20 Tips for Taking Action

Below are some suggestions for how you can more deeply explore and involve yourself in the drivers of change and trends outlined in the 2020 Forecast.

  1. Improve your brain's health by spending ten minutes per day on the SharpBrains website
  2. Join a group advocating children's health or environmental safety in schools, such as the Healthy Schools Network
  3. Host an Innovation Jam to engage students and teachers in developing new ideas for learning
  4. Connect your school with the nearest Farm-To-School program, or start one in your area
  5. Be a citizen journalist by contributing to NowPublic
  6. Check up on politicians or legislation through one of the projects run by the Sunlight Foundation
  7. Host a Meetup for Youth Rights
  8. Find or contribute a lesson plan at Curriki
  9. Advocate for reward structures that give teachers incentives for sharing and creating collective educational resources
  10. Use data-driven decision-making to assess student learning as well as the effectiveness of learning agents in supporting them
  11. Search the twitterstream for conversations about current events
  12. Track South Africa's progress in its quest to create a nationwide open curriculum
  13. Create a network in your community like the Berkeley Parents Network
  14. Involve students and parents in your professional learning community
  15. Use social impact and education games with your students at Games for Change
  16. Download courses from Stanford University on iTunes, or MIT OpenCourseWare, or other open access sites for use in your classroom
  17. Earn money for research on various projects at Innocentive
  18. Join your local Freecycle Network to exchange things for free in your area
  19. Create and sell your own ideas and goods at Ponoko
  20. Contribute to the body of global climate data through the NASA GLOBE project