Workshop+Notes

**__21st Century Learning - SAI training October 25, 2010 (Kelly)__**
uceacastle wiki for this workshop

[|Conan O'Brien]


 * __What's on your mind? 9:30-10:00__**
 * Training for parents about how technology is used with students. Part of our purpose in education is to go back and retrain parents.
 * At one meeting parents were asked to go to YouTube! and look up something that they like to do. This was a new experience for many of them. They may have knowledge
 * Why haven't we been holding parent workshops? There may be an assumption that parents have the same knowledge that we do as teachers about the power of technology and internet/information.
 * Some are content to stick their heads in the sand.
 * Lack of understanding of the core and how it is different/similar to when "we" went to school.
 * If parents won't come to us, how do we go to them? - Get kids involved. If they share their knowledge and what they're doing, parents will come. A lot of good questions and positive attitude.
 * What is the culture? - I send my kid to school and you do your job?
 * What is the connectivity in our communities? - rural areas may still be (are) working on dial-up
 * How are we engaging our community? What are the avenues that we can use to engage the community?
 * Facebook - is the current coffee shop - whether or not we like it, it IS where people are.
 * Facebook is more powerful than websites.
 * It is more of a conversation than a static web site.
 * Alumni pages; school pages; district pages
 * We can promote our schools, needs, etc., and build momentum within our community
 * People aren't going to coffee shops, getting hard copies of newspapers - How do we get into the stream where people are?


 * __A New Learning Landscape (10:00-11:00)__**

Three volunteers to take notes during the session. (Notes from Australia) One volunteer doodler who will doodle in pictures and words their thinking. Anyone who is on Twitter. I need you to volunteer to take notes via Twitter using the conference tag #saitraining Follow along here. Are you more the social type? Like to chat and bounce ideas off of others? Try the back channel chat room. (Need two monitor volunteers)


 * We live in a society that is always on. Reference to miners in Chile. You could see this anywhere in the world for free via the internet. When did we as a society //expect// this access? At the movies, they don't tell people to turn their cell phones off, but to put them on vibrate. The shift has happened that people **will be** connected. We blame kids for always being on their cell phone, but it's a shift in society.
 * Seniors today (born in 199) will never know a time without internet. By (1996), mobile computing/palm pilot has come out. This is the world that they've gown up in.
 * Is there another generation that has created their own global language (shorthand in texting)
 * By 1999, the first iPod comes out. Our kids will always know digital music - won't know tapes, or even CDs.
 * By 2001, wikipedia comes out. Many kids will never have an entire set of encyclopedias.
 * By 2003, Skype comes out and they'll never have a long-distance bill.
 * By 2005, YouTube redefines media
 * By 2006, kids are called the Myface, then Facebook generation.
 * 500 mil users on Facebook - They went from 400,000 to 500,000 users in under 100 days. This is how the world is. You can either block it or embrace it.
 * Book: //Millennials Rising.// We're in the middle of an education revolution. There are 300,000 more incoming freshmen across America than the year before. Suicide rates are at an all time low. They believe it's their environment and they're going to fix it. They believe we screwed it up and they're going to fix it. Homocide, violent crimes, and abortion are at an all time low.


 * **Digital Natives** born 1976-1991 - hardware generation - grew up with "the stuff" - Atari, computers, the first Nintendo. This was when all of the hardware was made. People born in this timeframe are good with the hardware. They can program the blinking lights on the VCR because they're not afraid of pushing buttons on the remote.
 * 1991-2007 - the **Web Natives.** They don't always know the hardware side of things. They don't always organize with folders. They are constantly on the web.
 * **Mobile Natives** 2007-??? - (2007 is the first year that the iPhone came out). These kids will change schools. They live in a time where laptop computers have always outsold desk top computers. They are expected to use the trackpad/touchpad, and the mouse is hard for them (kindergarteners). This generation will **expect** to be mobile. Go to a computer lab? What's that? They expect to be mobile.
 * 66% of text messages during school comes from parents
 * Idea: Work Life vs. Social Life. There used to be a clear line between our work life and our social life. That line is now blurred. We now answer e-mail at home, send text messages from home, etc. School life and social time - schools are still trying to keep a clear line, when society isn't as much. Should schools be understanding that homework can be done a different way? Should we be blurring these lines?
 * Can students multi-task? Are they able to listen to music, talk, text, and do homework at the same time? Possibly it depends on the level of cognitive work that we're asking them to do. If they are doing low-level tasks, they probably can multi-task with some of these other things and still accomplish their work. 100 questions instead of 50 questions doesn't make something hard, just tedious and boring.


 * Constuctivism - our learning theory
 * Connectivism - an extension of our learning theory "Learning occurs within shifting environments, not entirely under the control of the individual." Examples - Chilean Mine; Oil Spill
 * Bloom's Revised Taxonomy - Create is at the top at the pyramid. Create - Evaluate - Analyze - Apply - Understand - Remember. What about kids who jump straight to create without going through the other phases? Are we scaffolding these skills in schools? - "My kids do good stuff, they made a video." Yeah, but did they analyze, etc. along the way?
 * Today's Digital World - Includes: Global Connections, Social Connections, Access to Information

Activity
 * What did we have to use (or what did we use) to do this task? (Consider Bloom's Revised Taxonomy, and the New Digital Landscape)
 * Pseudocontext - a contrived scenario similar to a real-life context
 * How many of use "copy and pasted"? In school, is this plagarism?
 * A CEO of a large company said that if a person can do this activity, in the time constraints, it's equivalent to a million dollar job.
 * What can be accomplished in 20 minutes, when there is unfiltered access to information. How can this help our school?
 * We mostly worked in the "Access to Information" arrow in the "Today's Digital World." We could have tweeted to get feedback and used social connections to answer the question. What would our Web and Mobile Natives done? Could have been formative assessment if we asked students, "What could I teach you so that you could do this better?"
 * Who was off-task - doing something else? (None of us). If students are off task, we need to shorten times. Jeff also kept reminding us about how much time was left. That created urgency about completing the task. Time shifting isn't enough - it also needs to be worthwhile, meaningful work.
 * What does it mean to be literate today? What were all of the skills that we needed to gather content, synthesize it, and write an e-mail. Do we teach students to write e-mails? There is another way of communicating that //is// society today.


 * Why provide so many ways to take notes: chat room, twitter, google notes, doodling? To give everyone an opportunity to interact with the content.
 * On Google Docs - not just taking notes, but take notes by looking through the lens of - students, teachers, resources
 * Give people multiple ways to engage with the information. They need an avenue to be engaged. At some point you're in control of your own learning and must be actively involved (Bloom's taxonomy - words are active), but I can provide the avenue.
 * Channel overload - then, just pick one way to be engaged. Some people choose to be engaged in many channels and that works for them.
 * Teachers sometimes say, "I can't do this because kids aren't looking at me." Teachers need to get over that. It's about learning, not focusing on the teacher. If students are engaged, that's what counts.
 * Sometimes the task of one of the recorders on the google doc is to go out and find images that represent the context/conversation. Some people think in pictures, or need pictures to make meaning.
 * Facebook
 * Student council students monitor posts
 * Facebook groups can be private for that group. Others can't see it. Ex. includes that two students from each class are the administrators who do the updates. The teacher starts it, and then gradually releases the responsibility to the student administrators. The group can share video, photos, messages, have discussions, etc.
 * One 1st grade class allows students to post in their best spelling. Parents really connect and love getting the feedback about class
 * Using cell phones to poll students - **Poll Everywhere** - Live Audience Polling
 * This can be used as a fixed choice format, or where students can type texts and send that to the poll.
 * **QR Codes - //Need to play with this//**
 * QR Creator web sites
 * Teachers post the pics on things in the room
 * All you need is the phone with a camera and the app (blackberry, android, iPhone, new iPod touches with cameras)
 * You can track how many people read the code. It's an easy way to get data about who is looking at the information.
 * Google Url Shortener
 * creates a shorter url
 * creates a QR code image which can be printed out or saved as a pdf and used.
 * Challenge - make a QR code and don't put any information on it. See how long it takes kids to find out what it means. "Congrats... "
 * Flickr.com
 * Photo sharing site
 * The free account only allows us to share 200 images
 * For $25/year, we can share unlimited space
 * Give everyone the username and password for the account, and everyone can upload the pictures to the account. Then, students have access to the images for projects. We no longer make CDs for people at the end of the school year. We now send parents the website, and they can download the images that they want.
 * Student council members monitor the site for appropriate content.


 * How do we go deep in learning in a hyper-linked, hyper-connected world?**
 * Google News - Local and Global news
 * Ex. Use of Google Maps - Students read articles about earth sustainability of their choice. Then they used pins on Google Maps (red=negative impact) (green=positive impact) (blue=negative impact) and included a few comments about the article. Then, classes overlayed their maps to look at trends.


 * You have to ask the right questions. Pedagogy vs. Content. The task will predict the results. Tasks, classroom instruction, and student work.


 * Do we need to be teaching media literacy in a sound bite world?**
 * With the elections coming up, we hear a lot of sound bites. How do we evaluate this? Is there media literacy that we need to be teaching kids as users of information?
 * How can we communicate effectively with sound bites? To get people to dig in deeper and investigate?
 * What is media literacy? Beyond library services - social media, commercials,
 * There is so much more context than what we get in the sound bite. Students may not understand that they are getting a small piece of the content.
 * Conversing - blogging may allow people to go deeper into content (still need to consider point of view of the author)


 * How do we get to where we need to be as adults to accomplish this?**
 * Put into practice our new learning
 * How do we scaffold our own learning? How do we prioritize our own learning? We can't do everything tomorrow.
 * Prioritize: Maybe, I really want to communicate with my community. What can I focus on to accomplish this?
 * We have to develop a culture that it's ok to not know everything. Our job is not to impart our wisdom and knowledge. We try to hide our failures instead of celebrate them - especially with technology.
 * What's one thing that you read recently?
 * What's one thing that you bombed recently?

Video: //Drive// [|Drive]by Dan Pink (author of //A Whole New Mind//) []
 * Autonomy
 * Mastery - we all want to be great at something
 * Purpose
 * []


 * At the end of the day - we need to share/show progress.
 * Ultimately, have to trust that we are going to use the time wisely. "I'm giving you 8 hours to go work on something that you're passionate about, and at the end of the day you're going to share what that was."
 * How much autonomy do we give students over their learning? Are there "fed-ex" days where students get the whole day to work on things that they're passionate about? Even one day a semester.
 * We are so scared sometimes of what might happen, that we never take steps to do what is best. - J Utecht
 * By putting content on a blog, we can create a portfolio about students' progression over a period of years. Blogging can become a multi-year digital portfolio.
 * In 9th grade - students may use first and last names on the web - creates a digital footprint.
 * Jeff commented on a 9th grader's writing, and retweeted it to his network. She received feedback from educators throughout the world. []
 * At least one person in the district should have global connections for our kids - large twitter following, etc.

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