Oregon School District 2008 Kickoff
From Shifted Learning
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[edit] Thanks
Thanks for letting me come play.
Quick exercise. Bear with me. We are going to take a chunk of time to try something I've never done.
You are going to get paper and a marker. I'm going to give you 4 minutes to turn this piece of paper into the following...
- State your name for the record.
- What do they pay you to do?
- Draw a pictorial representation of what technology means to you.
When we are finished, I'm going to force you kicking and screaming to explain yourself to the rest of the group.
[edit] What is Web 2.0? How is the web changing things?
Web 1.0 - Connecting People to Things
Web 2.0 - Two things.
- Creating content.
- Connecting People to People
Insert examples of how the Web is changing things.
Web 3.0 - Now That We Have Stuff and Know Each Other, Let's Play.
Kevin Kelly: "This stuff has fundamentally changed society, yet we still act relatively unimpressed/unaware of the magnitude of what's happening."
Clay Shirky: "For any given organization, the important questions are 'When will the change happen?" and "What will change?" The only two answers we can rule out are never, and nothing."
Image:Fear of Change is Death.jpg
John Seeley Brown: "We are entering a time of deeply personalized, passion based learning."
- Our current curricula is less relevant to our students.
- The expectation is to create, not consume, content. We are not ready.
[edit] Digital Immigrants vs. Digital Natives
Marc Prensky's "Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants"
Digital Native vs. Digital Immigrant: A Refresher
- Digital Natives: The little kids we see running around. They are "native" to this land. They grew up with the technology. Note: Your graduating seniors this year don't know a world without the Internet. School has always been connected.
- Digital Immigrants: These are the adults. We come to this digital world from afar. We have accents.
Generational Math: Think Hard
The leading edge of what we've labeled the "digital natives" are making babies that are showing up at Kindergarten this year.
What used to be "us vs. them" is now "us vs. them + parents".
The conversation over the past 15 years in educational technology has been "Well, they'll be retiring soon. The natives will replace the immigrants over time and the balance will shift."
We can't afford another 15 years to wait out the digital immigrant population.
[edit] "Millenials", "Generation M", "Net Gens"
Image:Claire Lars Stop.jpg "They’re sociable, optimistic, talented, well-educated, collaborative, open-minded, influential, and achievement-oriented. They’ve always felt sought after, needed, indispensable. They are arriving in the workplace with higher expectations than any generation before them—and they’re so well connected that, if an employer doesn’t match those expectations, they can tell thousands of their cohorts with one click of the mouse. They’re the Millennial Generation. Born between 1980 and 2000, they’re a generation nearly as large as the Baby Boom, and they’re charged with potential."
Confident. Raised by parents believing in the importance of self-esteem, they characteristically consider themselves ready to overcome challenges and leap tall buildings. Managers who believe in “paying your dues” and coworkers who don’t think opinions are worth listening to unless they come from someone with a prerequisite number of years on the resume find this can-do attitude unsettling.
Hopeful. They’re described as optimistic yet practical. They believe in the future and their role in it. They’ve read about businesses with basketball courts, stockrooms stocked with beer for employers, and companies that pay your way through school. They expect a workplace that is challenging, collaborative, creative, fun, and financially rewarding.
Goal- and achievement-oriented. Just a day after she won a totally unexpected Olympic gold medal, skater Sara Hughes was talking about her next goal—scoring a perfect 1600 on her SATs. Many Millennials arrive at their first day of work with personal goals on paper.
Civic-minded. They were taught to think in terms of the greater good. They have a high rate of volunteerism. They expect companies to contribute to their communities—and to operate in ways that create a sustainable environment.
Inclusive. Millennials are used to being organized in teams—and to making certain no one is left behind. They expect to earn a living in a workplace that is fair to all, where diversity is the norm—and they’ll use their collective power if they feel someone is treated unfairly.
[edit] Break
Take 10 minutes to shake it out.
[edit] Rules of Engagement
- This isn't about the kids. They are perfectly comfortable in this new world. They invented it.
- It's going to be much easier to change you than it will be to change them.
- You need to commit time to your own personal learning. It may involve weeks, months, or years before the payoff. It depends on what you put in.
[edit] Unlearning & Undoing
In order to learn something, you must first unlearn something. In order to do something, you must first undo something.
Exercise: What are you going to unlearn?
Take 5 minutes to think ahead to the upcoming school year. On the back of the really pretty picture, I want you to think and jot down for yourself a few things that you are going to attempt to "unlearn" or "undo" this upcoming school year. (I won't make you share, though I will ask if anybody wants to share!)
Examples
- Stop teaching that lesson/unit/topic
- Stop doing all the talking with my students
- Stop being quiet in meetings
Will Richardson's 10 Things to Unlearn
- We need to unlearn the idea that we are the sole content experts in the classroom, because we can now connect our kids to people who know far more than we do about the material we’re teaching.
- We need to unlearn the premise that we know more than our kids, because in many cases, they can now be our teachers as well.
- We need to unlearn the idea that learning itself is an event. In this day and age, it is a continual process.
- We need to unlearn the strategy that collaborative work inside the classroom is enough and understand that cooperating with students from around the globe can teach relevant and powerful negotiation and team-building skills.
- We need to unlearn the idea that every student needs to learn the same content when really what they need to learn is how to self-direct their own learning.
- We need to unlearn the notion that our students don’t need to see and understand how we ourselves learn.
- We need to unlearn our fear of putting ourselves and our students “out there” for we’ve proven we can do it in safe, relevant and effective ways.
- We need to unlearn the practice that teaches all students at the same pace. Is it any wonder why so many of our students love to play online games where they move forward at their own pace?
- We need to unlearn the idea that we can teach our students to be literate in this world by continually blocking and filtering access to the sites and experiences they need our help to navigate.
- We need to unlearn the premise that real change can happen just by rethinking what happens inside the school walls and understand that education is now a community undertaking on many different levels.
[edit] Do
[edit] Get involved online personally.
"You can't give away something you don't own."
[edit] Facebook
Facebook is a nice start.
- Register an account.
- Poke around for that friend, colleague, relative, etc. Trust me. They are there.
- Look at their friends. Lather, rinse, repeat.
- Start up a game of Scrabble.
[edit] MySpace
If you are feeling a little frisky, try MySpace. Please don't make an account, rather, do a zip code based location search and see what your students are doing on MySpace. Please.
[edit] Growing Up Digital
Understand your kids. Growing Up Online PBS Frontline Special
[edit] Feeding Your Own Brain
[edit] Get Involved Professionally
Links to Educational Bloggers
Flat Classroom Project
Jen Wagner's Creative Online Projects for PreK-6 Classrooms
Classroom 2.0 Ning
[edit] Do Schools Kill Creativity?
Sir Ken Robinson at the TED conference.
[edit] Time for Conversation
Questions, Comments, Conversation
[edit] Photo Credits
Kid on Computer: http://flickr.com/photos/tanyaryno/975839418/sizes/o/
Coolest Dad Ever: http://flickr.com/photos/elvissa/433689608/sizes/m/
