School Hackers

Partner

BIF is partnering with the Hewlett Foundation to prototype School Hackers, a free online platform that inspires and enables educators to share creative ways of repurposing existing resources and capabilities to move their students toward deeper learning.

Design Challenge

To create an online destination that inspires and enables educators to share low/no-cost creative routes to deeper learning for all students.

Educators throughout the country are working to prepare their students for success in college, careers, and everyday life by finding ways to engage them in the classroom, give them real-world experiences, and assess them on life skills. Deeper Learning is spreading. Too often people believe that making substantive changes in our schools requires closing existing schools and opening new ones; receiving financial windfalls; or gaining permission from district, state, and federal offices. Meanwhile, many of the best changes educators are making to increase deeper learning are low- or no-cost creative realignments of existing resources and capabilities in their schools. With so many schools facing budget cuts, there is a need to increase and share these creative solutions and help interested educators implement them in their own schools.

Approach

To prepare all of today’s students for the world of tomorrow, we must unlock and broadly share the wisdom of educators who have successfully created classrooms and institutions of deeper learning. School Hackers is a crowd-sourced–or “educator-sourced”–online space where educators can post, browse, search, and respond to resourceful ways of moving toward deeper learning. BIF will also create an accompanying series of video segments showing real world educators trying deeper learning “hacks” to inspire other practitioners to identify and implement achievable solutions to their schools’ challenges.

Impact Statement

School Hackers provides the peer-to-peer collaboration so important to educators through a free virtual playspace for ideas. We will enable educators to seek and share creative approaches to increase deeper learning for students across the country.