21st Century Learning – Thoughts-
Posted by jeremyl on April 10, 2008
I attended a wonderful presentaion today by John Kuglin on 21st Century Learning at our district’s leadership council. Two of the main goals were to help understand vision of technology for our classrooms and also gain excitement towards advocating this technological movement within our schools and have our community respond favorably towards helping make it happen.
John gave a wonderful overview of the advancement of technology and how quickly it is changing. We are at a crossroads in our educational system to help meet the needs of our digital native students who are part of a youth media culture. From Marc Prensky’s paper he states, “Today’s students are no longer the people our educational system was designed to teach.” We need to begin to think outside of the box. Let’s rething the way the system has been operating for quite some time. We may have learned a certain way, but we need to realize we now need to teach differently and utilize our resources more wisely. It it essential that our district find a way to access the resources all around us and no longer think of a textbook as our only means to deliver material. 2 million minutes our students spend in high school. That is a considerable amount of time to allow them to develop the skills to compete globally.
Yes, it will require money to bring the needed technology(i.e., bandwidth, interactive whiteboards, projectors, instructional laptops, one to one intitiatives, doc cameras, etc) into our classrooms so that is why we need to understand the need and be a strong voice to have all people see the need for our students. Right now the money may not be there, so what can we doin the meantime? How about beginning to take the time to get familiar with some of the Web 2.0 applications?
To name a few from John’s list:
Google Earth – download it and start playing – WOW, the possibilities
Let’s transform our classrooms and breakdown the walls so that our students and each one of us can access opportunites and experiences from all over the world. As Thom Hartman says, “Tag, Your IT!”
May 28th, 2008 at 11:35 am
I’d like to add haiku LMS to this list. In fact, with the launch this summer of our “Embed the Web” feature, allowing our educator users to place Web 2.0 content from around the web inside their haiku LMS classes.