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Many conversations around interactivity in formal learning programs rests on the tools. Does WebEx allow polling? Can you have threaded conversations in Second Life? What if you gave keypads to members of an audience? And those are all good questions. But at the same time, we need to nurture cultures around interactivity that are independent of any technology. We need vocabulary and expectations around interactivity itself.Here's a suggestion, hopefully useful in practice if not in theory:

Level 0: The instructor speaks regardless of audience.

Level 1: The instructor pauses and asks single answer questions of the students.

sparking students’ intellectual curiosity by encouraging teachers to “teach to their passions”

Beacon’s freedom from the state Regents examinations in social studies – the result of a hard-earned waiver – allows for a thematic approach and a deep exploration unconstrained by coverage considerations.  

All classes will do extensive writing and revision, developing the skill of using evidence to support conclusions.  The students will engage in debates, make presentations, and have varied avenues to demonstrate what they have learned and accomplished.

If you've been lusting after the touch-based iPod inside Apple's iPhone or iPhone 3G, but don't want your phone and iPod to be one device, the iPod touch is for you. The touch is basically an iPhone without the phone, a touchscreen iPod with Multi-Touch, Cover Flow, Wi-Fi and even the Safari web browser, email and weather. The

Digital debate: Prepare kids for exams or life? 'Open-Book Exam' 21st century-style: Educators begin to ponder if students should be allowed to use digital devices to take tests

essential learning tools that every 21st century learner should have.

Miguel Guhlin

use your blog as your "backup brain"

I wonder what school would be like if we could have more options and choices available to students. Sure all students have to learn the same basic standards. How much choice do we give the students in how they go about doing it? Do we provide lectures, demonstrations, guided instructions, interactive activities, group activities, and self-tests in various digital formats for them? By using technology we can have many different forms of learning the standard available to the students. What, if instead of lock stepping the class in terms of the students’ learning, we freed up the class to make their own choices? They can select in what order or format to see/hear/experience the learning.

The more contact, the more learning (for the most part), however there are benefits from learning from experts (e.g., store managers, head clerks), though the worker has to have at least some signicant contact with them to create this benefit. You'll notice that district staff have only a little impact and regional and corporate staff have none.

They're very self-motivated.

This world encourages us to multitask. I think it encourages kids to be much less patient. More terse.

This generation spends time at home — connected. Kids have to be social. It's all part of the preteen and teen years and young adult years

I can say without hesitation that all my traditional educational experiences combined, everything from grade school to grad school, have not taught me as much about learning and being a learner as blogging has. My ability to easily consume other people's ideas, share my own in return, and communicate with other educators around the world has led me to dozens of smart, passionate teachers from whom I learn every day. It's also led me to technologies and techniques that leverage this newfound network in ways that look nothing like what's happening in traditional classrooms.

In many schools and even states, it's been, rather, a movement to block and bust: no blogs, no cell phones, no IM. We take away the powerful social technologies our kids are already using to learn and, in doing so, tell them their own tools are irrelevant. Or, instead of using the complex and challenging phenomenon of a site such as Wikipedia to teach the realities of navigating information in this new world, we prohibit its use. In fact, at this writing, the U.S. legislature is in the process of deciding whether schools and libraries should have access to any of the potential of the Read/Write Web at all. When you read this, blogs and wikis and podcasts (and much more) may be things that students (and teachers) can access and create only from off-campus.

I wonder whether, twenty-five or fifty years from now, when four or five billion people are connecting online, the real story of these times won't be the more global tests and transformations these technologies offered. How, as educators and learners, did we respond? Did we embrace the potentials of a connected, collaborative world and put our creative imaginations to work to reenvision our classrooms? Did we use these new tools to develop passionate, fearless, lifelong learners? Did we ourselves become those learners?

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