Tag Archives: clms

CLMS 2007: Marc Prensky

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Marc’s theme: Engage me or enrage me.

Educating today’s digital native.

Technology changes; Tools switch. TV becomes You Tube; email becomes IM; Yahoo search becomes Google search; Hard drives become flash memory.
Our students are expecting things to change; they were “born to the idea of change.”
The nature of education is changing.

Tomorrow’s problems won’t be solved with today’s tools.

What do kids want?
Group work; projects, activities, discussing, interacting, being asked what they think…

Immigrants look at technology as a tool. Natives look at tech as a foundation. It’s totally integrated into what students do.

Every single teacher is going to have to change how she/he teaches. That means we’ll have to give up some control to students.

We have lots of reasons why we shouldn’t change. You have to feel the fear and do it anyway which is the definition of courage.

Kids are great at sharing and teaching each other. Why are our kids so bored? We’re not teaching them the right stuff. We’re too focused on the past and not their future.
Marc thinks we should be teaching programming (this is a bit 360 since that’s where we began in the 1980s.) We have to teach kids 21st century skills. He believes we should be teaching Covey’s “7 habits” to our students.

How do we do this in the era of content standards? Curriculum deletion. What can we NOT teach?

We also not teaching kids the RIGHT way. We ban tools from our schools. What’s the role of technology? Technology is NOT the answer if we don’t change the way we teach. Digital natives learn from being engaged, multi-=tasking. After school kids have found a different way of learning. The new paradigm is kids teaching themselves with guidance.

Things for teachers to try
Find two tech buddies and put their numbers in your cell phone.
Hold a class meeting to talk with kids about how they want to be taught.
Appoint a student to be your assistant.
Take your class’ temperature every day.
Get something unblocked.
Assigning homework where kids have the option to use their favorite technology
Decide what you won’t cover.
Have your students populate an RSS aggregator in your classroom.
Share what you do that’s successful via You Tube.
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Blogs and Wikis: Writing Across the Curriculum

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by Brian Bridges

While CLRN will be presenting several hands-on sessions at the CLMS conference, I’ll be sharing about our blogs and wikis course. Session information is listed below, but I encourage you to arrive early for my special BONUS presentation. I hope to see you Friday ant 2:30.

Blogs and Wikis: Writing Across the Curriculum

Discover a variety of online, collaborative writing tools, and see how teachers are using them to engage their students, participate in online writing projects, and publish to an authentic audience. We’ll review and demonstrate a variety of free resources including Edublogger, pbwiki and Google Docs. Handouts include content standard connections, 100 ways to wiki and blog in the curriculum, and tutorials. Come early for a BONUS presentation.

Abstract

Each summer, I teach one of the four-day technology integration strands at CTAP 6’s Technology Festival. This summer, I focused on writing in the curriculum using blogs, wikis and Google Docs.

During this writing across the curriculum session, we’ll first look at a variety of ways that teachers and schools have utilized blogs and wikis to add relevancy to the writing process. Writing, reporting, and analyzing is woven into the content standards of every subject area. To that end, one of this session’s handouts outlines specific standards that teachers will be addressing when their students create blog or wiki postings.

We’ll explore a variety of educational blogs and wikis and compare and contrast their best uses. Using two handouts, Blog Strategies and 50 Ways to Wiki, we’ll make connections both to the standards and to current and potential class projects in several subject areas.

I’ll also demonstrate setting up a new Edublogs blog and a pbWiki wiki and show how to customize them for your class. Handouts will include tutorials detailing how to set-up each blog or wiki component. Links to other tutorials, resources, curricular projects, and clients (wordpress) are included as well.

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