Wednesday, September 2, 2009

Chairs w/ Alan November - notes

K-12 District Team / Chairs session w/ Alan November

Chairs w/ Alan November
Sept. 2

Cellphones in the classroom – invite but demand performance
PollEverywhere.com – we Have ActiVotes, same concept.

Unfair advantage to tech savvy students? Are there parents who don’t want their kids to use technology? It is a personal value, not pursued.

Assessment – is writing overlooked/surpassed by presentation and aesthetics of an assignment? Does glitz of technology mask the major component(writing)of assignment?
• AN – final paper – how did student get to the writing? Google docs revision history
• Takes draft to a whole new orbit – provides data to understand final doc in a new way.
• Have we given teachers enough info to do the best possible job? New tools give insight into the process of learning than ever before.

Research – how do we ensure that kids are taught tools/skills in K-12 continuum?
• Google Custom Search – design your own search engine. Power of Google limited to sites you put int. 100 people can be on design team, unlimited access. Create content search engines built by classes. One student tasked with being researcher-for-the-day. That student finds the worlds best resources while teacher teaches. Teacher can answer questions – or teach students to get their own answer.
• Teach kids they are building a search engine (design team) they will take ownership of it.
• The best tech teacher in a lab can teach, but it has to be reinforced in every classroom.

Overwhelmed by Technology
• Comprehensive plan to support teachers is needed
• Need teachers to model
• Scale up the pioneers in organizational design
o ActivBoards

Paradigm / Practice Shift
What could support look like to put this into practice and make this change.
• Start with curriculum – what is the toughest to teach
• What works the best
• What works the worst – where do kids struggle
• Give that list to your tech leaders to help
• Create bridge between tech and pedadogy
o Embedded specialists in each department
o Kick the wheels, play, choose a few things to start with, enlist the kids in helping you learn
o Manage tech you don’t know how to use, but know what is possible. Know the CONCEPT
• Specialists give suggestions for pedagogy

New Tools to make learning more powerful. Nothing new. Addition of new tools in communicating content to new learners. More attractive to kids.

How-To Research
Do we need to teach this? Discipline behind the knowledge, with reinforcement and practice. Technology isn’t an option but a core requirement.
• Secondary teachers use collaborative word processing
o Leaders models this so it filters down

Scotland and other small and developing countries – takes tech seriously, in a global economy they can’t afford to lose 1 kid. They get that there are new rules, and Internet as new tool for opening up economic opportunities.

Student Voice
SpEd – new opportunities for these students
Find new formats to find voice and contribute to their won learning
Task students with designing tutorials – they know it has meaning to others
Ownership of product > learning > publishing globally > authentic

Design
Skills are merging in student projects, and collegial support for student production needs to be a design feature.
Professional community on the web - free

Robin's TO DO:

CREATE NING
TEMPLATE DEPT CUSTOM GOOGLE SEARCH WIDGETS

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1 Comments:

Blogger Kathy Codianne said...

Did you see Ed Leadership March 2009? The topic is Literacy 2.0. A few articles that are pertinent to this conversation: "Orchestrating the Media Collage," "Let's Talk 2.0," and "The Importance of Deep Reading." Big ideas from these articles include:
Modern literacy means the ability to "consume and produce words through reading and writing, listening and speaking."
A technological society requires "digital literacy," the ability to read and write a number of new media forms including sound, graphics, and moving images in addition to text.
Digital literacy means being able to integrate media into a "single narrative or 'media collage' (Web page, blog, digital story).
Digital literacy calls for effective writing skills and the ability to employ critical thinking more so than ever.
Literacy 2.0 and Web 2.0 requires students to employ 21st century skills (collaboration and networking, effective oral and written communication, assessing and analyzing information, curiousity and imagination to name a few)
Concerns about the digital culture's impact on thinking and learning are similar to those raised in ancient Greece during the transition from an oral to a written culture. Socrates is said to have warned against learner to read because he thought that literacy could alter the kind of memory and "probative processes required for deep pursuit and internalization of knowledge."

September 7, 2009 at 10:03 AM  

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