Digital Eyes

Daniel Pink speaks about the fact that we need to prepare kids for their future, not our past. That got me thinking. What skills or ideas do we teach that fall under the category of preparing kids for our past? Here are a few. What do you think? What would you add? 1. Cursive Writing 2. Learning map skills with paper maps!! 3. Learning historical names and dates that can be found online in seconds 4. Dictionary skills with a traditional dictionary

I was at TIES today listening to 3 great presenters on video games in education. Colin Maxwell , Roxana Hadad , and Seann Dikkers spoke about teaching video game design as well as what video games teach kids. Seann Dikkers did a great job of sharing his research at UW-Madison on gaming. He talked about how video gaming deals with losing. Old games like PacMan had music at the end to make you feel defeated, but gaming designers have designed today's games to encourage kids to retry things multiple times until they figure it out. He used the terms little l and Big L losing. In other words, kids are willing to go through a series of small losses if they know they will figure it out in the end. He talked about high stakes testing and traditional education models as Big L losing. We don't give kids the opportunity to learn from their mistakes. We don't allow time for the "messiness" of learning. I couldn't agree more. Imagine a classroom where students are encoura...

Thanks to John Moravec at Education Futures for sharing this article about how teaching facts is becoming irrelevant. The article quotes Don Tapscott, the author of Wikinomics and Growing Up Digital , who states that "memorizing facts in the age of Google and Wikipedia is a waste of time." I especially like John's statement that: "...education should concentrate on “upload” pedagogies, based on knowledge production by students and collaborating faculty, together with augmentations provided by a new category of community-based volunteers. Using the most advanced forms of information search engines, networks, early artificial intelligence, and the aforementioned volunteers, there is an opportunity to leapfrog education beyond any of the competition. This will require fundamental changes in the mission, structure, and curricula of education at all levels." I couldn't agree more. We are teaching "downloading" skills. We are teaching our students to...

I recently came across this quote by Ellen Goodman: We spend January 1 walking through our lives, room by room, drawing up a list of work to be done, cracks to be patched. Maybe this year, to balance the list, we ought to walk through the rooms of our lives . . ., not looking for flaws, but for potential." I think this quote has so many applications to education. Do we look at our students' potential rather than focusing on their flaws? Do we look at our own potential as educators? I think it is especially relevant to technology integration. I believe that many teachers walk around focusing on their flaws. By this, I mean they are so concerned about what they don't know that they often miss out on opportunities to learn new ideas. Teachers often say to me that there is too much to learn or that things change too quickly to keep up. This is true, but we CAN choose to focus on what we CAN accomplish and worry less about what we do not get to. I hope this year, we can all foc...