Ripple Effect of Big Ideas

Both this year and last what I have taken to heart from Big Ideas is that it is not okay for kids to be bored out of their skulls at school. I can actually remember being so bored in high school that I thought you really could just die from boredom. We give lip service to multiple intelligences, differing learning styles, and blooms taxonomy and then everyone just goes right on lecturing and giving reading and writing assignments and that's it. I love being at Big Ideas because people are looking at the fact that the world has changed, that technology exists and it has the power to make education more just globally. Why we still have textbooks is beyond me. I would love to work with a group of people and create an textbook for English that only used sources in the public domain. I have textbooks in my class so big that kids will never take them home. The thing is enormous, costs a fortune and is filled with excerpts from literature available for free on Gutenberg. How stupid.