Blackboard Training

Today I ran a faculty professional development module on Blackboard. The more time I spend working with the software the more I realize it is too much of a walled garden to be a game changer. The teachers and kids are working on too many different platforms in such creative and native ways that forcing them to follow one set of guidelines is too prescriptive for them. Students and teachers need freedom. Change requires freedom. Imagine a school instituting a Google like approach to education. Allow students at the high school level to spend 20% of their time working on a project that interests them and has relevance to their lives. Wouldn't they get so much more out of their other classes? Blackboard, like many things in education, miss the point of what kids need. Let's stop telling them what they HAVE to do and allow them to be a part of the process. At my school there is a science research course that let's kids work for three years on research of their choosing. Seeing what these kids produce at the end of the process is mind blowing. Why not expand this idea to every student? Revolution, not evolution!!!