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Dr. Papert begins at the 20-minute mark.

Papert explores constructionism vs. instructionsm, the potential of the Internet, teacher "training," the choice between Monday and Someday, as well as what we can learn from watching children play video games OR what children can learn by making video games.

a battle between those with utopian and dystopian viewpoints, over who can have a more extreme perspective on technology. So where's the middle ground?

With this complexity in mind, I would like to introduce a question that I have been struggling with for the past few years: what role does social media play in generating or spreading societal fear?

We fear the things – and people – that we do not understand far more than the things we do,

Technology is the driving force behind most of the education innovation. It is impacting not only what we can do as educators, but it is also changing how we approach learning. These innovations may have not all reached the education journals yet, but they have been presented and are being discussed digitally and at great length in social media.

Information from technology may be easily accessed, but it is not yet a passive exercise. It requires effort and an ability to learn and adapt. These are skills that all educators have, but many may not always be willing to use. The status quo has not required educators to use these skills in a long time. Using these skills requires effort and leaving a long-standing zone of comfort in order to learn and use new methods of information retrieval.

They need to be the life-long learners that they want their students to be.

As needs change over time, addressing them might mean switching devices (remaking the choice). As schools progress in their technology implementation, they may find that their needs have changed, and should not hesitate to change devices as their understanding of their students’ needs develops. This seasonal view of devices (rather than “device as school identity”) is essential to helping schools move forward, meet their current students’ needs, and keep the curriculum relevant and timely for the future. A focus on pedagogy and key technology skills will transfer from one device to another, making the shift easier; a focus on being a device expert, or mastering device specific mechanics, will not. Students will graduate into a world that will demand technological fluency, the ability to move and process information across various platforms and devices.

What are the critical 21st century skills every student needs to survive and succeed in a world that’s changing and developing as rapidly as ours?

It’s not about the computer; it’s about the learning.  Our students today both want and need to be active, engaged, collaborative, on-line, vigorous, empowered, creative,  solvers of real-world problems.   They need to be skilled and informed to do so, but they need to be challenged, motivated, and engaged in doing so.

We don’t need to end, abolish, or abandon any of these things.

we need to shift from a purely knowledge-based education toward a focus on skills (creativity, critical thinking, communication, and collaboration), character (mindfulness, curiosity, courage, resilience, ethics, leadership), and meta-learning (learning how to learn, growth mindset, metacognition). Schools will need to prepare students to find the intersection between these four dimensions of knowledge, skills, character, and meta-learning

When technology is integrated intentionally with foresight and with intention of addressing specific growth-oriented goals, it increases the potential to help students learn, develop, and grow in unique ways

These PLTs would challenge teachers to delve deeper into their thinking about how, why, when, how often and who with  Technology can be used in their lessons. Staff meetings alone only brush the surface as 30-40 adults add a single thought to the conversation. PLTs allow for the in depth scaffolding of what is needed.

As educators what do we want from e-textbooks?

need to be visually stunning

e-textbooks need to have an inherent interactivity that engages

So how did I learn all of the technology I use in my instruction and in my online collaborations with teachers? I learned it on my own.

So, I started using the internet to learn how to do what I wanted to do – blog, make videos, make podcasts, publish student work, etc. Of course it wasn’t easy, but I wanted to learn it so I did. (That is key – my learning was self-directed.)

are we independent learners?

Technology is a game-changer

There is a lot of research

Teachers are the key

Educators have always needed to master the understanding of at least two fields of endeavor to be successful. First, they needed to master their content field. They are required to be experts of content. Second, they needed to master the field of education with a clear understanding of the latest and greatest methodology and pedagogy available. The 21st Century has now further complicated the teaching profession by requiring an additional third area of mastery, digital literacy.

It requires an understanding of the connected culture in order to reap the full benefits of collaboration.

We're in the state once described by that great scholar of cyberspace, Manuel Castells, as "informed bewilderment".

The idea is that our short-term memory can only hold between five and nine "chunks" of information at any given moment (here a chunk is defined as a "meaningful unit"). So, when trying to decide how many big ideas about the internet would be meaningful for most readers, it seemed sensible to settle for a magical total of nine. So here they are.

On a scale of one to five! You have only to ask the questions to realise the fatuity of the idea. Printing did indeed have all of these effects, but there was no way that anyone in 1472, in Mainz (or anywhere else for that matter) could have known how profound its impact would be.

We need to rethink how we teach search skills to kids We need to reteach search skills to kids We need to teach kids to search