David Warlick of 2 Cents Worth always has interesting and thought-provoking ideas.
Please take the time to read David’s full post on this subject. In brief, he says
The bottom line of this ramble is that students armed with answers about science, technology, engineering, and math will not be able to compete or contribute to a global economy. It will be students who can can observe their environment, understand it, and inventively find ways to participate and contribute.
So we need to be teaching our students more than “just the facts, M’am.”
Students need to be challenged to take the facts, understand the meaning of these facts, create something new from the facts, and develop insights from learning these facts to contribute something of value to the world around them, not matter how small or big that world is.
A student does not have to be a grad student, a college senior, a high school senior, a middle school student, or even a fifth grader to create something of value to his world.
EVERY student at EVERY AGE can contribute to his world.
What are your students contributing to their worlds?
[As always, in my author quotes, the underlines, color changes, and bold type is mine, not the author’s!]
“What is the difference between 20th century learning and 21st century learning?”
He talks about the definition(s)of learning:
First of all, I would characterize formal learning, in the pre-digital/industrial time as:
listening,
watching,
remembering
In a time of information scarcity, when our futures were fairly predictably, being educated was characterized by what you know.
In the digital age, where information is abundant (overwhelming) and the future is always a BIG question, I think that learning expands out of listening, watching, and remembering to include:
questioning,
engaging,
proving (and disproving),
Constructing (inventing)
teaching
He says usually engagement is used with the obligation/responsibility of the teacher, not the student. He says the verb engage should be used with the students:
I’ve had to work on the engaging part. It’s a term that I usually do not like to hear. …when I usually hear the term engage the students, it appears to be a verb … linked to the teacher — that the teacher’s job is to engage the students. What I like better is to attach the verb to the students. The students will engagewith their information environment (textbook, whiteboard, Internet) to learn through questioning, experimentation, discovery, and construction.
Our goal with students should always be to engage the students and the students need to become engaged with their learning.
How do you engage your students with their learning?
[As always, in my author quotes, the underlines, color changes, and bold type is mine, not the author’s!]
I have a smile on my face and I am humming a tune.
Revenge is sweet! Actually it is not really revenge as much as it is JUSTICE!
Listen/watch, and if you don’t get the story from the song, there’s more explanation below, or you can go to David Warlick’s blog post at 2 Cents where he has even more links for you.
SORRY for the video being too wide to see it all. Anyone who can give me advice how to make it work I would be appreciative. (I tried changing the embed code, but it didn’t change anything!) You can click on the title of this bog post to go straight to UTube!
It is especially poetic to me, as several years back, I was running down the tarmac after a US AIR plane and had a different, yet similar (the bad experience part!), resulting experience!
Unfortunately, I did not have the expertise to make a singing video or the notoriety of this group. Plus, I don’t think it was available back then to post it on UTube and get so many people aware of the situation!
Thanks to David Warlick of 2 Cents I was made aware of this story and this video on UTube made by the singing group Sons of Maxwell where as David Warlick says
“after landing in Chicago for a connect to Nebraska, Dave Carroll and band, Sons of Maxwell, were alerted when another passenger exclaimed, “My god they’re throwing guitars out there.”
David was able to relate this to learning and education. He states that
First of all, we are experiencing and participating with a new information landscape where the message — the spin — is no longer issued exclusively by the few who can afford the spin-mongers and media outlets. We all have a voice today.
But just having a voice is not nearly enough. Secondly, a video on YouTube did not make this story. It was a young man, his band, and a very clever and well-performed song that made it. They communicated their message compellingly with charm, humor, and bite — and they got the attention and response of a giant.
This is why teaching writing is not nearly enough for our children to be fully empowered members of their society. It’s not that everyone will produce viral videos for YouTube. But, because of YouTube and the avalanche of information that characterizes our society, messages must compete for attention to earn audience, customers, collaborators, etc. — and this means that beyond learning to write well, students must learn to communicate with images, sound, video, and animation. They must have a command of the entire spectrum of content.
I’m sorry for quoting so much of David Warlick’s post, but he says it so well.
So all of this new media is not just “extra fluff” for the classroom teacher. Students and teachers need to learn about it, how to use it, and how to use it effectively to participate in everyday life.
What “extra fluff” are you teaching your students to be ready for what the world is like today?
[As always, in my author quotes, the underlines, color changes, and bold type is mine, not the author’s!]
David Warlick over at 2 Cents always has stimulating discussions. Someday I hope to go to a session where he presents. At least I should have access to him since I, too, live in NC! In the meantime, I must read his blog which is always informative. Today he asks, as he has in many of his presentations,
What kind of questions will we ask on our tests, when our students walk into the classroom with Google in their pockets?
He states the example of
calculators — how, for years, we resisted the new devices because it wasn’t math. It didn’t look like the math instruction we traditionally provided, and so we almost demonized the things. But now that calculators have become a critical part of many mathematics classes, have they changed the questions we ask? Have they changed the problems we ask our students to solve? Has it changed the nature of math instruction?
The answer, of course, is, “Yes!” Calculators empower learners to work numbers to an end. They force students to transcend paper and pencil, to truly utilize the language of numbers to solve problems, answer questions, accomplish goals — to learn new things. I maintain that we should expect learning in the classroom to be the same as learning in the “real world” — that it is about ubiquitous access to the global flow of information and the tools that empower us to work that information.
So, we should be looking for tools and pedagogy that empower learning.
David says:
It’s new questions that will define our future. Today, we need graduates who can invent answers to the “new questions.”
[This quote immediately above is purely the way David Warlick wrote it! I didn’t mess with it at all!]
Teachers need to realize there is a reason that students are there in their classrooms; it is not just to pass a test.
The whole purpose, originally, of education was/is to learn so we can use that information for our our enlightenment and betterment.
Do you teach students for their enlightenment and betterment? How do you do it? What are your strategies, tools, and pedagogy?
Can you do it, in spite of the tests?
[As always, MOSTLY (see exception mentioned above) in my author quotes, the underlines, color changes, and bold type is mine, not the author’s. I do this so often, I should probably put a disclaimer to this effect at the bottom of every blog!]
OK, I don’t really know what I am doing here. I hope it is not something that will ruin things for my blog.
So I need some advice and help re: PINGing and Technorati…
I think that after posting this post, and experimenting with it, I may remove it.
All my ramblings do seem wild and crazy when I read them over again.
Here’s what happened: I was concerned that my Technorati rating had not changed. I thought I had done whatever was necessary at BlogSpot to automatically pingTechnorati if there was anew post.
But then I went to Technorati and it said it had not been updated in 14 days. I had been writing like mad over the last several days – 21 posts in the last 14 days!. That is major writing for me! So it should have been updated.
I GOOGLED “ping technorati” and found that perhaps, BLOGGER does not work with automatic pings to Technorati.
Could this be true?
BLOGGER does not automatically PING Technorati?!!
There was a post that said to add some text into my blog,(http://rpc.technorati.com/rpc/ping) but it did not say where. If I put this text into my blog supposedly it would automatically ping Technorati, but WHERE to put it? In each and every blog post? In only one blog post? I wasn’t sure…
Then I found this site called BlogBUZZER. I typed in my blog info. They activated some code. They said I should put the code into any page of my blog. One time of inserting on any page would send a ping to any place like Technorati that I had selected to ping.
Who can tell me what all these other places (Like Technorati) were? I had only heard of Technorati. David Warlick calls them “information gathering services on the Internet”. I picked a couple that sounded vaguely familiar. So now I am writing another post after inserting that BlogBUZZER Code on my previous post.
BTW, It did make a little icon or widget at the bottom of that post.
So I am trying this to see if this works.
If you read this and know what I am talking about (because I really don’t know what I am talking about), please respond and let me know what I am doing, right or wrong!
HELP!
Some things are more clear after reading David Warlick’s post here.
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