21ST Century Learning

 

21st Century Learning

 

This was made on Wordle – a great site to make text compilations like this one. They are words that I could think of when relating to new learning. What do you think? What words did I miss? What words don’t belong there?

Check out Wordle. You’ll love it. I do wish they would allow for JPEG saving of the creations. BUT! They are modern and forward thinking by making these Creative Commons licensed creations and giving the “author” permission to use the Wordle even for profit. Kudos to Wordle for that!

Educational Technology doesn’t work (Not my title)

I found this excellent entry on the GenYes Blog. I love the author’s reasoning behind why this title / subject is simply not correct. Have a read!

What do you think? What kind of teacher are you?

Here is a link to an award winning blog post. It may be controversial and therefore, I wanted your opinions! What do you think about what the author is saying in this post?

Is it okay to be a technologically illiterate teacher?

The future – Some of it is practically the present!

This is a cool video – you know, personally, I rarely say that Microsoft does a lot of “cool” stuff. But this video will get you thinking about what our current students will be graduating into! The types of new technologies and the new uses for it… it will be mind blowing!

Is this generation really lost?

I have had conversations about the next gen – the net gen – the digital gen – the Y Gen… whatever you want to call them. I hear a lot of criticism. My goal is to uplift them – I think they have something to say and offer us. 

Here is a video that deals a little with this topic with a ‘twist’.

Ning – Create your own Social Network

Facebook, Facebook, Facebook… have you heard of it yet? If not, maybe your head is buried in the sand. In my classes, I was looking for a solution that would provide me with the opportunities and features of Facebook but with more privacy for my students. I found Ning.com – a site that allows you to create your very own social networking site. 

Ning.com offers you many features in your networks. You can have a photo viewer, videos, audio, chatting, forums, notes, games and even more. What I love about it is that you create the network and everything is self-contained… like a mini-Facebook just for you and your students! What my students seem to really love about it too though is that they can configure what their own profile pages looks like. There are dozens of themes they can choose from as well as having the ability to change colour themes and so on.

What Ning has opened up for me though is the ability to draw my students into something outside of class. I will sometimes post a new forum topic right away after class. By the time students arrive at their house, they will see the forum topic and they CHOOSE to respond. No pressure involved and they do it! I am very excited about the possibilities. 

Another feature I like is that with my music classes, the students belong to a more vast music student network belonging to the school. For my individual classes, however, there are subgroups within the network that I can allow for more specific discussions and posts. 

With all of this, I also am aware of the security issues when dealing with students and online behaviour. This is why I have set up my Ning.com sites to only allow new members based on invitations and my sole approval. Without my approval, NOBODY can become a member of the group. Without membership into the group, people can not see inside the network. 

Check it out and see for yourself. Ning.com. 

Did I forget to mention that it is free?

Google Forms – Tutorial

Here is a tutorial I made with the intention of being brief and not going into too much detail about Google Forms. This is how to go about setting up a form and gathering information. Have fun setting one up! You will see the light!

Next time I do one of these, I’ll make the screen larger for eyes that need to squint! :)

Google Docs – Tutorial on using Forms from Eric Moccio on Vimeo.

Collaboration – what is cheating?

In this day and age, technology has moved kids to look for a different way of working, a different way of learning. In fact, it may not just be kids. Do you belong to a social networking site like FaceBook? Chances are that you do. If not, you are at least aware of it. 

Why have these types of sites become popular? It is in our nature to want to be with people. Even more so, we love to collaborate. Never in history has it been easier to collaborate – the barriers to communication have come tumbling down with new technologies like email (not so new), instant messaging (not so new), FaceBook and Google Docs. 

I have set up Google Docs for my classes. I send out Google Forms to my students to gather information on them at the very beginning of the semester. By emailing a link to a form I have created, a student simply fills in the information on their own time and the information immediately gets tabulated in a spreadsheet for me to manipulate. I can then sort the information in the spreadsheet as I please. For example, in my music classes, after polling the whole class (a senior class) about their voice type, I can then pool together using Google Spreadsheets (or download it to my program of choice, Numbers by Apple) all of my tenors, sopranos, altos and basses. Even more impressive, is that I have all of their musical biographies in one location – I have saved paper and time having to go through each sheet.

This isn’t the only good thing about this process however. We will now start collaborating together (like a Wiki) using Google docs. Students will share documents for collaborations (i.e. scripts or storyboards for their video projects) using Google Docs. They can work on them ANYTIME and ANYWHERE.

In my experience, students want to collaborate. I think we need to rethink what “cheating” is because of this. I know this could become a hot topic but what if we designed more projects that had students collaborating together and sharing their knowledge and research in order to produce something even more powerful. Traditionally, we will tell our students that they must work on this on their own. But is this realistic? Do you belong to FaceBook, I ask again? Why? You like to share with others perhaps. 

If we shift our thinking that memorization of information is the most important of all to a mindset that helps students find the information they need (look at the amount of websites there are online now), we will begin to design projects where it does not really matter if they share knowledge. Together, students can then use their higher order thinking skills (Blooms Taxonomy) to delve deeper into their learning and think more critically about what we are asking them to do. They will retain the new learning more easily and will be challenged along the way.

The current generation of students is a collaborative one. We need to help them with these skills. It will be crucial for the future as they become our business, political and educational leaders of the future. 

If you are interested even more, here is an example interview with a teacher in the United States who has some interesting thoughts along these lines (especially the cheating). Have a look! 

Steve Maher

Times have changed…

I had a conversation with a senior level student just the other day. He was debating between 2 elective courses for the following semester. His choices were both good choices for him and my goal is listening to him talk was just that, to listen and perhaps help him sort out of choices. He had a guidance appointment scheduled that day to make his final choice for next semester.

The following day, I saw him again and asked how his appointment went. He told me he chose course A. I asked what his reasoning was and he said, “Well, if I ever want to learn about Course B, I can always learn it on the Internet!” Granted, there are many sources on the Internet that contain false information but there are many excellent sources as well. Let it be understood that I believe we need to help students learn how to judge, analyze and synthesize the information they find to ascertain whether it is good or not. His statement, rather, emphasized the new world of thinking. I learn on the Internet and why can’t he?

This said, I just came across this 5 minute (or so) video. It is well put together and helps detail where we are in the history of learning. One person in the video says, and I concur, that students are having much richer experiences outside of the classroom than in it. I am not saying I offer this rich experience in my classroom. Unfortunately though, I believe this speaker is correct. How can we fix this? Here is the video.

Digital Content vs. Physical Content

This is a very interesting study conducted about students / kids consuming more and more digital content. I know I much prefer digital content on 2 levels:

• Environmental reasons – decrease in the use of paper
• Flexibility – once something is digital, you can manipulate it, adapt it, share it (assuming you have the appropriate rights to do so with the document)

I prefer to rent movies on the iTunes store now. I purchase my music digitally and I love that I can purchase a single from an album and not the entire album (if I so choose). I love that my computer holds all of my teaching documents. I seldom rely on a paper-based system. I think we need to move towards this mode of operation if we are to embark on teaching 2.0, we need to move closer and closer to this way of sharing documents – but in more ways that we currently do. Obviously students prefer it, don’t we owe it to them? Read the results for yourself. 

http://www.npd.com/press/releases/press_090107a.html