Alexandria School District - Opening Day 2008
Speaker: Barry Dahl, Lake Superior College
Resources:
Recommended Edubloggers: (alphabetical by last)
Talking Points
- Who am I and why am I here?
- Parent, CTO, educator, volunteer, PTA member
- State Math Champ in high school, t wo degrees in accounting, 17 years as faculty and 7 as admin.
- Most of what is useful to me now as an adult was learned through informal learning.
- Teachers are seeing each other for the first time in weeks, and they have so much to do to be ready for their students — and now they have to listen to this guy from Duluth with credentials that “ don’t really have anything to do with my science curriculum at all.”
- Passion for teaching and learning. (Everyone in this room is an educator, either directly or indirectly. Those of you in non-teaching positions are still modeling behavior for students every day.)
- Theme for the day: Teachable moments
- Higher-order thinking skills (Bloom's taxonomy - analysis, synthesis, and evaluation)
- 21st century literacy skills - What does it mean to be literate? How has it changed? Has it changed?
- Global connections (Skype example of mine, connect with students in foreign countries (Vietnamese War or American War?))
- Integrating technology? or just new ideas about teaching and learning?
- My daughter's 6th grade "computer class" = 3 months of keyboarding drills (Now she hates computer class, but she loves doing thngs on the computer.)
- Don Tapscott in Growing Up Digital who said “technology is not technology unless it was invented after you were born.” I don't believe that at all.
- The technology is the pencil and paper, the crayon and scissors, just the tool. It is not about the technology, it is about the learning.
- Prensky: Digital Natives vs. Digital Immigrants (not even close to true for many of us)
- New Digital Divide: There are basically two camps for educators. The pro-technology camp and the anti-technology camp. I don't get it. Is there a pro-math camp and an anti-math camp? Is there a pro-reading camp and an anti-reading camp? Pro-writing and anti-writing?
- How comfortable with technology is the audience?
- Mythbusters using Clickers: Net generation
- Teaching kids to make PowerPoint slides? Ick.
- Online security and safety. Important, yes. But not all consuming and not more important than neighborhood security.
- When do you start introducing information evaluation, research, ethics, etc. We tend to think of these skills as technology or digital skills. It’s an unfortunate mistake, because it channels us down to thinking of these skills in terms of time-on-machine.
- Warlick suggests that educators of primary level children model, as part of their lessons, the practices of researching, evaluating, processing,and expressing digital information, that they talk about what they are doing, and engage their students in conversations about the processes. Teachers should be doing this all the way through. It’s another way of convincing students that these are not merely skills, to be demonstrated, but habits to be embraced and adopted. (TEACHABLE MOMENT)
- Beloit College Mindset List for recent H.S. grads: http://www.beloit.edu/mindset/2012.php
- Net Gen Nonsense Blog (even handed? No.) http://netgennonsense.blogspot.com/
- One example of cell phone fines - Madison County Mississippi
- Ideas for using cell phones productively: Terry Freedman
- Virtual worlds - Second Life and others
- Personal Learning Networks - connecting with other educators to learn together