STSD Curriculum & Technology Update

Regular updates and musings on curriculum and technology in the Salisbury Township School District in Allentown, PA.

Did You Know?

Definitely worth watching.

Karl Fisch’s Did You Know?

Karl Fisch’s What If

Karl Fisch’s 2020 Vision

Jennifer Dorman’s Adaptation [with permission of Karl Fisch] of Did You Know?

Definitely Worth Visiting.

The Fischbowl

A Web of Connections: Why the Read Write Web Changes Everything

Just finished an amazing webinar with Will Richardson on A Web of Connections: Why the Read Write Web Changes Everything.  Long story short: because the web is both read and write.  The write aspect of the web profoundly changes how we learn: in social networking communities.  Richardson’s thesis is simple: today’s students are digital natives who create their own learning environments where they make global connections.  What, as educators, Richardson says we need to come to terms with is the issue of control.  Students are engaged in connectivism: building and maintaining social networks where connections hold as much [or possibly more] relevance than content.  Digital natives build communities of independent learners, unlike the way most educational systems work: on dependence [of students’ learning to teachers’ knowledge].  Richardson suggests that whether we like it or not, the web has made learning transparent, and teachers need to move forward as connectors of information inside this educational mindset. 

Perhaps, for those of you who may not have participated in a webinar, I should give you a figurative screenshot.  Think of a webinar as a videoconference without the video.  What you see is a screen that the presenter controls [content] with audio via teleconferenciog.  But that’s only the beginning.  The sidebar discussion [imagine a chat room smaller screen insert] is often as exciting as the presentation, and just as lively.  Then picture many of the participants also Skyping [yet a second chat room, but separate from the webinar host].  Let’s count: webinar, sidebar, Skyping.  Add to that taking notes and blogging.  About this point you are losing your Digital Immigrant status.  And to this most students would add texting with cell phones, working on facebook, myspace, or fanfiction, and editing their wikispace.  Definitely Digital Natives.  This is our community.  This is how they learn, or would, if we let them. 

Richardson believes that within the next five years, the face of education will change exponentially.  We seem to have choices: move with it or be moved by it.  I think of our group as change agents, working collaboratively to provide the best possible education for our students.  With that in mind, here’s Will Richardson’s webinar wiki:

A Changing World

Some statistics.
*1 billion people on the Internet
*China will soon be the largest English speaking country in the world.
*China has more honors students than we have students.
*Name this country
*“None of the top 10 jobs that will exist in 2010 exist today.”—Richard Riley, (Former US Sec. of Ed.)
*57 million blogs, 1.7 million posts a day.
*We can all be community journalists.
*Millionaires in virtutal worlds.
*Mark Zuckerberg, the soon to be teenage billionaire
*The problem is not change...we’ve always had change. The problem is the speed of change, and that change is cultural now. Because of that it feels like our kids are leading the way with technology

Many more questions than answers.

The Web is Changing How We Learn

*Learning is not about acquiring knowledge as much as it is about building networks. (Articulated by George Siemens.)
*We are at times teachers and at times learners. Our roles shift with each interaction.
*My blog, Weblogg-ed is an example of network creation. It’s where my most powerful learning has taken place. Here are a couple of examples: “Dear Kids, You Don’t Have to Go to College” and “Owning the Teaching...and the Learning.”
*The power of being “clickable” is that teachers can find you. (Google search)
*My good fortune is that I have potential teachers visiting from around the world.
*Our kids are already creating their own networks. Fan Fiction is one site where “affinity groups” meet.
*And like it or not, MySpace is another example of kids creating their own networks.
*But so are student role models, (Meg Cabot)

*Millions and millions of people are participating in the new social networking services. (Wikipedia)
*But we can help our kids to start creating their own networks as well and work with people around the world. (Nata Village)
*Wikiville (John Bidder) is another example. And Skype is a tool that we can use to maintain our networks.

*And networking doesn’t just have to happen through text. (ClipBandits)
*We can also build networks in virtual worlds. (Second Life)

The Web is Changing our Assumptions About Knowledge, Information and Literacy

*It’s not as much about content anymore as much as it is about context. Knowledge and information used to be scarce...that’s what our was built upon
*But today, I can learn anything, anytime, anywhere providing I have access. Knowledge is no longer scarce. (MIT)

*And we tend to look at knowledge as hard or unchanging...but these days, knowledge is soft. It’s constantly changing. (Wikipedia)
*In this world, we cannot only seek information, but information seeks us. (Pageflakes)
*But in a world where anyone can create and publish information, how do we know what to trust? (Dove Beauty)

*How do we teach our students (and ourselves) to make sense of a much more complex literacy regarding who to trust as authoritative sources. When we can be manipulated or be the manipulator.
*We can no longer be “just” readers...we must be editors as well.

*And reading is no longer a passive, linear activity that deals simply with text. How do we read multimedia and hypertext? (A Tank of Gas)
*In this world, we must read with an ear for writing and responding, engaging and interacting.

The Web is Changing our Assumptions about Classrooms and Teaching

*If teachers are no longer the arbiters of knowledge in the classroom, our roles need to change.
*Now we have the opportunity to be connectors, to bring our classrooms to the world in a variety of ways. We can find other teachers who may know more than we do. (Secret Life of Bees)

*We can also connect our students to other students around the world so they can learn together. (Flat Classrooms Wiki)
*And in a world where all of our students can be content producers as well as content consumers, we need to re-envision the work we ask them to do.
*Our students can teach in powerful ways. (Pre Cal)
*As Marco Torres says, students’ work ”should have wings.” (Buckle Up)

We Need a 2020 Vision for Education

*How do we learn to help our students leverage the technologies they are already using instead of have them check them at the door? (Especially when our students can get around our efforts anyway.)

*How do we change? How do we re-envision teaching for a vastly changed world?
*How do we the use of these technologies in our own practice?
*It starts with one small step

*******
Let’s take that one small step.

21st Century Skills

Borrowing from fellow colleague STAR DEN Advisory Board Member Jennifer Dorman, I am including her research links for our learning community’s professional development.
* U.S. Department of Education National Education Technology Plan
* U.S. Department of Education Technolgy Evaluation and Research
* The Partnership for 21st Century Skills
* Noodle Tools 21st Century Literacies
* 21st Century Technology Support Project
* Landmarks for Schools
* enGauge: 21st Century Skills - Literacy in the Digital Age
* Skill Sets for the 21st Century
* The Evolving Definition of Literacy
* Big6 The Importance of Contemporary Literacy
* Teaching Information Literacy
* Learning in the Digital Age
* Preparing the Digital Generation for the Age of Innovation
* The Challenge of the Digital Age

Randy discussed enGauge in our initial meeting.  I thought if we shared a common list of resources, we might deconstruct our notion of “basics” in light of the what Pink [A Whole New Mind] calls the Conceptual Age.

Educational Change

I had blogged about this about a year ago on my own blog, but thought it worthwhile sharing here...

Renate Nummela Caine and Geoffrey Caine present some significant ideas about why and how our educational system thinking must change. In their article Understanding Why Education Must Change, the authors assert correctly that our students will be working in an era of communication, not in factories as was the case in the past. Our present system of education is based on a series of assumptions:

1. Only experts create knowledge.
2. Teachers deliver knowledge in the form of information.
3. Children are graded on how much of the information they have stored.

Our future system will need to be based on a new series of assumptions:

1. Dynamic knowledge ( the sort of knowledge that is naturally and spontaneously invoked in authentic interactions in the the real world) requires individual meaning making based upon multiple sources of information.
2. The role of educators is to facilitate the making of dynamic knowledge.
3. Dynamic knowledge is revealed through real world performance.

In regards to technology:

Also, if we consider what technology in the information era makes available to children and students, we find that trying to control knowledge the way we are used to is beginning to look like holding water in our hands. Information is available everywhere and in multiple forms, from complex software to 500 television channels to the world wide web. Not all children have access to every one of these, but not having access is already handicapping children now in school and will continue to do severe damage to their futures as the school years progress. This massive flow and availability of information, together with our new appreciation of just how interconnected the human brain is, will be for education to become much more complex. And that is precisely what is needed if we are to teach for dynamic rather than surface knowledge.