Digital Eyes

I am at the TIES Conference in Minneapolis. There have been some great presentations and I wanted to share about them. But first I wanted to share a thought that has been bothering me. Where are our teachers? It is important for tech support people and integration specialists to see and hear all the information that is shared here, but it is far MORE important for our classroom teachers to see what is happening in other classrooms. As I watch teachers present on how they are using blogs, clickers, GoogleDocs, Scratch, and many other great tools in their classrooms, I keep thinking how it is the classroom teachers who should be making up the majority of the audience. I'd love to hear peoples' ideas on how we can make that happen. One solution is to share all the handouts and presentations from all the sessions. Go to http://wiki.ties.k12.mn.us/Conference+General+Sessions and click on any presenter to download their presentation.

Lou Paff from Oregon Episcopal School is presenting now on using these two tools in the classroom. These are basic programming tools for elementary age students. Students train icons to move throughout an environment. They use problem solving skills, patterning, geometry, and many other skills to figure out how to make it work. Lou is using Scratch with 2nd graders. Scratch is a free download. Kids create a product and debug it as they go. What a great problem solving skill! All finished products can be uploaded to the website: http://scratch.mit.edu to be shared with the world. You can also collaborate with others once it is uploaded. Imagine designing your program to create geometric shapes as a way to learn about angles, shapes, coordinates, etc... Lou is showing us an example in which students used paint tools to create an icon, called a sprite, and wrote a script to make the sprite walk, turn, change appearance, speak, and interact with another sprite. It is an animation. I know...

This past Saturday, December 1st, Wayzata Public Schools hosted a Futures Conference. State representatives, board members, administrators, teachers, parents, business leaders, and community members braved the snow (it is MN, after all) to spend a day learning about the trends of the future and discussing their implications on our schools and community. Gary Marx , author of Sixteen Trends, Their Profound Impact on Our Future , led the conference with a presentation on the sixteen trends he writes about in his book. I have included them below. From there, each table, made up of a cross section of the community, had a discussion about the implications of these trends on our schools, students, and communities. The discussions were great. At my table we discussed the need for more world language instruction, more focus on the process of learning rather than content, creating lifelong learners, connecting our schools to our local businesses and community members, serving the needs of all o...