Folklorico Las Alacanas from Cholla High School danced for AzTEA conference attendees during our lunch break. Enjoy a QuickTime clip of this colorful entertainment!
Showing posts with label AzTEA. Show all posts
Showing posts with label AzTEA. Show all posts
Sunday, January 27, 2008
Folklorico Las Alacanas
Folklorico Las Alacanas from Cholla High School danced for AzTEA conference attendees during our lunch break. Enjoy a QuickTime clip of this colorful entertainment!
Saturday, January 26, 2008
AzTEA Keynote: From Classroom Knowledge to Global Contribution
AzTEA schedules conferences every school year in Flagstaff, Tucson, and Phoenix. Each conference has unique content but all focus on educational applications of technology. On Saturday, January 27th, I attended the Teaching and Technology: Students in the Global Village conference at Pueblo High School in Tucson, Arizona.Dr. Tim Tyson is presenting the keynote addresses at all of the 2007-08 AzTEA conferences. He is the former principal of Mabry Middle School in Atlanta, Georgia. Mabry students hold an annual film festival. Student film teams are encouraged to identify an issue, research it, and present their work in a video. No grades are assigned for these projects. Dr. Tyson has shown several impressive student videos during his keynote addresses in Flagstaff and Tucson.
Here are some highlights from Dr. Tyson's keynote:
- Kids are facing foreboding global issues. We’re not doing enough to prepare them. We’re so out of touch.
- The new oil will be bandwidth. “Bandwidth is this generation’s oxygen.” - Steve Jobs, Macworld 2008 keynote speech
- Brainwidth can’t keep up with bandwidth. Developing and distributing transformative ideas is growing exponentially, not linearly. How do we keep up? We don’t! Don’t focus on technology. Let kids handle it. Focus on making the connections in students’ minds.
- Students want an emotional connection with their learning. We’re teaching kids with tools that they have no emotional connection to and we’re wondering why they’re not engaged in learning.
- Technology is not a tool for students -- it's a habitat, an ecosystem.
- iPods can be Trojan horses because students love them. Load them up with educational content!
- Students crave educational experiences that leverage their unprecedented interest in technology.
- Video is the language this generation speaks. Adults think in the two-dimensional world of words. Students think increasingly in the four-dimensional virtualized world of connected, interactive media.
- Videos are a studio for students' creation, a stage for sharing, and a community for collaboration.
- Kids are writing more now than ever but they're using different tools.
- The use of technology tends to be at a very low level on Bloom’s taxonomy. We need to raise the bar to increase the scope and quality of what they’re producing.
- Teach students in a language they understand.
- Dr. Tyson predicts that public schools will join universities in a digital distribution model similar to iTunes University. Lectures, instructional activities, assignments, digital media objects, and student-created learning objects will be databased and available.
Tuesday, November 13, 2007
Learning 2.0: Tools for 21st Century Learning
Diana Laufenberg is a young social studies teacher at Mount Elden Middle School in Flagstaff. I rarely miss one of her sessions at the Peak Performance conference. Diana is enthusiastic about using technology to further the cause of learning.
Diana arrived at this conference with over a dozen of her students. Their charge was to interview and photograph speakers and those in attendance and to create a conference wrap-up slide show to be shown at the closing of the conference.
Diana devoted a section of her wiki to her Learning 2.0 session. Here's her introduction to this page:
"It's all about the learning. Tech tools and gadgets are fun, no argument there, but they don't necessarily make for good teaching or learning without sound pedagogical footing. Asking compelling questions, focusing on process, pushing the envelope on critical thinking are all goals of the learning and we live in an age where there are tools to serve those educational endeavors. Do not confuse a fun gadget with something that is necessarily good for the learning. First define the learning and find the resources to support. In my humble opinion, this is the key to effective teaching in the 21st century. Work to carefully define what are the goals for learning and use the most appropriate tool for the task."
Diana always schedules hands-on presentations in a lab and gets her audience involved in creating or exploring something on a computer. This year we explored the wiki page and I went nuts when I found this link: Top 50 Web 2.0 Sites. What a treasure trove!
I'm not going to post my notes on Diana's session because her Peak Performance wiki page is almost an exact duplicate.
I will report on two items of interest:
1. Diana also is a fan of TEDTalks! I'm addicted to them and, in fact, recently purchased a new video Nano so I could watch the vodcast version. The TED (Technology Entertainment Design) conference is held annually in Monterey -- yes, in the same venue as Internet Librarian. They select a theme and gather the great minds of the world to present their ideas. Aforementioned Great Minds are given twenty minutes to share their passions with the world. Visit TED's site or the Podcast section of iTunes, search for TEDTalks, and wallow in free access to either audio or video podcasts! Diana showed a clip from Dr. Ken Robinson's talk, "Do Schools Kill Creativity?"
2. I asked Diana if she was familiar with any web-based audio editors since we still don't have Audacity installed on any computers in my library except for my laptop. She logged into her Twitter account, which is dlaufenberg, and asked her circle of contacts. No one had a solution, but it was inspiring to know that some of the big names in educational technology were being polled for help with my question. Professional collaboration on the fly!
Teacher librarians, Joyce Valenza has a Twitter account! You can sign up for a free account, too, and read what she and her circle of acquaintances are discussing. Or, better yet, ask her a question -- or answer one.
Diana arrived at this conference with over a dozen of her students. Their charge was to interview and photograph speakers and those in attendance and to create a conference wrap-up slide show to be shown at the closing of the conference.
Diana devoted a section of her wiki to her Learning 2.0 session. Here's her introduction to this page:
"It's all about the learning. Tech tools and gadgets are fun, no argument there, but they don't necessarily make for good teaching or learning without sound pedagogical footing. Asking compelling questions, focusing on process, pushing the envelope on critical thinking are all goals of the learning and we live in an age where there are tools to serve those educational endeavors. Do not confuse a fun gadget with something that is necessarily good for the learning. First define the learning and find the resources to support. In my humble opinion, this is the key to effective teaching in the 21st century. Work to carefully define what are the goals for learning and use the most appropriate tool for the task."
Diana always schedules hands-on presentations in a lab and gets her audience involved in creating or exploring something on a computer. This year we explored the wiki page and I went nuts when I found this link: Top 50 Web 2.0 Sites. What a treasure trove!
I'm not going to post my notes on Diana's session because her Peak Performance wiki page is almost an exact duplicate.
I will report on two items of interest:
1. Diana also is a fan of TEDTalks! I'm addicted to them and, in fact, recently purchased a new video Nano so I could watch the vodcast version. The TED (Technology Entertainment Design) conference is held annually in Monterey -- yes, in the same venue as Internet Librarian. They select a theme and gather the great minds of the world to present their ideas. Aforementioned Great Minds are given twenty minutes to share their passions with the world. Visit TED's site or the Podcast section of iTunes, search for TEDTalks, and wallow in free access to either audio or video podcasts! Diana showed a clip from Dr. Ken Robinson's talk, "Do Schools Kill Creativity?"
2. I asked Diana if she was familiar with any web-based audio editors since we still don't have Audacity installed on any computers in my library except for my laptop. She logged into her Twitter account, which is dlaufenberg, and asked her circle of contacts. No one had a solution, but it was inspiring to know that some of the big names in educational technology were being polled for help with my question. Professional collaboration on the fly!
Teacher librarians, Joyce Valenza has a Twitter account! You can sign up for a free account, too, and read what she and her circle of acquaintances are discussing. Or, better yet, ask her a question -- or answer one.
It’s Time to Upgrade: Making the Case for Change
Dr. Tim Tyson will be presenting the keynote addresses at each of the three AzTEA conferences this year. Every keynote will be different. After enjoying his keynote at the Peak Performance conference, I'm looking forward to hearing his presentations at the next two conferences.
Dr. Tim Tyson has been an educator for over thirty years. He currently works as a consultant and speaker. Prior to this, he was the principal of Mabry Middle School in Cobb County, Georgia. School Library Journal has referred to him as the "Pied Piper of Educational Technology." He started a student-led digital film festival at Mabry.
Here are my notes from his keynote:
It’s all about perspective. We get stuck until some tragic emotional experience shakes our perspective. Are we powerful enough to change our perspective without a tragedy?
The nature of work has changed because of technology. Global competition, consolidation, mergers, and layoffs have resulted in a third of America’s work force being laid off. They’re now independent contractors. To thrive in the economy, right-brain skills are essential. (Both Tim and LSLibn highly recommend reading Daniel Pink’s book, A Whole New Mind.) Unfortunately, many schools still focus on Rules, Rituals, Routines, and Right Answers.
Tim said he worked in a middle school with “hormonally handicapped” kids. (Sounds pretty typical, eh?)
Students sitting in rows is an outdated practice. We need to be doing project-based learning to prepare them for the workplace.
John Dewey (1916): “One learns through direct experience, by being engaged in authentic tasks. Learning is not, then, a process of transmitting information from someone who knows to someone who doesn't; rather, learning is an active process on the part of the learner, where knowledge and understanding is constructed by the learner. Moreover, learning is a social process: learning proceeds by and through conversations....”
A Big Question for Teachers
Who owns the learning? Teachers are working themselves to death and their students aren’t. Students need to take ownership of their learning.
The way we work, play, communicate, build and maintain relationships, travel, etc. have been transformed by technology. But school is pretty much the same. There’s LIFE and then there’s school.
Trivia: People in one out of every eight marriages in the U.S. last year met online.
The New Bad Word (per Daniel Pink) Is Routine
We need routines to be efficient, but anything that can be reduced to routine can be automated, digitized, and sent around the world at the speed of an electron. If you’re engaged in a job filled with routine, your work can be outsourced.
Students believe what happens in schools is irrelevant to both their present and their future. We can’t continue school as usual. It's time for new beginnings! Opportunity! Potential! Transformation! Metamorphosis!
The transformational power of the laptop is more potent than the printing press.
School 2.0
- Authentically engaged learners
- Self-directed learning - “If you require a boss, you’re already too expensive to hire.”
- Project-driven instruction
- Independent problem-solvers
- Empowered by technology innovation
- Collaborative learning community
- Relevant
Connectedness, meaningfulness, significance, and contribution are hallmarks of School 2.0.
We shouldn’t think our job us to pour information into children. Instead, they need to gather information on their own, assimilate it, and then use it to make the world a better place.
Put kids’ work into global distribution. This is the first time in history that we can do that and it doesn’t hardly cost anything. It’s simple and cheap. Tim started the school year at his middle school by asking students: “What do you as a student have to say that is so important that everyone in the world needs to hear or read about it?” This was very inspiring to his students.
His podcast, MabryOnline.org, on iTunes has had 2.2 million downloads so far in 2007.
In New Zealand, every teacher and student has a blog that serves as a digital portfolio.
Authentic Assessment
The concept of childhood is very recent. Tim's grandmother started early to make a valuable contribution to her family. Her contribution was respected and essential. Children today are entertained and minimized.
When does meaningfulness start for a person? When students graduate from high school? College? Get a job? Marry? Have kids? It should start today. It’s time to refocus our thinking.
What’s on Students’ Minds?
Inspired by Tim's challenge, some Mabry students wanted to shoot a video about human embryonic stem cell research. Tim, concerned a bit about the volatility of the topic, told themm “Come up with a plan and keep me informed on every step you take.” Their next progress report was to request a field trip to Emory University to speak with Dr. Chedda, a researcher, who had committed to spending two hours with the students. Tim went with the students and their parents wanted to go, too. The researcher gave the kids the same presentation she gives to colleagues. She didn’t dumb it down, but she drilled down to explain concepts and vocabulary. Students toured the lab, saw actual stem cells, and witnessed experiments being conducted. The video they made after the visit was judged by a panel, including someone from Georgia TV.
Other topics of student-created Mabry Middle School videos:
- Children’s slave labor in the chocolate industry on the Ivory Coast
- Commercialization of pure drinking water
- Saving lives in Africa from malaria - Students collected donations for bed nets when it was aired.
- Captivity of elephants -- The teacher had shot video of elephants during a vacation in Africa. Tim rejected the student request for a field trip to Africa (!), so students filmed videos of elephants during a field trip to the Atlanta Zoo. They discovered the elephants in the zoo had a skin condition because they don’t have enough room. They researched that and raised people’s awareness.
- Organ donation
Students are not assigned a letter grade for their films. Their reward is what a thousand attendees say when they watch the project on Film Night.
The point is not the technology. The effective educator in this age of hyperconnectivity is the educator who uses tools to get students involved in their world.
Children want to be prepared to make a contribution today.
“The self depends for its wholeness upon its surroundings.” - John Dewey
Tim claims his greatest fear is that No Child Left Behind will accomplish its goals and will create an entire nation of minimum achievers. Will -- or have -- the students who are achievers be overlooked because we’re emphasizing the bare minimum?
Contact Information
drtimtyson.com/feedback
drtimtyson/blog
tim@drtimtyson.com - He invited attendees to email him “if I can help you in any way.”
You can watch some of Mabry Middle School student videos by searching for MabryOnline on iTunes.
Dr. Tim Tyson has been an educator for over thirty years. He currently works as a consultant and speaker. Prior to this, he was the principal of Mabry Middle School in Cobb County, Georgia. School Library Journal has referred to him as the "Pied Piper of Educational Technology." He started a student-led digital film festival at Mabry.
Here are my notes from his keynote:
It’s all about perspective. We get stuck until some tragic emotional experience shakes our perspective. Are we powerful enough to change our perspective without a tragedy?
The nature of work has changed because of technology. Global competition, consolidation, mergers, and layoffs have resulted in a third of America’s work force being laid off. They’re now independent contractors. To thrive in the economy, right-brain skills are essential. (Both Tim and LSLibn highly recommend reading Daniel Pink’s book, A Whole New Mind.) Unfortunately, many schools still focus on Rules, Rituals, Routines, and Right Answers.
Tim said he worked in a middle school with “hormonally handicapped” kids. (Sounds pretty typical, eh?)
Students sitting in rows is an outdated practice. We need to be doing project-based learning to prepare them for the workplace.
John Dewey (1916): “One learns through direct experience, by being engaged in authentic tasks. Learning is not, then, a process of transmitting information from someone who knows to someone who doesn't; rather, learning is an active process on the part of the learner, where knowledge and understanding is constructed by the learner. Moreover, learning is a social process: learning proceeds by and through conversations....”
A Big Question for Teachers
Who owns the learning? Teachers are working themselves to death and their students aren’t. Students need to take ownership of their learning.
The way we work, play, communicate, build and maintain relationships, travel, etc. have been transformed by technology. But school is pretty much the same. There’s LIFE and then there’s school.
Trivia: People in one out of every eight marriages in the U.S. last year met online.
The New Bad Word (per Daniel Pink) Is Routine
We need routines to be efficient, but anything that can be reduced to routine can be automated, digitized, and sent around the world at the speed of an electron. If you’re engaged in a job filled with routine, your work can be outsourced.
Students believe what happens in schools is irrelevant to both their present and their future. We can’t continue school as usual. It's time for new beginnings! Opportunity! Potential! Transformation! Metamorphosis!
The transformational power of the laptop is more potent than the printing press.
School 2.0
- Authentically engaged learners
- Self-directed learning - “If you require a boss, you’re already too expensive to hire.”
- Project-driven instruction
- Independent problem-solvers
- Empowered by technology innovation
- Collaborative learning community
- Relevant
Connectedness, meaningfulness, significance, and contribution are hallmarks of School 2.0.
We shouldn’t think our job us to pour information into children. Instead, they need to gather information on their own, assimilate it, and then use it to make the world a better place.
Put kids’ work into global distribution. This is the first time in history that we can do that and it doesn’t hardly cost anything. It’s simple and cheap. Tim started the school year at his middle school by asking students: “What do you as a student have to say that is so important that everyone in the world needs to hear or read about it?” This was very inspiring to his students.
His podcast, MabryOnline.org, on iTunes has had 2.2 million downloads so far in 2007.
In New Zealand, every teacher and student has a blog that serves as a digital portfolio.
Authentic Assessment
The concept of childhood is very recent. Tim's grandmother started early to make a valuable contribution to her family. Her contribution was respected and essential. Children today are entertained and minimized.
When does meaningfulness start for a person? When students graduate from high school? College? Get a job? Marry? Have kids? It should start today. It’s time to refocus our thinking.
What’s on Students’ Minds?
Inspired by Tim's challenge, some Mabry students wanted to shoot a video about human embryonic stem cell research. Tim, concerned a bit about the volatility of the topic, told themm “Come up with a plan and keep me informed on every step you take.” Their next progress report was to request a field trip to Emory University to speak with Dr. Chedda, a researcher, who had committed to spending two hours with the students. Tim went with the students and their parents wanted to go, too. The researcher gave the kids the same presentation she gives to colleagues. She didn’t dumb it down, but she drilled down to explain concepts and vocabulary. Students toured the lab, saw actual stem cells, and witnessed experiments being conducted. The video they made after the visit was judged by a panel, including someone from Georgia TV.
Other topics of student-created Mabry Middle School videos:
- Children’s slave labor in the chocolate industry on the Ivory Coast
- Commercialization of pure drinking water
- Saving lives in Africa from malaria - Students collected donations for bed nets when it was aired.
- Captivity of elephants -- The teacher had shot video of elephants during a vacation in Africa. Tim rejected the student request for a field trip to Africa (!), so students filmed videos of elephants during a field trip to the Atlanta Zoo. They discovered the elephants in the zoo had a skin condition because they don’t have enough room. They researched that and raised people’s awareness.
- Organ donation
Students are not assigned a letter grade for their films. Their reward is what a thousand attendees say when they watch the project on Film Night.
The point is not the technology. The effective educator in this age of hyperconnectivity is the educator who uses tools to get students involved in their world.
Children want to be prepared to make a contribution today.
“The self depends for its wholeness upon its surroundings.” - John Dewey
Tim claims his greatest fear is that No Child Left Behind will accomplish its goals and will create an entire nation of minimum achievers. Will -- or have -- the students who are achievers be overlooked because we’re emphasizing the bare minimum?
Contact Information
drtimtyson.com/feedback
drtimtyson/blog
tim@drtimtyson.com - He invited attendees to email him “if I can help you in any way.”
You can watch some of Mabry Middle School student videos by searching for MabryOnline on iTunes.
AzTEA
On Saturday, November 3 I attended the Peak Performance conference in Flagstaff. Two conferences in one week! I was in Web 2.0 heaven! Peak Performance is the first of three conferences held around Arizona by the Arizona Technology in Education Alliance (AzTEA). This year’s conference was held at Northern Arizona University for the first time.
AzTEA conferences provide an excellent way to learn about educational applications of Web 2.0. It's an excellent opportunity to meet colleagues from around the state. Most of the presenters who teaching the sessions are working educators.
The next AzTEA conference, called the Teaching and Technology Conference, will be held in Tucson at Pueblo High School on January 26th. The final conference of the year, the WOW Way-Out West Technology Conference, will be held at ASU West on May 3.
AzTEA annual membership costs $35. Individual conference registration is only $50, and there is a discount when you register for multiple conferences. For example, you could register for the next two conferences for $80.
If this wasn't already a sweet enough deal, here are a few more incentives. You collect a conference tote and tchotchkes from the exhibitors. Breakfast and lunch are provided. A raffle for techno-goodies and gift certificates from local vendors and restaurants is held at the end of each conference. Professional development certificates that will add seven hours to your stockpile are distributed. And, if you're very, very lucky, you might win a free week at Plug and Play tech camp! (I was very lucky last spring and tech camp was a fantastic experience! A week at a 5-star resort with hot and cold running technology!)
I'm going to post some material from Peak Performance and try to chip away on the remaining Internet Librarian sessions, too.
AzTEA conferences provide an excellent way to learn about educational applications of Web 2.0. It's an excellent opportunity to meet colleagues from around the state. Most of the presenters who teaching the sessions are working educators.
The next AzTEA conference, called the Teaching and Technology Conference, will be held in Tucson at Pueblo High School on January 26th. The final conference of the year, the WOW Way-Out West Technology Conference, will be held at ASU West on May 3.
AzTEA annual membership costs $35. Individual conference registration is only $50, and there is a discount when you register for multiple conferences. For example, you could register for the next two conferences for $80.
If this wasn't already a sweet enough deal, here are a few more incentives. You collect a conference tote and tchotchkes from the exhibitors. Breakfast and lunch are provided. A raffle for techno-goodies and gift certificates from local vendors and restaurants is held at the end of each conference. Professional development certificates that will add seven hours to your stockpile are distributed. And, if you're very, very lucky, you might win a free week at Plug and Play tech camp! (I was very lucky last spring and tech camp was a fantastic experience! A week at a 5-star resort with hot and cold running technology!)
I'm going to post some material from Peak Performance and try to chip away on the remaining Internet Librarian sessions, too.
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