New Technology Learnings 09-10

This is a wordle of what my Technology Learning Commitment Team celebrated today at our final meeting for the year. What Good stuff!

Change is messy. Many in my district were resistant to the change in technology this year. Mac to PC, stationary to Mobile, static to dynamic, flood gates were opened, some felt naked. We had a number of struggles this year but our teachers and technology support specialists all celebrated today. We discussed three pieces of the Horizon Report 2009 K-12 Edition

1. Technologies to Watch
2. Key Trends
3. Critical Challenges

We shared our ideas about the following questions on our TinyChat;

• What practices should we be changing (if any) in our classrooms?
• How important is assessment in these classrooms?
• How do we make progress in the short term?
• How do we make progress in the long term?

(Thank you Kyle Peck who posed similar questions at the 1-1 Conference at PSU this year.)

We did not come up with any perfect answers but we did find that we had learned a lot and we are excited about more technology, changing teaching practices AND not forgetting to balance technology use with teaching to read, write and play in the mud!

Self-Engagement at 8 Years Old

This morning I watched my 8 year old son show his morning sitter how to enter the world of Alice. Being a retired teacher, she was amazed at what he was doing.

He and I had dabbled in this 3D programming world when he had said to me, mom, I want to create a web-page...like Webkins....you can teach me that, right? Well, how could I say no?

I downloaded Alice and went through the tutorial on my own and then showed it to him. He learned how to load a world and start to manipulate objects in that world.

We need to find ways to harness this self-engagement for the 21st Century Learner so that all of our learners get this excited about learning on their own.

Too Much Printing!!!

My question of the day...how do we empower teachers to not print but go digital?? Baby step ideas are needed...I love Wes Freyer's post today about Digital Storytelling but I think I have to start smaller with some of the folks that I am working with.

All ideas welcome!! I am hoping that we can begin to get rid of so much printing and move to more digital teaching, learning, creating and assessing!!

From Fred D'Ignazio's Sparky the Dog...
"Cultural Blindness

We are not doing this on purpose. Most of us adults are not naturally mean, despite what many kids think. We really are people of good will. But we may be terminally blind.

As with any cultural transformation, the inhabitants of the old culture (the world of printed words) can't see the new culture coming. And the inhabitants of the new culture (electronic media) can't understand why most of their world is so foreign to the older persons they see everywhere around them.

Let's face it, we big people love books. We have spent our lives in the company of books. If you added up all the books we've stuck our noses into, you'd be amazed. Even worse, add up all the inches of text we've followed, line after line, page after page, as we've read books over twenty, thirty, or more years! We've spent our lives in "book school" learning this simple equation: KNOWLEDGE = BOOKS. And school is the center of this theory of knowledge. The specialists of book-centered knowledge teach in the schools. Their methodology is straightforward: If you want to know something, find it in a book."