Month: July 2007

Attending NECC virtually has been fascinating. Not the same as being there for sure, but reading and watching what I can, I do feel a connection to what happened. There is still a long list of videos/podcasts to catch up on, but I’m brining my official attendance to a close.

The twitter-skype chat-live blog thing has me thinking a lot about my own personal preferences for learning, and so I wonder…am I a dinosaur?

When I want to really concentrate on something, I have to focus on it and immerse myself. If its reading, I dont like the tv on. If its writing, no music in the background. Attending a session with a speaker I want to hear – that’s all I want to hear. If its practicing the piano, then that’s it. OK, maybe one little exception – I like to have a cup of coffee while doing any of those things…

We talk all the time about how kids multi-task, and reports are coming out that brains are working differently. Are there any kids left who need to focus? Who really should turn off the chat client and log out of the social site to get something done (even if they don’t want to)?

Am I the new dinosaur? Is the ice age that is going to freeze my bones in perpetuity a huge spout of ones and zeroes that the younger generation can process and manage with the flick of a finger? I consider myself reasonably tech-savvy, but what do we need to do in schools to meet the needs of these kids? Or, are we just letting them be over-stimulated and under-focused when we should still be guiding them in how to train their minds?
Definitely a Russo’s Rambling…

And on that note, pointatopointb is going to power-down for a couple of weeks. Its that time of summer when I dig into my hosting site, re-learn how to tweak, align and update all the background stuff, and get ready to launch into the new year. I really like the current design for the site (implemented last year), so probably no new look for the new year, but maybe some tweaks and such as I upgrade the verison of WordPress. See ya soon!

“Dinosaur Skeleton.” Online image. PowerMediaPlus.com. 6 July 2007.

Courtesy of Barbara and her Dare to dream – Classroom technology Blog, the following questions appeared on a t-shirt being given out by Nettrekker:

21 Skills for 21^st century learning!

If I look at our district K-12 technology standards (which look much like any other district – word processing skills, spreadsheet basics, presentations, ethics, etc. etc. etc.), just about NONE of the above questions are addressed. And I think it is reasonable (absolutely necessary…) that the above are the skills we should be aiming for. If that is the case, what does it say about the general state of technology “standards?”

Thanks for the post, Barbara!

Browsing through the blog postings from NECC, this one-liner shared during Andrew Zolli’s keynote panel discussion jumped out at me: (thanks to Jorge on his Desert Dew blog)

In the new paradigm, the Principal is now called “The Chief Learner.”

Pow. Why? It comes down to learning. Great teachers since the beginning of time know that learning is the engaging part, and do whatever they can to engage the kids in it. Technology has provided a veritable magic carpet to expedite the learning. Great teachers saw this instantly and took off with it (regardless of whether or not they were “techies.”

Unfortunately the principal of today has become “The Chief Moderator,” “The Chief Compromiser,” and/or “The Chief Lawsuit Avoider.” Not because they want to, but because they have had to. When the focus goes away from learning, the system suffers, and that is a lot of why our system struggles.

The Chief Learner…that’s what we all want our leaders to be.

On a somewhat connected note, this is why ed-techers love the new stuff – including me. I was not-so-nice in my previous post about twitter, but I now see that the folks there involved in it were LEARNING something new, how to incorporate it, how to utilize it. That is the addicting part of what we as educators do. I believe the key to why we got into the business, whether we knew it or not, is that we love to learn. Technology is great since it provides a never-ending (and often overwhelming) stream of new things to learn.

Keep it focused on the learning, and from that all the right things will happen.

One of the things ed-tech-ers have to watch out for is being swayed by the “cool new tool” syndrome. Interestingly, Twitter, as an example, was all the rage at NECC. Its just a tool, but post after post talked about the tool, rather than the learning.

At NECC there were folks live blogging, twittering, and skype-chatting all at the same time during sessions. Just how many layers of concurrent communication are necessary? Does this really lend itself to higher order thinking, or just spread-too-thin thinking? Those involved (all great people whom I immensely respect and read regularly) are reporting that this is a fascinating new layer. I’m not sold at all, but I was not there, either.

Published work should involve some layer of personal contribution – formats that are essentially live transcripts are nice, but do they provide enough information to prove worthy?