Princeton Hive

What If You Are When You Eat? What if we're wrong about education the same way we're wrong about health and nutrition? We're asking the wrong questions. Surely you've heard that "you are what you eat" when it comes to diet and health. And, in search of eating a healthy diet, we have been laser-focused on what we eat which has manifested into decades of fad diets that leave us with more than empty stomachs. Want to eat in a way that actually improves your overall health and well-being? What if you are when you eat? Whether you've heard of intermittent fasting or not, The New England Journal of Medicine has and recently concluded in the article, " Effects of Intermittent Fasting on Health, Aging, and Disease ": "Evidence is accumulating that eating in a 6-hour period and fasting for 18 hours can trigger a metabolic switch from glucose-based to ketone-based energy, with increased stress resistance, increased longevity, and a decreased incidenc...

People often say that innovation and creativity are born by thinking outside of the box.  There is a prevailing argument that increasing constraints on people will limit their ability to innovate and be creative.  This argument is wrong.  What? How can we be innovative if we are "boxed in".  Surely we must think outside of the box to be creative.  Wrong.  The box is what forces our creativity.  For people who don't push innovation, the box becomes the grave of their creativity.  But, for people who value creativity and innovation the box is an inspiration.  The needs combined with constraints can bring out the most creativity.   Being creative without constraints is unrealistic.  In the best of situations, we always have some constraints.  Success in innovation isn't about taking off all the shackles and learning to fly.  Instead, it is about learning to use what is available to you to create, identify ways to mitigate the...

... discovery is learning? If you've read or heard anything by me for the past decade plus, you know my thoughts on curiosity: it's a natural resource that can be converted into anything including--and especially--learning. But what is learning? We tend to define learning by outcomes, i.e. what we learned. We also tend connect our individual inspirations for learning to those outcomes to create a complete composite of "learning." Yet, we rarely consider the actual process of learning as if it is too complex or variable to conceive. But what if, it's pretty simple? What if learning is discovery? Nothing more, nothing less. There's something you didn't know. Now you know it. Maybe, "magic" could be a suitable synonym. Watching my 10 month old son discover the flow of water from the faucet in the bathtub maintains a coherent vertical structure that can easily be penetrated horizontally with a wave of a hand was pure magic. This learning may not seem...

The launching point for jumping into virtual or augmented reality can be terrifying.  If you are not already comfortable with the technology or you are not someone who typically jumps right into new technological teaching challenges, you may think to yourself, "why bother?" Augmented and Virtual Reality (ARVR) are not only two of the hottest technologies changing the world right now, but they are changing the way we train, learn, and do business.  It isn't if these technologies become more mainstream in schools, but when.  Because of this, and the intrigue and curiosity your kids will feel around learning to create in one of these technologies will be enough to create significant engagement for more than a single project.   You may say, however, "I have no idea how to do this, how do I teach them to use it?" First, we have great opportunities coming your way right here at Princeton Hive for that very thing, but two, and perhaps the most important, you don't ...

This Was Never Digital Learning Written by Brian Costello Princeton Hive You may have recently read an opinion piece on a popular newspaper site that stated that the results were in from digital learning and it didn’t work.  This statement was not only insulting, but it was wholeheartedly false.  Regardless of your experience with children learning at home and educators teaching from home, the families pressing through to help, and the kids that did everything they could during this pandemic.  We did not try and fail at digital learning, we struggled together to navigate through an emergency situation that taught us many important lessons going forward.  Before getting to the core of those lessons and how we can move forward, let’s start with the idea that this was digital learning.  Educators were given hours at most to create, prepare, distribute, and facilitate a plan for students to be able to continue their education when schools closed down.  Most of ...

Written by:  Rachelle Dene Poth HIVEXR Influence From STEAM to foreign languages, immersive tech tools can be used in any class to engage students and help them retain concepts Augmented reality and virtual reality is one area that I really enjoy teaching in all of my classes, but especially in my eighth-grade STEAM course called “What’s Next in Emerging Technology.” A few years ago, several students in my Spanish classes asked me why they didn’t get to do “all of the cool augmented and virtual reality stuff.” I didn’t have a good response. Honestly, I had never thought about using those types of tools in my Spanish classes. But I gave it a try, and it went really well. My students enjoyed exploring different types of digital tools, and I found that they were able to better retain the vocabulary and grammar concepts I was teaching. They were engaging in more authentic and meaningful work, and they had fun in the process  Getting started with immersive tech We know there are en...

What if the only two-word combo you find more exhausting than “remote learning” is “new normal”?  You’re not alone. What if the quicker technology is allowing us to share ideas and information--looking at you, Twitter--the quicker it is also leading us to judgment and exhaustion? What if balance must be maintained, even in the Twitterverse? Don’t get me wrong, Twitter and other social media platforms have been tremendous in facilitating educators around the world to connect; but let’s be honest, this technology has done little to move the needle on demonstrable changes to how we educate and learn. But what if you don’t have to be an agent or a victim of short shifting your ideas or our future? What if, just because people are clamoring about the “new normal” doesn’t mean it must be new or normal to you?  What if technology is a tool, rather than a cure? What if it’s still up to humans to determine how technology is used?  What if, one of the best things of what’s next is ...