Teaching Every Century Skills
A colleague of mine, Porter Palmer, and I recently created a new presentation called 22nd Century Skills: Bringing Future Tech into Today’s Classrooms. I did it three times in the span of a week in two different states. From an ego standpoint, I’m thrilled. At FETC the room was packed and the feedback was fantastic. When I did it at CPS TechTalk, it was really the wrong session for the conference and didn’t generate much of an audience, but the people who were in the room raved about it. And then at the NICE MiniConference, based on the comments I got after it seemed to resonate rather well.
As a presenter, I’m a happy guy. New keynote that I’ve worked my butt off on, successfully shares some new ideas, inspires people a bit, revs them up for a day of learning… mission accomplished, right?
Mostly. I’m still struggling with one thing. What the heck are 22nd Century Skills? Personally, I think that 21st Century Skills are kind of a joke. It’s a broad term that represents a shift that we’re struggling to qualify. Sort of like Web 2.0. And if we have that much trouble defining those skills, how the heck are we going to define what kids will need in the 22nd century?
We can’t. Which is why one of the points we close with in the presentation is that 22nd Century Skills are just as arbitrary as 21st Century Skills and what we need to focus in on are Every Century Skills. Has the skill set kids need to learn to be truly successful really changed all that much in the last 50 years? I don’t actually think so. Yes, there are more positions open for community managers and knowledge workers. There are also more positions open at WalMart and McDonalds. Moot point.
Image via Wikipedia
I think what’s really changed is the level of visibility. People are seeing exceptional teaching shared more frequently through blogs and videos and presentations. The great stories are being broadcast and an incredible rate. And that creates a skewed vision that any classroom that isn’t working in a BYOD environment and participating in a dozen global collaborative projects is failing their students…
I don’t believe that’s true. I honestly believe that most classrooms are doing a pretty darn good job. I honestly believe that most teachers genuinely want to do the best job they can, but they may not know what the options really are. IT departments are often run by IT people. Instructional technologists are spread so thin that they often focus their energies on the most eager teachers, the ones who ‘see the light’. With that in mind, I believe that the single most important thing every member of the EdTech community can do… is recruit. To take colleagues by the hand and not just show them the magic, but how to get started learning a few basic tricks so they can create their own magic show.
In your building, on your floor, in your own hallway… what percentage of teachers don’t want to be embracing new technologies? And what can you do to help them take the leap?
Slacking, lacking or snacking?
Image by jasoneppink via Flickr
I feel like I’m slacking. Because I find myself snacking when my fingers should be clacking the keyboard. But I find myself lacking, whether it be motivation or inspiration, and every post I read just sounds like quacking in my head. Instead of cracking the whip, I’m backing away from the blog. I think need to start hacking my habits, packing up my insecurities and attacking the very thing that got me to where I am… this blog.
First of all, I apologize for those last few lines. But once I got rhyming, I couldn’t seem to stop. Probably ought to delete it, but I’m proud of it in the same way I’m proud of the awful poetry I wrote when I was in 7th grade. And yes, I still have it all.
I haven’t posted anything since that pre-ISTE post. Know why? Because I felt like I should put up an ISTE roundup. Which I never did. And now I feel like it’s too late. Which it isn’t. But it isn’t fresh anymore so it really is.
And that’s what’s causing me no end of issues. It’s not reality, it’s my perceptions of reality. That blogging is a big deal, and I need to make it significant. Instead I avoid the blog, which means I avoid writing, which means I avoid delving into my own thoughts and exploring them. And that’s not a good thing for me. I miss it.
Want to hear how fragile my ego is and how much my own lack of effort in this area affects me? I have been avoiding reading blogs lately because when I read them, I get riled up, and then I want to write about them, and if I don’t, I feel guilty about not doing so. And to avoid feeling guilty about not responding at length to someone else’s post, I avoid reading those posts at all.
Strange eh? Also makes me wonder just how many posts on Teach42 I’ve put up ‘apologizing’ for not posting more. Too many I would think, but I’m not going to look.
The reason for this post (about time I got to it, eh?) actually has nothing to do with any of that though. It’s because I wanted to mention how much I enjoyed this video from WGN.
I ‘liked’ it, which shared it out via The Facebook and Twitter, but then I thought I ought to put it up on the blog. But the last blog post was that ISTE post, and do I really ant to follow it up with a TiltShift video? And that’s when I realized just how self-destructive I was being. And a little hypocritical to say the least.
So no apologies, no promises. Just some insight into what makes Teach42 tick. Hope you get a laugh out of it and say, “Well, at least I’m not that schizzy!”
Studyladder, online english literacy & mathematics. Kids activity games, worksheets and lesson plans.
Via Scoop.it – Edu 2.0
Used by over 70,000 teachers & 1 million students at home and school. Studyladder is an online english literacy & mathematics learning tool. Kids activity games, worksheets and lesson plans for Primary and Junior High School students in Australia.
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Pearltrees
Via Scoop.it – Edu 2.0
The social curation community – Organize, discover and share the stuff you like. Very similar to Scoop.It in the actual activity, but quite different in the way that they are visualized. More like interconnected spokes showing links between different curated topics. Worth a visit. Thanks to @ppalmer21 for the tip!
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Borrow Kindle Books from the Library? Yes, Please.
“Amazon today announced Kindle Library Lending, a new feature launching later this year that will allow Kindle customers to borrow Kindle books from over 11,000 libraries in the United States. Kindle Library Lending will be available for all generations of Kindle devices and free Kindle reading apps.”
#gamechanger
Be the Ball
Ty Webb, CaddyshackI’m going to give you a little advice. There’s a force in the universe that makes things happen. And all you have to do is get in touch with it, stop thinking, let things happen, and be the ball.
Your phone is listening to you.
Image by jochenWolters via Flickr
Creepy or cool?
A new class of smartphone app has emerged that uses the microphone built into your phone as a covert listening device — a “bug,” in common parlance.
But according to app makers, it’s not a bug. It’s a feature!
The apps use ambient sounds to figure out what you’re paying attention to. It’s the next best thing to reading your mind.
Before you start getting weirded out, it’s worth reading the rest of the article. It focuses in on apps that use the noise in the room around you to make connections with others.
For example, the iPhone/Android app named Color. Ever go to a party/event/conference and see dozens of people all taking photos of the same thing at the same time? I’m sure it has occurred to you at least once that there really ought to be some way to gather all those images from everybody together into a single repository. So instead of being the 101st person to take a photo of the person up on stage, you can just snag a photo taken by someone else.
Color uses the microphone to take an auditory snapshot of what’s going on in the room. It compares that to other active Color users at the time, and if the sound patterns line up, it concludes that you’re both attending the same event at that moment. Once it makes that connection, it gives you the chance to see how the other people in the room are documenting things and to share what you’ve captured with them. Instant collaboration/sharing.
There are other ways to accomplish this. For example, if you’re all on the same Wifi network… but many phones will be using cell based networks. GPS could be a good way to go, but it’s too inaccurate, particularly when indoors. It couldn’t tell if you’re in one room or the room next door. So using the soundscape is a pretty creative way to do it.
While I love the idea, the firs thing that comes to mind for me is that I want to see it combined with a whiteboard/collaborative word processor type utility. Think about the potential for note taking, or for back channels. For apps to instantly know who else is in that room at that time, and for you to be able to connect up with them if you like.
Don’t worry, I’m sure it’s coming! Now if we could just scrape the ‘creepy’ feeling off of it.
Related articles
- New Color App for iPhone is Kind of Creepy (lockergnome.com)
- Snooping: It’s not a crime, it’s a feature – Computerworld (dccrowley.posterous.com)
- Snooping: It’s not a crime, it’s a feature (computerworld.com)
Why should I go to school?
Via Joe Brennan
Original comic can be found here.
ePub Bud
One of my favorite things to show people on the iPad is that you can create your own multimedia books on the computer and bring over into the iBooks app. When I did it, I used Pages but didn’t have a good solution for the PC. Just learned today about ePub Bud, which is a web-based way to do that and much more! Definitely worth spending a few minutes exploring if you’re at all interested in the future of digital books.