Giving Compass' Take:

• Meg Ormiston wrote a book series that explains detailed projects of how k-12 education works with both students and teachers in tandem with technology integrated into the curriculum successfully.

• What makes Ormiston's approach to edtech tools in the classroom different from most? Is it more successful?

• Read about edtech start-ups setting up incubators at schools so that teachers can help create the curriculum they will eventually use.

Meg Ormiston is a prolific author, having written several books about teaching, learning in the digital age and using technology. But her most recent project is likely her most ambitious: a writing project called NOW Classrooms that she undertook with 26 working educators on the subject of what school looks like when students and teachers truly work in tandem; when technology is neither the focus of instruction or an afterthought; and when teachers—and their students—don’t feel thrown into the deep end of technology, but instead are given a chance to work up to it the way you might move through levels in a video game.

The end result is a series of books covering a range of grade levels—K-2, 3-5, 6-8 and 9-12—all following a similar structure that introduces a broad concept or skill and includes specific projects classes can work through together.

Her goal was to find educators who had mastered teaching, but who also understood that it’s not a rubric—that risk-taking and failure were just important as creativity or good technology integration.

The search was about more than finding co-authors. Ormiston was looking for a cohort of kindred educators to embody her vision of NOW Classrooms, a title as concerned with the present as its creator. Here, students are allowed more freedom to learn as they like, and in many cases classrooms become more like coworking spaces where students work together and alone on various projects and activities to meet their learning objectives.

In this world, teachers guide, nudge, encourage and suggest. The educator’s role becomes decidedly more passive, although the teachers Ormiston assembled for the project are anything but.

Read the full article about technology integration in schools by Stephen Noonoo at EdSurge