21st Century Skills

Alan November, an internationally known "ed tech" consultant, was the keynote speaker at a regional educational technology conference held in Binghampton, NY last March. His presentation talks about what skills kids need in order to be able to be successfully productive and independent in today's world. Mr. November is an entertaining speaker. I've heard him speak several times and he always pushes me to think about classroom practice and the role technology can play in that.

His presentation was "vodcast" (video podcast) on the NYSCATE (New York State Association for Computers and Technology in Education) website. You can view and listen to it at this link, (scroll down to find the video version and then click, "listen") or see a slightly edited version of it at the link I sent to you all in my email.

Please listen and make a comment here. Also, at our next meeting, I'm going to ask you to choose a topic(s) mentioned by Mr. November, for me to go into further detail about at our final meeting on May 31st.

And, if you listen and post, that counts as 1 hour of time for those of you trying to meet the inservice requirement for the study group.

There Are No Shortcuts

I highly recommend you listen to this podcast, There Are No Shortcuts. This is a very inspiring look at education by a 5th grade teacher in Los Angelos, Rafe Esquith. The podcast is a recording of a presentation he and some of his students did at the Texas Computer Education Assocation’s annual conference on February 10, 2006. The podcast was recorded and posted by Wesley Fryer on his site, Moving at the Speed of Creativity (I highly recommend his site as well.) In this presentation Mr. Esquith talks about technology in the classroom, but in very different ways. He uses technology very much integrated into real life experience and skills to reach students in an LA elementary school with over 2,000 students, K-5, where more than 90% of them are below the poverty level and speak English as a second language. However, he doesn't focus soley on technology use either. What he has done with his students is incredible. And he doesn't use technology in the ways we are used to hearing about. It's listening to teachers like this that makes me long for a class of my own again.

Please take a listen and comment below. Since the podcast is about 50 min. long, listening and then commenting can count as your whole April online time and half of your May online time.

WikiVille

Here's a cool idea I came across. This wiki for kids was recently started in the UK but the idea is for kids from all over the world to add information about their schools and their towns. So far, there are no schools in New York who have added information. Maybe we could get the ball rolling!

Welcome to WikiVille 21st Century students building a world-story of life in their home towns.

Has your town been WikiVilled yet?

For every place in WikiVille there'll be stories & stuff about

• school life from the day-to-day to hopes & dreams

• home life from jobs & chores to happy places & things that could be better

• about the past as well as the future

PLUS WikiVille:Community Portal projects help needed

Picasa and Flickr

Our next in-person meeting will focus on 2 online photo tools, Picasa and Flickr. The photo gallery to the left was created with Flickr. Just thought you might like to see one of the cool things it can do.

The pictures are KidPix slides that Suzanne Monagan's and Sarah Carlson's first graders created to illustrate what "respect" means to them. I then exported them as image files and uploaded them to Flickr to create the gallery. You can click on any image to see the full size image.

You might also want to take a look at the Respect Week Blog. That software wouldn't let me post this same type of gallery so I created a different type of photo gallery there. Respect Image Gallery.