ISTE+Videos-+February

Video 1: [|The Tech Commandments: 10 Ways to Revitalize Education with Technology] //Adam Bellow, eduTecher// Adam shared his view of the 10 ways to revitalize education with technology. I found that while he shared many ideas, his ideas were not neatly packaged and presented. In the presentation, Adam jumped around a lot, making it hard to follow the points he was making. While I found the information important and useful, I found it hard to realize all 10 of his ways to revitalize education with technology.

In the presentation, I agreed with the presenter's beliefs on using technology in education. Adam emphasized the point that in using technology in education, teachers need training. He said training was essential. But not just training, quality training, continuous training, constant training, support in training, and finally a priority to training (taking the time needed to train). To many times training for teachers is too quick and not indepth enough. We recently had this at my school, it was frustrating, and shows the importance on continued training.

I also liked the part of the presentation when he talked about getting everyone involved. Adam mentioned that the administration should include teachers, students, and parents before rolling out new technology and policies. Let those who are going to be most affected by the change have a voice in the direction and implementation.

Video 2: [|This is Not a Unit: Eight Shifts for Every Curriculum] //Will Richardson, Powerful Learning Practice// Will shared his eight shifts that need to take place in the classrooms. These shifts are:
 * 1) Do Talk to Strangers - We need to be networking, learning from others. I think of my limited PLN on twitter and notice that I follow very few people that I know. I follow those that I want to learn from. And those people are strangers to me! We need to teach our students how to communicate and participate in a world that is much bigger than their school, a world where they do not know everyone.
 * 2) Create your own Portfolio - Will questions how students are portraying themselves online. He suggested we all google ourselves to see what comes up. Then determine if what comes up is what we want to see. Maybe we need to teach reputation management to the students. Teach them how to brand themselves.
 * 3) Share widely - Make sure that we share our work with others. We can share using slideshare, you tube, blogging, twitter, etc. However we do it, we need to share what we do well (and what did not go so well) in order to help all educators everywhere.
 * 4) Manage information and lots of it.
 * 5) Be a crap detector with attention literacy - we need to teach students how to determine the authority of their research. Is it legit? Was it doctored? A good example just happened inthe last 48 hours where a receipt was blogged about on which the person paying a lunch tab only left a 1% tip ($1.33 on a $133.52 bill). Now it has come out that this receipt was photoshopped and is not true.
 * 6) Follow your Passions.
 * 7) Learn to Learn - we need to be willing to learn from our student. We need to be willing to say that we do not know the answer and then teach our students how to research to find the answer. We need to let our students drive some of their learning instead to spoon-feeding it to them.
 * 8) Solve Problems...Creatively, Patiently - We need to teach our students how to solve problems and "not just the ones in the back of the book," according to Will.

Will did a great job in offering a roadmap, and some of the tools, to get us discussing how to change education and the way we teach. I found myself pausing the video to share some of the thoughts (and have conversations) with my wife (who is teaching in her 10th year). Some of the suggestions and ideas Will made are things I am going to try in my classroom. I found the most interesting part of the presentation was in the first 10 minutes. Will asked the group (of educators) "what do we mean by learning?" In all of the answers that came back, none of them were about the knowledge and skills that we assess in standardized tests, or any tests for that matter. This concept really makes me think about what we are doing in the classroom, and what we need to do differently.