Administrators at Risk Tools and Technologies for Securing Your Future

This handbook provides innovative ideas for enhancing a learning community for students and faculty and offers administrators a blueprint for surviving into the next decade. The book argues that we are witnessing the final phase of “smokestack education,” an outmoded approach to schooling that was designed to fuel an industrial society’s need for assembly-line workers. As we enter the Information Age, new technologies are revolutionizing the ways in which people learn. The inadequacy and irrelevance of the “smokestack” educational paradigm necessitates a shift to the “information age” paradigm. Eighteen chapters present information on the following: the role of technology in restructuring; the use of Channel 1 to teach visual literacy; how to engender a change ethic in the next generation; the use of “hyper-navigating” to learn critical-thinking skills; the effect of the word processor on student writing; benefits of integrated learning systems and computer-assisted instruction; the design of environments suited to new technologies; student-centered learning; evaluation of new technologies; and open-minded shared decision making. An underlying theme of the chapters is the belief in the value of teaching children to ask their own questions and the potential of new technologies to support such independent questioning. (LMI)