La Crosse Middle School Technology Visioning

From Shifted Learning

Contents 1 Big Picture Researchish Stuff 2 A Little Closer to Home 3 Questions and Conversation Starters 4 Expressive Capital 5 Creativity & Expression 6 Message 7 Action Items

[edit] Big Picture Researchish Stuff

Danah Boyd's mix on most recent Pew research on teens and social media practices. (The data here is from late 2005 and early 2006.)

What are teens doing and not doing?

• Digital images - stills and videos - have a big role in teen life. Posting them often starts a virtual conversation. Most teens receive some feedback on the content they post online.
• Email continues to lose its luster among teens as texting, instant messaging, and social networking sites facilitate more frequent contact with friends.
• Teens who are most active online, including bloggers, are also highly active offline.
  • 65,000 people under 30 participated in Iowa caucuses, 3x growth over 2004
• Most teens restrict access to their posted photos - at least some of the time. Girls are more restrictive photo posters.
• The number of teens who report instant message use has dropped since 2004, "visitinga chatroom" has declined significantly in popularity since 2000.

Demographic Information

• More older girls than boys create and contribute to websites.
• Girls have fueled the growth of the teen blogosphere.
• Teens from lower-income and single-parent households are more likely to blog.
• African American teens are more likely to look for college information online.
• Content creators are not devoting their lives exclusively to virtual participation. They are just as likely as other teens to engage in most offline activities and more likely to have jobs.

Original Pew Report

What is their preference?
Image:Rank Order.jpg

How often?
Image:Daily Social Communication.jpg

Yeah, but do they have them?
Image:Teen Gadgets.jpg

[edit] A Little Closer to Home

Did You Know

Pay Attention

A Vision of Students Today

[edit] Questions and Conversation Starters

"Did You Know?" is intended to be a conversation starter. As you use the presentation with various audiences, leave plenty of time at the end for questions and discussion. Questions such as the following are good ways to start conversation.

Use this video along with your favorite questions below to have extend these conversations to your buildings!

• What are your initial reactions to what you saw in the presentation?
• How are these changes manifesting themselves in your personal lives? Professional lives?
• What do we think it means to prepare students for the 21st century? What skills do students need to survive and thrive in this new era?
• What implications does this have for our current way of doing things?
• Do we need to change? If so, how?
• How do we get from here to there?
• What challenges must we overcome as we move forward?
• Who's scared? Why?
• What will we do next? What are some concrete actions that we can take in the near future?
• Is it possible for a teacher to be an excellent teacher if he/she does not use technology? [see this key question for another way to ask this]

[edit] Expressive Capital

Hugh MacLeod is a marketer, a writer, and a cartoonist. He specializes in marketing hand-made suits, South African wine, and Microsoft. Hugh is a model of what it will take for our students to succeed.

Among Hugh's gems is a piece called "Expressive Capital"

1. First we had human capital. You! There! Go to the next village and kill everybody because I’m the chief of this village and I say so etc.
2. Then came physical capital. Land, property, factories etc.
3. Then came financial capital. Money, credit, dollars etc.
4. Then came intellectual capital. Our widgets are better than your widgets because our engineers are smarter than your engineers etc.

1. Then came emotional capital. People love our product more than they love our competitor’s product etc.
2. Expressive capital. Our products make it easier for the end user to find and/or express meaning, narrative, metaphor, purpose, explanation and relevance in his/her own life than our competitor’s products.

Marketers know that establishing a successful "21st century brand" involves tapping people's emotional and expressive sides. Foldgers vs. Starbucks. How are schools meeting student's emotional and expressive needs? No doubt we are still chasing a benchmark of "intellectual capital" as our "financial, physical, and human capital" continue to dwindle. How are we working to make learning more relevant to students? Is learning today like Foldgers or more like Starbucks?

Take what we are learning about globalization in the 21st century. Others have quickly surpassed our ability to compete in the domains of human, physical, and financial capital. Leaders continue to focus on metrics comparing where US students match "intellectually" compared to international students. "How are our widgets compared to theirs?" "21st century leaders" know this is the wrong battle. They realize that successful "21st century business" stopped focusing on "my widgets vs. their widgets" and refocused on being emotionally and expressively rich. They stopped trying to improve Foldgers and got on with building Starbucks.

[edit] Creativity & Expression

Do Schools Kill Creativity? Sir Ken Robinson TED Talks
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iG9CE55wbtY

[edit] Message

Communication. It's happening in very different ways. Blogs, wikis, text messaging, etc. How are these impacting you personally? Professionally?

Creativity. Others countries will capitalize on the physical, human, financial, and intellectual capital. Differentiate by focusing on the emotional and expressive capital.

[edit] Action Items

1. Learn.

Download a copy of iTunes and begin exploring the content available in the podcast section of iTunes. I highly suggest feeding yourself yourself with TED Talks.

2. Question.

Is it Okay to Be a Technologically Illiterate Teacher?

"If a teacher today is not technologically literate - and is unwilling to make the effort to learn more - it's equivalent to a teacher 30 years ago who didn't know how to read and write."

3. Know the kids. Be relevant.

Educating the Net Generation - Educause

"The Net Generation has grown up with information technology. The aptitudes, attitudes, expectations, and learning styles of Net Gen students reflect the environment in which they were raised—one that is decidedly different from that which existed when faculty and administrators were growing up. This collection explores the Net Gen and the implications for institutions in areas such as teaching, service, learning space design, faculty development, and curriculum."