Non-continuous

Everything is Scott’s presentation this morning is available here. We can also follow whats going on at TodaysMeet.com/mcleod This is a nice way to follow #slate2011 tweets.

Scott started by introducing #pencilchat as a hash tag where educators take pokes at excuses for not integrating technology into the classroom. Pithy stuff.

Scott’s first point is that We All Now Have A Voice and his second point is that We Can All Find Each Others Voice and then We Can Easily Work Together. This has to change the way we do things. Access is completely mobile now and we can get it anywhere. The lines are blurring now, say, between work and home or between local and global. Google’s Art Project is a great example of blurring the lines. So is Google maps in terms of being in one place but seeing another in “real time”.

We now live in an era where a 12 year old guitarist can get 90 million hits on youtube. That kind of thing used to be reserved for huge record contracts. Lines between producer/consumer and expert/amateur are clearly blurring. Another line that is blurring is the one between Us and Them. What kind of jobs are location dependent versus location independent. The internet is destroying geography. The jobs that we are going to grow and not see disappear because a robot can do them are
those that involve critical thinking, problem solving etc. This needs to be the focus of our classrooms. Not things we can look up on Google. Dan Meyer puts it best when he says “The robots are going to eat our lunch if we are not careful.” We need to spend classroom time doing the things that the robots can’t. Making connections, diagnosing and treating misconceptions, creating perplexing problems that create patient problem solvers, etc.

The University of the People and MIT Open Courseware are blurring the lines between formal and informal learning. Can a student learn on-line all they need to know to pass a bunch of AP Exams and get college credit for that? Why or why not?

Next part of the session Scott challenges us to discuss how we operationalize changes in our schools that actually lead to student learning. What are we doing to combat low-level, wrote memorization, naked skill pedagogy? The first premise is that we need to invent our own solutions. The answer is not “out there”. We need to work it out and make it happen. Do it.

Next we took a look at this Mission Impossible: How do we get rid of textbooks? Each group put ideas into a Google Spreadsheet and then each group looked at someone else’s spreadsheet, identified 2 good ideas and put them on a summary page. We did this as a discussion around textbooks but also to see the value added by doing this is a digital way.

Scott also did a short segment on his iPad and looked at some really decent apps:
Algebra Touch is a great looking app for the iPad for Algebra.
So is Word Wit for English.
iMuscle for kinesthetics.
NYPL Biblion for History (The World Fair).
The Waste Land for Poetry/literature.

Tags: Scott McLeod