Creating Innovators by Tony Wagner

I've had this book since late this summer, and now I'm finally getting around to reading it.

Not only is the author, Tony Wagner, remarkable - just check out a sampling of these talks --






 Here is the trailer to the book.  This was a QR code on the book's spine.



Creating Innovators: Book Spine Trailer from Creating Innovators on Vimeo.





but he has a very important message: our school are doing a good job creating innovators, which is exactly what our economy needs.

Schools, he argues, have been very slow to recognize how important it is to shift from a simple factual recall system (where it mattered what you knew and how quickly you could recall it).

What schools need to focus on is giving students freedom to create, invent, adapt, or do something with what they know.

As Wagner puts it: "The world doesn't care what you know.  The world cares what you can do with what you know."

The first thing that struck me with Wagner's book is his use of QR codes.  The book has QR codes embedded throughout it.  Once I downloaded the free Microsoft scanner application for my smartphone, I was able to scan them, where I was brought to Vimeo where authors and professors and innovators share their ideas on what Wagner is writing about.

How cool is that?

I don't think the question is why can't textbooks do something like this, but the question is when will textbooks start to do this?  And they may well be doing it already.

I can't wait to dig into this book and apply its principles to my classroom.