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I remain very, very concerned with the notion that all we have to do is let the kids connect with the world -- just like they do on Facebook or MySpace -- and the kids will learn. There's a fallacy there, and my experience with how much really deep teaching of digital ethics we've had to do at SLA to counter all that the kids come in the door thinking about the digital world.

is there much of an honest discussion of just how hard implementation of these ideas actually is.

And the problem is that our entire structure has to change to make it easier. You can't teach 150 kids a day this way... you can't have traditional credit hours... you have to find new ways to look at your classroom. Everything from school design to teacher contracts to class size and teacher load to curriculum and assessment -- everything we do in schools -- has to be on the table for change if we are to achieve the kind of schools that video is speaking about. The only thing that shouldn't be on the table, and that the video actually hints that it should be, is the need for teachers in their day to day lives-- the adults who can make a deep profound impact in kids' lives.

We need to get the teacher into the game. The teacher needs to get in there and be part of the learning process, actively engaged in solving the problem with the students and learning with the students—not teaching but modeling learning with the students by functioning as an expert learner solving problems and constructing new knowledge with the students.

modeling the learning process

Part of the Story While I was at ASCD 2008 in New Orleans in March 2008, I started a conversation with some ASCD Leadership Council members and my online network of educators about the need for educators familiar with Web 2.0 pedagogies to spread the word about how they are successfully using the new 21st Century technology to improve student learning. That conversation has continued until today, April 3, 2008. We have less than a month to pool our collective intelligence to help ASCD do a "bang up" job for it's membership in Orlando in March 2009 on technology and engaging students in learning. See the home page of this wiki for more details. Go here to read the conversation as it developed on Professional Development 2.0 from March 16, 2008 to April 3, 2008 when I then created this wiki. Join this wiki and help us develop a comprehensive proposal. In the process we will show how the online nextwork of educators works. If nothing else, at least that will be impressive. If you help out!

Thank you for connecting through Twitter. You have really hit the nail on the head that the Web 2.0 tools are not meeting mainstream, and I am right there, we need to change that!

While I was at ASCD 2008 in New Orleans in March 2008, I started a conversation with some ASCD Leadership Council members and my online network of educators about the need for educators familiar with Web 2.0 pedagogies to spread the word about how they are successfully using the new 21st Century technology to improve student learning. That conversation has continued until today, April 3, 2008. We have less than a month to pool our collective intelligence to help ASCD do a "bang up" job for it's membership in Orlando in March 2009 on technology and engaging students in learning. See the home page of this wiki for more details. Go here to read the conversation as it developed on Professional Development 2.0 from March 16, 2008 to April 3, 2008 (Dennis Update - ongoing as of 4.17.08) when I then created this wiki. Join this wiki and help us develop a comprehensive proposal. In the process we will show how the online nextwork of educators works. If nothing else, at least that will be impressive. If you help out!

by Grace Rubenstein AUDIO SLIDE SHOW: Lawrence Township Narrated by Grace Rubenstein It is one thing to create change inside a classroom -- the best teachers, masters of their one-room domains, break from tradition and foster innovative learning environments all the time. A harder task, which a growing number of schools are proving can be done, is to convert an entire school to embrace new practices that fulfill the changing educational demands of our age. Then comes the next -- and the messiest -- frontier, the entity most resistant to cohesive change: the school district. Five years ago, administrators in the Metropolitan School District of Lawrence Township, in the northeast corner of Indianapolis, tackled this challenge. With a $5.9 million grant from the Lilly Endowment, a local philanthropic organization, they set out to transform the prevailing vision of what preK-12 education is for -- as one district official put it, "to meet the needs of the kids' future, and not the teachers' past." They decided that they needed to teach a modern set of skills in a student-centered way. Critical thinking, self-direction, and cultural competency, along with fluency in technology, information resources, and visual and graphic presentations. These were the elements of digital age literacy the district believed its students would need in the twenty-first century. Educating students for the new era demanded not only new content, they believed, but also new teaching methods. Teachers needed to recast themselves as facilitators, and to demand that students take more ownership of their learning. Into Focus Visit classrooms in Lawrence Township -- at least those where the change has caught on -- and you'll see kids inventing their own projects, using computers in daily work, involving themselves in community initiatives, and inquiring on their own about continued . . . 1234567next ›last » This article was also published in Edutopia Magazine, June 2007