Have spent most of the day doing CPD on the lounge floor whilst kids played out in the sun.
Last night I subscribed to the video podcast channel for the K12 Online Conference 2007. I didn't know it existed last year and found out about this years via Vicky Davis' Cool Cat Teacher Blog.
So (in a Fast Show stylee) today I have been mostly watching David Warlick. Now I'm sure that for most of you who read this David Warlick is not a new name, but if he is click his name to find out more. Anyway his keynote was entitled Inventing New Boundaries and dealt with how teachers are in the strange position of trying to educate students for a future we are unable to describe...scary isn't it, but so true. Most students have very little idea about how they will make a living once they leave school.
The real crux (for me) of David's presentation came towards the end when he talked about the gulf of knowledge about using new technologies between students and their teachers. Apparently 57% of US students have produced original digital content and as a result communicate directly with their audience.
To my mind too many teachers are stuck in their traditional ways with little desire to shift out of their comfort zone...there ought not to be a comfort zone anymore, things move so fast. There are a surprising number for whom email is still an alien force with a mind of its own. More importantly there often seems to be a total resistance to change within our profession, in other words " i have been doing the same lessons the same way for years and I'm not going to change my lesson plan for nobody..." that kind of thing.
I am not saying every teacher must blog, podcast and spend hours, like me, checking out things on the web but surely every teacher must now start to make some kind of effort to get near the kind of learning landscape which our students inhabit. Did they all have lessons on how to Bebo? Who gave the YouTube homework? What was the Facebook NAB like? See what my point is? We all need to be pro-active in using new info and finding out about it.
I'm nowhere near as eloquent as David so let me quote his blog:
One question that I consistently get is, “How do we train teachers to work with today’s information and communications technologies?” I don’t quite understand this. It’s probably my own very unique perspective, my outside the box mentality, my own success as a learner, and less success as a student. But this just doesn’t seem like such a big problem to me.
It’s completely understandable that educators, with the institutional culture that we work in, would attack the problem by asking, “How are we going to teach this to teachers?” But yesterday, I asked the audience, of almost 300, to raise their hands if they could say that they learned at least half of what they do with technology by teaching themselves — and almost every hand went up.
The thing I am finding with much of this web 2.0 stuff as i go along is that it gets far easier to pick up the more you look into it and ideas for using the things come quicker...the big thing though is making sure there is educational value in using your chosen technology. As Ewan says
its the teach not the tech.
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