21st Century Educational Leadership

Out $marting the Interactive WhiteBoard. By Kenneth Willers The transformation to 21 st Century instruction is being dominated by the integration of interactive technologies. Over the past few years, classrooms, entire schools and school districts have been investing thousands of dollars into interactive technologies for classroom adoption. The most common device being installed in classrooms all over the globe is the interactive whiteboard. The instructional benefits of the interactive whiteboard have been well documented and highly praised by many classroom teachers. The ability of a teacher or a student to interact with the classroom whiteboard, to view, manipulate and demonstrate content, to browse the internet with a single tap, to record lessons for web posting and to interact with educational software that engages the student, are all features of the interactive whiteboard that makes its use in the learning environment a valuable tool for 21 st Century instruct

S cience T echnology E ngineering   A rt M ath “I can build a computer doing this with Piper.” said one of 7 th grade students, “This is so cool!” Piper, a start-up gaming company, is designing kits that allow students to assemble their working computers and begin their journey into creating lights, motors and DIY hardware. Piper is currently partnering with the Madeleine to bring engineering into the school’s STEM curriculum. Mr. Willers describes Piper this way, “Think: Erector-Set meets Minecraft. Where you build in the real world and create in the virtual.”   Mr. Willers met the co-founders of Piper at an EdTech Summit, hosted by BrightBytes (a technology company that measures the impact of technology on learning and education) this fall in SF. At the summit Mr. Willers commented when he saw the kits, “Our students would love this. So many of our students are doing Minecraft anyway, lets bring what they’re doing at home into the learning that’s happening at scho