-based Education Commission of the States.

Of the 2,009 schools that had expanded learning time last year, 1,208—or 61 percent—were regular public schools. That's almost a total flip from 2012, when there were 1,079 schools with additional time and 56 percent of them were charters.

The number of students attending charter and non-charter extended learning time schools has also doubled during that period, from 520,000 to nearly 1.2 million. 

Jennifer Davis, president of NCTL, said the shift indicates that charter schools are fulfilling their mission as centers of innovation in education whose successes can be models for traditional public schools.

"Every high-performing charter school in America has more time," Davis told Education Week. "That's the only way they have been able to show that kind of educational gains for their students."

An interactive database developed by NCTL shows that schools in 44 states and the District of Columbia have added at least 30 minutes to their school day or 10 days to their academic year.  

Some have gone well beyond that. So far, 41 schools in five states increased the school year by..."

Read more @ Education Week
Related article | Longer School Year: Will It Help Or Hurt U.S. Students?

Michael Horn provides his insights on innovation from his new book, Blended.
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"When it comes to innovation in education, there is a tension.

Some educators express concern about innovating when children are involved. Innovation implies experimentation and uncertainty. Aren’t “disruptive innovation” or even “breakthrough sustaining innovations” too risky to pursue in schools given that the well-being of children is at stake?

Other educators come at it from the opposite perspective. Believing that current schools aren’t good enough for students, they think avoiding innovation in schools is akin to malpractice.

In our new book, Blended: Using Disruptive Innovation to Improve Schools, Heather Staker and I devote a chapter to sketching out a way to innovate that takes into account the truth in both positions: the need for caution in unpredictable innovations, and the need for innovation to improve how educators serve students."

Read more on edSurge