Group items tagged

(1) modeling the use of new technologies in communicating to students, teachers and the general public; (2) ensuring that technology becomes integral to teaching 21st-century skills from critical thinking and problem solving to collaboration and information literacy in the classroom; (3) boosting Web 2.0 applications and tools as key components of student learning; (4) offering professional development in these technologies and deploying the online tools that help teachers create learning communities among themselves; and (5) requiring better balanced assessments of student work—including project-based learning enhanced by technology tools—in an age driven by NCLB-oriented testing and better use of data from the assessments to help students improve their performance.

The revised edition also includes a self-assessment for superintendents to evaluate how far their districts have come along the technological curve. CoSN’s CEO Keith Krueger explains that his organization’s research shows that many district leaders are behind that curve, and the new document opens with a letter:

e cautions that the large-scale changes CoSN is advocating are most likely to happen for district leaders who are not engaged in dozens of other initiatives. “Everybody wants the superintendent to be in the middle of everything,” Reeves explains. “The real acid test is whether you can execute the ‘not-to-do list,’” adding that superintendents need to resist establishing too many priorities. Each of the five areas featured in “Empowering the 21st Century Superintendent” includes a set of resources and a series of action steps for superintendents and district leadership teams. For instance, in the 21st-century skills section, leaders are urged to improve their own such skills, create a vision for integrating them into K12 instruction, audit the district’s strategic plan to see which might be missing and adjust professional development accordingly.

However, for teachers this is not usually the case. Incorporating technology into their teaching practices without being aware of the didactic possibilities that technology offers, a lack of training in educational technology, or resistance to its use produces fatigue in the professional and working environments

“burnout syndrome”, which is related to exhaustion and burnout due to increasing demands

In the pedagogical context, burnout syndrome in teachers can affect their level of commitment at work.

Not everybody has to teach with technology, but it does need to be deeply embedded throughout the ecosystem we create on campus - and not because "that's what students want" or "that's where the students are."  The surprising-to-most-people-fact is that students would prefer less technology in the classroom (especially *participatory* technologies that ask them to do something other than sit back and memorize material for a regurgitation exercise).  I use wikis, blogs, twitter and other social media in the classroom not because our students use them, but because I am afraid that social media might be using them – that they are using social media blindly, without recognition of the new challenges and opportunities they might create.  I use social media not only as an effective teaching tool that encourages participation, but also as a way to broaden the media literacy of our students.  In this regard, we still have a great deal of work to do.  We need to embed new media literacy more deeply into the curriculum so that it isn't just this "one crazy Anthropology class" (as I have heard my class fondly referred to by students) that showed them how they can effectively use these tools in ways they had not yet imagined, while also allowing them to see a little more clearly how these tools are using them, altering their habits, sensibilities, and values as well as the larger structural contexts in which they live.

Whatever tool professors can find to conjure that—curiosity and a sense of amazing possibilities—is what they should use, he says. Like any good lecture, his point may be more inspirational than instructive. "Students and faculty have to have this sense that they can truly connect with each other," he concludes. "Only through that sense of connection do you have this sense of community."