EDUTOPIA: Success Stories for Learning in the Digital Age

By The George Lucas Educational Foundation and Foundation

Here's a tantalizing glimpse into the classrooms of innovative educators who are using technology to connect with students, colleagues, the local community, and the world beyond. Edutopia offers a unique perspective on education in which technology is employed to make schools more exciting and dynamic for everyone involved -- students work on real-world projects and consult with the best outside experts; teachers learn by tapping into the best people and practices in their field; and classrooms regularly connect with the rich resources of their communities and the world beyond. A lively resource that teachers and parents will want to refer to again and again, Edutopia is filled with more than forty full-color photos, has a useful resource section, and comes with a unique CD-ROM that contains more than seventy minutes of video footage of these classrooms in action. "This book provides educators and parents alike with an unprecedented opportunity to see the future. We must support the efforts of these national heroes--teachers and students from primary and secondary education, foundation and community leaders--as they use technology to make our students and our nation more competitive." - Bob Kerrey, president, New School University and former United States Senator and chair of the Congressional Web-Based Education Commission "This book provides a glimpse of the future by showing us the best work of innovators today. Anyone involved in creating the schools of the future shoud read it." - Linda Darling-Hammond, professor, School of Education, Stanford University "Edutopia is an exciting guide to help teaching and learning move into the twenty-first century." - Richard Riley, former Secretary of Education

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0787960829
• ISBN13: 9780787960827
• Release Date: March 2002
• Publisher: Jossey-Bass
• Length: 256 Pages
• Weight: 1.90 lbs.
• Dimensions: 9.2" x 0.7" x 8.0"

Customer Reviews

CSULB ETEC551 Review

Edutopia is a book put together by the George Lucas Foundation in order to provide educators, parents, business and community leaders an opportunity to take a look at some of the success stories of innovative implementations of technology in the classroom. The overall goal of the book is to open the eyes of its readers to question what it truly means to be a teacher, what defines a student, and finally how our schools should be designed. The book achieves its goal through multiple sections of chapters broken down by their intended audience. Another nice thing is that the book comes with an accompanying cd-rom containing eleven short documentaries including topics such as project-based learning, assessment, emotional intelligence, and teacher preparation. It also features an interview with George Lucas on the topic of teachers and instruction. The accompanying cd-rom is a welcome addition to those who might wish to motivate peers or educators with videos of what is possible with technology. This book could be recommended to parents, educators, administration, community and business partners, anyone with involvement in the educational community.

Critical Starting Point for Global Transformation

I respectfully encourage all serious reviewers to avoid the video review option. The video review sacrifices both rapid scanning of diverse views, and the ability to create added value from automated text search. edutopia is a true gift to humanity from the George Lucas foundation. I consider the book and the DVD to be a superb starting pointfor the necessary global transformation. Chapter Nine discusses a dozen promising practices that work: 01 Peer Instruction 02 Cross-age tutoring 03 Bringing local experts into the classroom 04 Multi-age classrooms 05 Cooperative learning 06 Class-size reduction 07 Team teaching 08 Looping (teachers stay with same students for several years) 09 Block scheduling 10 Schools within schools 11 School teams 12 Community service This is a superbly crafted multi-media teaching tool that every teacher, parent, and administrator will learn from and be strengthened by. My only disappointment is that the book's sponsors and authors focused so narrowly on just the USA and how the wisdom in this book might be applied within our existing academic and vocational infrastructure. My own focus is on the five billion poor who do not have the time for 18 years of rote education. Simply by subsidizing cells phones and creating a global network of 100 million volunteers using Telelanguage.com, we could offer free education to the five billion poor, and our own population, "one cell call at a time." Education is the only way we can create stabilizing wealth--this excellent book set its sights too low.

Great Resource for Educators

This is one of those text books you have to keep. It's not expensive enough to be a text book in the first place. It has lots of great references to websites teachers should make use of. I've been passing the website information on to my computer literate teaching friends.

Eutopia--examining the present to discover the future

This is exactly what it promises to be --a very informative description of the best learning contexts that are being built with new technologies. Rather than celebrating the technology it focuses on the relationship between and among people and the way in which new forms of information and communication are reshaping these relationships.If you want to think beyond the two covers of a book and 4 walls of a classroom, if you want to redesign schools and their communities as places of serious, playful learning in social contexts, this book will push your thinking. Yes, this book (and the 11 short movies) celebrates learning. No, this book is a not a critical examination of research that validates the learning outcomes although, for some of these projects, such studies exist. A "success story" has value because it shows us how people have come to work together to create projects that push the boundaries past the routine. The purpose of these stories is to not simply to inform. We need stories like the ones in this book to inspire us, to energize us to move beyond what is now, and to realize that each of us can and should be thinking about what can be. I use this book in my graduate courses to expose students to the range of project-based learning applications of technology, the evolving role in technology in assessment, the ways in which communities have become more involved in education and how communication technology is reshaping professional development into a continual everyday process. While a consistent philosophical and theoretical position underlies the examples, students need to abstract the principles. The range and choice of stories is excellent but the stories are brief. Personally, I would have preferred a single spaced book with twice the information on each of the projects and examples. But in a multimedia connected world, stories can link to web sites, videos, and more extensive information on the Edutopia site and on the web. Celebrating success may not fit the critical stance that some take toward the work of education, but with all of the challenges, it is inspiring when people connect.