Moving at the Speed of Creativity

These are my notes from Joseph Morelock’s presentation, “Student as Prosumer: Content and Mobile Devices in 21st-Century Learning Environments” at the 21st Century Learning @ the West Lake Expo held Oct 31 – Nov 3, 2009 at Xi Hu, China, also known as West Lake. West Lake is in the center of Hangzhou, China, which is about an hour by bus southwest of Shanghai. MY THOUGHTS AND COMMENTS ARE IN ALL CAPS.

Joseph’s homepage at his school and contact information

I purchased 250 of these video-capable iPods at $150 US each for students at my school to use

Every minute every day, 10 hours of video are uploaded
In the last minute, 6000 photos were uploaded to Flickr

On Facebook: 200 million active profiles, 100 million logged in today

President Obama, duirng his inaururagion party for young people
- you can see all the cameras owned by oung people
- they are producing: taking photos, videos, and uploading

Twitter
- image of Tweets when Obama was sworn in as 44th President

Cover of the New Yorker, June 1, 2009
- painted on an iPhone (PROBABLY WITH THE APPLICATION BRUSHES)

Digital natives are younger users and digital experts
- as younger experts, they gain earlier responsibility for their own learning and for tasks to help their parents
- that is my son, Lorenzo, who is 4
- he has his own iPod Touch that he uses to learn writing, math, and practices his reading (and gets a little music)

environment: the network is everywhere
- we traveled thousands of miles to connect with you
- but you can also connect today with small devices like cell phones, and your computers
- you can have connections now at all time

Social networking
- Q-Q (LIKE FACEBOOK FOR CHINA)
- tweets, iPods, flickr, wikis, mashups, blogging, podcasting

Producing, not just consuming

How do we build 21st century learning environments?

we must think about going mobile: moving away from the laptop and the desktop
- the Internet “in the cloud”
- sending and receiving, consuming and producing

My son’s classroom, where students use the iPod Touch to read, to write, to listen, and to watch video
- they build content to share with the rest of their peers

School is not from 8 am to 3 pm
- school is all day thanks to mobile devices
- developing content to take with you as teachers: that is our goal and task

what defines a good “new” television from an old one is our ability to customize it
- how many different things can you do with the same television?
- this is customized
- customizing our content for students, making sure we can deliver it on multiple devices

Alvin Toffler: “The future arrives too soon and in the wrong order.”

Technorati Tags:
china, education, integration, iste, technology, #xihu09, nets

My name is Dawn Danker. I’m the Director of Operations for Oklahoma A+ Schools and the not so faithful blogger of Subtle Conversations.  When Wes asked me to guest blog during his vacation, I too was honored by the invitation.

Today I had the distinct pleasure of attending the Annual State Superintendent’s Leadership Conference, sponsored by the Oklahoma State Department of Education. This conference is designed to address Oklahoma superintendents, principals, school leaders, lawmakers and state officials.

State leaders started the conference by calling for schools to think about transformation and responding to the needs of 21st century learners. It was no surprise that some of the technology related breakout sessions were almost filled to capacity after such a challenge. I attended the 1:1 Teaching & Learning session presented by the Office of Innovation, Support and Alternative Education alongside an excellent panel of forward thinking Superintendents and instructional leaders. Their goal was to discuss innovative strategies for preparing students for the 21^st century through a 1:1 initiative.

The panel members were:

Bart Bantield, Superintendent, Stidham Public Schools
Scott Trower, Superintendent, Lowry Public Schools
Steve Shiever, Superintendent, Crescent Public Schools
Scott Parks, Superintendent, Howe Public Schools

The discussion was facilitated by Eric Hileman, Director of Instructional Technology and Telecommunications. I appreciate the mood Eric set for the session by recalling the great Seymour Papert and how he encourage educators years ago to put an electronic device in the hands of every child. These panel members have been striving to do what Papert challenged us to do years earlier. Each Superintendent took an opportunity to give us some background on their schools and individual career paths. Here are the elements from the session I think are vital to share as we continue to have the conversation of putting a computer in the hands of every child.

There are Five Pillars to a Successful 1:1

1. Leadership
2. Professional Development
3. Hardware
4. Software
5. Infrastructure

Steve Shiever Quote: Curriculum should drive the technology.

The implementation of technology in a school should encourage creativity, allow access beyond the structure of a school day, and empower students to be responsible for their own learning.

Leadership – Yes, it’s bigger than items 3, 4 and 5 because it’s one of the TWO MOST important elements of a successful 1:1.

• Everyone is a LEADER!
• It starts at the top.
• A Superintendent must have a vision for the school that includes technology.
• The administration needs to be engaged at every level.
• Technology needs to become a part of the schools culture.
• There needs to be a commitment level from the administration to participate in all processes related to the implementation of a 1:1.
• Planning, deployment, training, and support is everyone’s responsibility
• Teachers need to accept the role of leader in the classroom.
• IT Directors need to be patient and understanding to the different levels of users in a district.

Professional Development – Yes, it’s bigger than items 3, 4 and 5 because it’s one of the TWO MOST important elements of a successful 1:1.

• Professional Development is what makes it work
• Stepping outside of the comfort zone should be expected not dreaded.
• Look for local help in providing PD to staff, students and parents
• Look for ways to collaborate with other schools. Been there…done that is a good thing in this case.
• Train process and pedagogy
• Think ongoing and sustained PD.
• Model lesson integration to help easy anxiety
• Allow creation of projects and content –this helps everyone learn
• Keep it relevant

Hardware-Software-Infrastructure

Not as much time was spent discussing these elements before the session was over, but each administrator did stress that their hardware, software and infrastructures were as different as their schools. This shows that the formula for success isn’t equal across every educational agency. The types of purchases (or leases) necessary will be dependent on the size, budget, and goals of each school. All the panelists agreed that web based applications gave them the most flexibility with minimal in-house support.

Back to what Steve Shiever said early in the session…Let the curriculum drive the technology.

Followed up by words from Scott Parks, “Think about creativity, think about authentic assessment, think outside the box and be prepared to make a positive change in your schools.”

I’m honored to have each of these men in my professional learning network and I’m thrilled they took the time to share their stories to help us transform and prepare for our 21^st Century learners. I look forward to many more conversations on 1:1!

[NOTE: Though I had hair his hair color when I was a kid, I am not Wes Fryer.  I'm just a guy who Wes bribed into guest blogging.  Actually, I'm Jon Becker and I usually blog over at Educational Insanity. If you subscribe to Wes' blog and/or you like Wes' writing, you'll like mine better ]

There’s an activity that I often do with students that I borrowed from Deborah Stone’s book Policy Paradox: The Art of Political Decision Making. To demonstrate the concept of distributive justice, I bring a chocolate cake to class. I tell the students that I’ve decided to cut the cake equally into the number of slices equivalent to the exact number of students in the class (plus me, of course) so that everyone can have an equal-sized piece of the cake. From there, I ask the students if they have any challenges to my distribution plan.

[Truth be told, I plant responses throughout the students in the class ahead of time. I usually do that for the sake of time, but the forced drama of it all usually leads to real, active engagement (or, they are just engaged because they know cake will be served soon).]

We discuss alternative distribution plans including distributing pieces of different sizes based on taste preferences. We also discuss the possibility that my plan doesn’t consider important issues such as allergies (i.e. maybe someone is allergic to chocolate and so they shouldn’t be included). The point of the exercise/activity is to explore decision-making where the resource(s) being distributed is limited. Distributive justice or distributive conflict is at the heart of many educational policy decisions and we are able to use the cake metaphor to frame subsequent discussions about policy decisions ranging from personnel to finance.

I was reminded of my teaching and thinking around distributive justice when I read the following Twitter update from John Maklary (a technology coordinator at a K-8 parochial school in Texas):

In my ongoing exploration of how schools support teachers (and leaders) around their use of technology, I have come to a point of thinking of instructional technology support as a limited resource. Especially where instructional technology support personnel are scarce, their time and attention are limited. From there, then, we must question how we distribute that resource (see how the chocolate cake metaphor works here?).

In the aggregate, most of the variance in the level of technology integration in education is within schools, not between schools. In other words, the degree to which technology integration occurs varies more between individual teachers than it does between schools. [NOTE: my data to support that knowledge claim are here.] Furthermore, though I have less evidence to support this assertion, the distribution in levels of technology integration across teachers is positively skewed (see the right side of the graphic below). If you imagine “level of technology integration” as the variable on the x-axis (the horizontal axis), the “enlightened” few (using John’s language), the high-flying tech. educators, exist on the distribution to the right under the tail. The vast majority, though remain under the curve closer to zero.

Related to John’s Twitter update, I’ve been wondering how the shape of the distribution is changing, if at all. On one hand, as technological innovation proceeds at breakneck pace, the “enlightened” (again using John’s language) are doing their best to keep up and to imagine the implications for learning. They are pushing or spreading the tail further out to the right of the distribution. At the same time, the modal (or typical) teacher is doing her or his best to catch up, pushing the mode closer to the mean. The closer the mode is to the mean, the more normally distributed the distribution is.

I don’t know if it is good or bad to have a situation where the distribution of teacher levels of technology integration is “normal.” Technology in education advocates/enthusiasts would argue that we need to head towards a negatively skewed distribution; i.e. where the mode is higher than the mean. Whether the distribution becomes more normal or even negatively skewed, there are still those teachers who exist under the tail; those teachers who, for better or worse, barely move past “zero” on some measure of level of technology integration.

Coming back to John’s Twitter update and my exercise/activity about distributive justice, if instructional technology support is a limited resource (like a chocolate cake), how should we distribute that resource? If we could categorize teachers along the “level of technology integration” spectrum as high, medium and low, where are our limited instructional technology support resources best distributed? What value is there in using that limited resource on the “unenlightened” (i.e. those in the “low” group)?

• Have you considered that some teachers might be “allergic” to technology integration (i.e. it is actually harmful for them as learning facilitators)?
• Have you considered that there are some teachers who will not get the most value from the limited time and attention of instructional technology support?
• Unlike the dictate from federal law for students, are there instances when we need to leave some teachers behind (i.e. No cake for them!)?

Just askin’…

IMAGE ATTRIBUTION

• Cake: photo credit: imcountingufoz
• Histograms: Wikipedia
  

My name is Beth Still and I was asked to guest blog while Wes is on vacation.

I have had a post brewing in my head for a very long time and I think this is the perfect forum in which to bring this issue to light. I would like to take this opportunity to discuss a problem that so many of us have, but are unwilling to acknowledge. The issue I am referring to is finding a balance between the various aspects of our lives. More specifically, I am an going to discuss the amount of time we spend online versus time we spend with our families.

I have two great loves in my life: my family and my career. I am passionate about both of them, but lately it seems like work has overshadowed my family. If I am being honest I would have to say that for the better part of the last year my family has taken a backseat to my career. I teach and develop online classes. Most of this is done at home on my own time due to the constant interruptions at school which occur even during my prep time.

I also have developed an amazing PLN that I love interacting with, but each minute I spend with them is a minute that I could (and should) be spending with my family. My family does not quite fully comprehend that I learn so much on Twitter. The other thing that they do not understand is that some of the friendships I have made on Twitter are very meaningful.

My husband made the awful mistake of giving in to my request and bought me a BlackBerry for Valentine’s Day this last year. I am now connected to all of my email accounts, Google chat, and Twitter around the clock. While I think this is great my family is not as thrilled. You see, I have not yet mastered the art of unplugging and taking a tech break. I enjoy the ability to connect to my network at any time from any place. My family is not impressed that I make myself so easily accessible to the world.

Last week I walked away for a few hours. I actually powered down my laptop and cell phone and I snuggled up with my husband in our favorite over-sized to watch a movie. When I had trouble remember the last time we did that I realized that I have been plugged in for way too long! It finally occurred to me that I need to find some balance. While I love working and I am not in danger of burning out; I am missing out on some very important things in my life. I am just not sure how an online teacher spend less time online, but I will figure it out.

Twitter, blogs and emails can wait, but my family can’t. I still have a lot of work to do online this summer, but I am going to turn off Twitter and I am going to purposefully neglect my reader. While I am online I need to focus on the task at hand. I need to learn to become more efficient when I work. I get tend to get sidetracked very easily! I am not quite sure how I will do this, but I need to find a balance.

I know other people have faced the same issues. How have you managed to strike a balance between work and family time? What are some of the suggestions you have for finding an adequate amount of time for each?

My name is Richard Byrne. I write Free Technology for Teachers. When Wes asked me last week if I would guest blog during his vacation, I was flattered and immediately agreed. This post is based on a workshop that I will be leading in a couple of weeks at MLTI’s Summer Institute.

During the past school the projects that my high school US History students enjoyed most was creating video mash-ups to demonstrate their content knowledge. My students used Animoto and Remix America to complete these assignments. There are other web-based video mash-up tools available on the Internet, but these were the two that suited our needs the best. So that you can choose the tools that best suit your needs, I’ve included short summaries of Animoto, Remix America, Stupeflix, and Photo Peach in this post. In the projects that are described below, students had to find public domain and Creative Commons licensed images. For US History projects there are some excellent image sources including Flickr’s The Commons, the National Archives, and the Library of  Congress. To conduct a more broad search for Creative Commons licensed images you should also use Compfight, Yahoo’s Creative Commons filter, and Google’s new Creative Commons filter.

To give you a little background on my work, I teach a class of special education students as well as college prep courses. In both settings my students have enjoyed creating video mash-ups to the point where they were suggesting video projects to their other teachers.

Project 1: “Using Animoto to Celebrate the Presidents.”

This is a project that my special education students did during the last month of school as a way to review the year.  Each student (there were 13) was randomly assigned a president to research. The students had to gather some basic biographical information. The students also had to gather information about significant events and or acts from their assigned president’s time in office. The information the students gathered would be used for captioning images in their videos. After gathering the information students had to find, using the sources mentioned above,  images for their videos. When all information and images were gathered, students then created their videos. Each image had to be accompanied by a short (one sentence) explanation.

The culminating experience for this project was an “Video Release Party.” During the “Video Release Party” students introduced their video to the class, showed the video through the LCD projector, and answered questions after the showing the video.

If you decide to try a project like this you should apply for an Animoto for Education account. It’s free and it gives you and your students access to editing features for which you would otherwise have to pay a fee.

Project 2: “Art as US History”

In this project students studied how artists created records of US History. Students again used Animoto for this assignment. Since my own knowledge of American artists was fairly limited and I needed a list long enough for a class of twenty-two, I worked with an art teacher to generate a list of notable artists. Students then selected from an artist from the list to research. Using the same procedure as outlined in project 1 above, students created Animoto videos about their artists’ work. An integral part of the assignment was for students to note what was happening in the US at the time their selected artist was working.

Project 3: “Make Your Own Civil War Documentary”

Remix America, launched last fall, makes it fairly easy for students to create their own US History documentary videos. Remix America provides video clips, audio clips, and images that students can arrange to create a Ken Burns-style documentary. If the stock media doesn’t contain what your students desire for their videos, they can upload their own media. My students used Remix America to create mini-documentaries about the US Civil War, but you could use Remix America to create mini-documentaries about any period in US History.

Other free video mash-up tools to consider.

Stupeflix allows users to drag and drop their images into the sequence that they would like the images to appear. Adding text to the images is easier in Stupeflix than it is on Animoto. Stupeflix offers only one default soundtrack so you have to upload your own audio clips.

Photo Peach is similar to Animoto although there is one difference worth noting. Adding captions to each image is a little more intuitive on Photo Peach than it is on Animoto. To add captions to your Photo Peach slideshow simply type your desired text into the caption box that appears as each image is automatically displayed by Photo Peach.

My name is Beth Still and I am one of the lucky people that Wes asked to guest blog this week while he is taking a well deserved vacation with his family. I wrote this post which focuses on social networking for Leadership Day 2009. I hope this example sparks some conversation.

The first time I heard of Leadership Day was last year. I had only just started blogging and felt like there was not much I could contribute. When I saw Scott McLeod’s post on it this year I felt like I might have something to add to the conversation. I spent hours thinking of something brilliant to say, but there were no flashes of inspiration. Then it hit me! Administrators need to know more about the benefits of social networking and how it can be used to help their teachers stay on top of the latest developments and trends in education.

I started developing my personal learning network (PLN) in April 2008. I joined the NECC Ning and immediately started making connections with people who were attending the National Educational Educating Computing Conference in San Antonio. I also joined Twitter and that is when I really saw my PLN grow. It was not long before I was making true connections with people around the world. There are a few people in my PLN that I work so closely with that I feel like we are coworkers.

In April I decided to test the power of my favorite social networking site, Twitter. I wanted to see if it was possible for the few hundred people in my network to work together to do something good for someone. I decided to ask for donations to help send a teacher to NECC. I asked Richard Byrne to be to the “newbie” and he gladly agreed. Within two weeks we met the $1500 goal. My plan had worked!

Stop and think for a minute about the implications that this has on learning. I am a teacher in rural western Nebraska who was able to make a difference because of my personal learning network. I was able to help send a teacher from Maine to a technology conference in Washington DC. People who knock social networking need to hear this story.

Can you imagine a student at your school harnessing the power of Twitter to change the world? I would like to ask you to start looking into the positive aspect of social networking. Teachers and students who are networked have so many more learning opportunities each day. No less than 99% of my professional learning takes place on Twitter. Before you totally write off what social networking can do in your schools for your teachers and students, please take some time to explore what it means to those of us who rely on it every day.

Cheryl Oakes is a blogger from Maine, who can be found skiing in the winter season or in her garden or kayak during the short summer season. Either way she is a life long learner and looks for the positive impact that technologies have on learners and adventurers in our school environments. Thanks to Wes Fryer for this opportunity to be a guest blogger. Wes and family, I hope you have a great family vacation!

Please read this post with the lenses that our students bring to the table. Does this post resemble your school? your grade? your child?

Hello, this is my first day in Kindergarten and I want share what happened in my day. My teacher used a flip video and filmed us as we said our name and our favorite color or number. Then we all got to watch the video, I even learned some names of my classmates. I was shy at first, but I asked my teacher if we would watch the videos again and she said each day she would record something we did such as learning about the calendar or numbers or learning our letters. I wonder what will happen next year?

In first and second grades our teachers set up our classroom computers so we can report on the weather at our school. He introduced us to another school where students have very different weather. Then, he showed us on Google Earth where we live and where our new school buddies live. It was half-way around the earth.

Welcome to third grade where we are using VoiceThread as our book talk. I liked drawing my picture of Chapter 3, my teacher posted it and now my friends are leaving me a message about what they think. I can leave messages to my friends too. When I tell my Grandpa he will leave me a message as well.

The part I like most about 4th grade is getting to practice my Internet Safety skills before we get to start our research projects. My favorite research kid site is Facts4ME . Two retired teachers started this site and when I get done with my project I am going to email them to tell them how easy their site is to use.

Finally, in 5th grade I get to work on my own blog at ThinkQuest. It is a closed site only teachers and other schools can view the pages. My teachers share more about Digitial Citizenship and how to be safe and I get to practice as I make my own blog pages and share with my friends. My favorite thing to do is ask survey questions and look at the answers my friends give back to me.

In 6th grade our projects involve using more skills and media. I really like the podcasts we made about our FolkTales, it was a little hard to talk slowly and loudly enough. I like that I could share these with my friends and family.

In 7th grade, our language arts teachers shared how to use an online writing program. That means that we type our essays or writing prompts into the program, and when we publish, the program helps guide our spelling, our vocabulary use and even grades us on our story. Before my teacher even sees it I get to fix things on my own.

In 8th grade my teachers have us answering questions in our forum in our Moodle site and we also work in a Ning. When we work online it is like we aren’t even doing school work. I like it best when I can share with my friends outside of school, we keep working on school work when we don’t have to.

In 9th, 10th, 11th and 12th grade my friends and I are in constant communication, even though we can’t bring cell phones to school, we do. I like to stay in touch with my friends during the day and I send quick text messages so I can find out what happens in their class. We take pictures of our classrooms and put them on Facebook. We take video with our cell phones and post them to YouTube. Oh, that is one great thing, our school doesn’t block YouTube, the bad news, they still block Facebook. If we use a proxy, sometimes we can get on our Facebook pages during the school day. I hear my teachers say all the time that I am a digital native, I don’t know if that is good or bad and I wonder what that makes my teachers. When we ask to do our projects with film or recordings, my teachers say we don’t have time, they have to cover the content, whatever that means? Sometimes I wish I could go back to my early grades, we had more time, we had more projects, we tried many different kinds of learning.

How does your school/grade/child look through these lenses?

Resources you might just want to use to transform your school!
Kindergarten- thanks to Maria Knee
Grade 1/2 – thanks to Kathy Cassidy
Grade 3, thanks to Alice Mercer
Grade 4 thanks to Bob Sprankle
Grade 5 my wonderful 5th graders and thanks WJHS 5th grade teachers Thinkquest.org
Grade 6 – a great example Frog Prince
Grade 7 wiki thanks to Beth Goodwin
Grade 8 NING, thanks to my 8th grade LA teachers, Bruce Peloquin and Julie Esch, and all 115 students
Grades 9,10,11,12
English wiki with a blog and student comments Anne Tommaso
Fine Arts teacher wiki Melissa Noack and her student gallery
Nokomis HS giving all graduating seniors their own domain name Kern Kelley
Fine Arts from Wiscasset Sarah Sutter
Comments for this post are real comments taken from student and staff conversations. What do you hear at your school?

In this video Anastasia Goodstein talks about her book, Totally Wired: What Teens and Tweens Are Really Doing Online, and gives us the scoop on Judy Jetson, MySpace, IM, LJ, and the always-on digital lifestyles of today’s Gen Y student.

As you listen to Anastasia, think about how teens use technology and social media in their “real life” versus the way they are using (or not) using technology in the classroom. Immersed in the digital world outside the classroom when Gen Y goes to school, they are more often than not, stuck in text dominated classrooms.

She also stresses the need for educators (and parents) to provide students with the skills they need to assess the onslaught of information and ability to evaluate the credibility of resources on the web.

Anastasia has a wealth of research to share about the wired lives of teens. This short video is a good opportunity for anyone who works in education to gain a better understanding of the totally wired world of today’s students.

Related Resources

• Anastasia Goodstein >Totally Wired
• CBS News: Gen Y & Technology
• Gen Y: Growing up and sharing (way) too much

The Media Awareness Network (MNet) is home to one of the world’s most comprehensive collections of media education and Internet literacy resources. The website has a wide variety of free resources for teachers (en)(fr), parents (en)(fr), and students (en)(fr).

One of their special initiatives is the Be Web Aware (en)(fr) program, which includes many helpful tips for teens using social software, instant messaging, blogs, and web search. The resources are available in both French and English.

Related Resources

• Media Awareness Network (en) (fr)
• Tout savoir sur… les blogues
• Are You Web Aware? – Blogs
• Be Web Aware (en)(fr)
• Yahoo! Safely
• Connect  Safely

Earlier this year, the New Media Consortium and the Educase Learning Initiative released The New Horizon Report, outlining which current and burgeoning technologies they feel will “impact education over the next five years.“

The report includes several “mega trends” in educational technology, including user-generated video (or “grassroots” video), mobile, collaborative web environments, as well as content mash-ups.

Trend #1: User-Generated Video & Content Mash-Ups

Mash-ups provide a huge amount of flexibility to both the instructor and the user to build new learning situations. A mash-up is “a website or web application that uses content from more than one source to create a completely new service (Wikipedia, 2006).” They combine separate, stand-alone technologies into a new application.

Content sharing tools, or “mash-ups” are providing learners the opportunity to socialize around the context of the content (text, video, images, audio), in terms of subject matter, production and commentary. This opportunity to be engaged socially is generating new content in and of itself. These experiences have become integrated into today’s use of everyday devices in the everyday lives of the students for whom we design.

Students can shoot video with either their mobile phone or camcorder, and then use free editing tools like Jumpcut to easily remix their video. They can also “grab” video created and contributed by someone else in the Jumpcut community that can be repurposed into new content and then posted on a blog, YouTube, Vimeo, Blip.tv or a myriad of other video-hosting sites. The Horizon Report predicts that this type of remix and reuse of video content “will fuel rapid growth among learning-focused organizations who want their content to be where the viewers are.“

Trend #2: Collaboration & Social Networks

Critics of e-learning often characterize online classrooms as neutral spaces devoid of human connection, emotion, or interaction with instructors or peers.

However, effective use of social networking and media technologies provides educators and students with the ability to interject emotion in the online space, thereby providing opportunities for peers to make emotional connections with classmates, and create a community of practice just as they do in the ‘real time’ world of the brick and mortar classroom.

Social networks can also provide an outlet for students who are socially isolated or shy in the traditional classroom, a way connect, share ideas and collaborate with their peers.

Online collaboration, whether in a formal education-centric VLE or social networking environment provide vital avenues for students to build relationships with their peers, while simultaneously meeting the needs of their digital learning styles.

Trend #3: Mobile

The use of mobile technologies continues to grow and represents the next great frontier for learning. Increasingly we will continue to see academic and corporate research invest, design and launch new mobile applications, many of which can be used in a learning context.

The convergence of mobile and social technologies, on-demand content delivery, and early adoption of portable media devices by students provides academia with an opportunity to leverage these tools into learning environments that seem authentic to the digital natives filling the 21^st Century classroom. Clearly, the spread of mobile technologies into both the cognitive and social spheres requires educators to reexamine and redefine our teaching and learning methods.

In order to create a better learning environments designed for the digital learning styles of Generation Y, there is a need to use strategies and instructional methods that support and foster motivation, collaboration and interaction.

Mobile technology plays a vital role in facilitating these mega-trends. Students can use their phones to connect with peers, make, edit and publish both photos and videos. The use of mobile devices are directly connected with the personal experiences and authentic use of technology students bring to the classroom.

Conclusion

“We now accept the fact that learning is a lifelong process of keeping abreast of change. And the most pressing task is to teach people how to learn.” –Peter Drucker

In light of these socio-cultural changes, educators need to find ways to infuse the curriculum with digital learning styles by designing curriculum which integrates opportunities for student’s to use social media to collaborate and interact with their peers, as well as customize, create, and self-publish their own content as a means to achieve both short and long term learning goals.

Now more than ever, instructors must “keep abreast of change” and learn how to integrate these (and future) technology trends into their curriculum. You can download a complete copy of the 2008 Horizon Report and learn more about these trends via the links listed below.

Related Resources

• Download: 2008 Horizon Report (PDF)
• New Media Consortium
• Educause Learning Initiative
• “Designing Courses and Teaching on the Web: A “How To” Guide to Proven, Innovative Strategies“ Dr. Mercedes Fisher

I’d like to welcome Derek Baird who will be guest blogging here for the next couple of days as my son and I head to Turner Falls Park in the Oklahoma Arbuckle Mountains for several days sans technology.

Since Turner Falls is right beside I-35 exit 51 Fried Pies, you can bet some of the food consumed on this trip will be QUITE tasty.

Welcome Derek!

On May 19th I posted on Gomeric Hill and cross-posted to Web 2.0 4 Teachers:

“Do you have a weblin? It’s like Second Life meets any website. From the weblin website: “Weblin makes you and others on the Web visible as small avatars. There are others on the same page you are on right now. Weblin opens a new and exciting world on every website.”

I just signed up for one 4 days ago. To sign up, I downloaded the software and confirmed my registration. I was then able to choose an avatar from a large gallery of avatars. Now no matter what website I’m on, my little weblin avatar is at the bottom of the page. I can walk along the bottom and communicate with other weblins on that page. If I right click my weblin I can change my profile, access my applications which includes an inventory, add friends, see edit and ignore other weblins, open a chat window or speech bubble to communicate with others, choose from pre-selected text that I have created and set my status.

I have seen lots of other weblins on Yahoo! Mail and a few on Flickr. If I go to the weblins website, I see loads of others. They may be here right now, but if you don’t have a weblin, you can’t see them. It adds yet another dimension to social networking and surfing the web. As I am writing this I have about three private chats with other weblins that keep popping up on my screen. The weblin site is German and there is an international flair. I have had most of my short interaction with avatars outside the United States.

Go get a weblin and let’s meet. I plan to be on my blog website, Gomeric Hill, on Wednesday, May 21, 2007 from 6:00 – 7:00 p.m. CST. It would be fun to see how many people show up. We can spend some time experimenting with our weblins together. “

As it turned out 6:00-7:00 p.m. CST is not a very good time for many to meet.  Several people contacted me through twitter and by e-mail to tell me that there were kids’ baseball games, homework and other activities which take them from their computers in the evening. 

Two people were available for the meet up: rfantster and aubree.  rfanster met my weblin, klmonty, on Gomeric Hill.  We chatted for awhile.  He found out about the meet-up from Ning.  I was simultaneously chatting on Skype and on the phone with aubree who was having trouble logging in.  rfanster mentioned he is a math teacher and doesn’t use many Web 2.0 tools or mobile devioces in his classes.  I suggested he take a look at Mobile4Math.  As I continued to work with aubree, I asked rfanster if he was still there.  He responded that he was downloading a math lesson to his mobile phone and thanked me for the suggestion.  rfanster had to meet a friend and left at 7:00 p.m.  I continued to work with aubree and she was eventually able to “see” me.  Her comment on my blog about weblins is as follows:

“Hi, Karen! I think this weblin thing might be a fun new idea. I like being “live” on a website with some other folks who are investigating it as well. I’d like to see if we can limit our conversations to folks who are on our “buddy list” – similar to buddy lists on AOL, MSN, etc. Will keep playing to see what else we can do with this!”

So, have you “played” with weblins?  Do you see a use for education?  Would you be interested in a future “meet-up?”

Recently, on two separate occasions, my colleague and friend, Wesley Fryer asked if I would be willing to guest blog on Moving at the Speed of Creativity for the weekend. On both occasions I was planning to be at my cabin at Table Rock Lake. By design I do not have broadband Internet access and use as little technology as possible when I am there. Therefore, I declined, but third time a charm. This time Wes asked if I could take over his blog while he vacationed with his family. I agreed to do this and have agonized since Monday that not one new word has been posted. If you are reading this, it is probably because you are a regular and your RSS reader let you know that the content had been updated. By the way, Wes text messaged me earlier today and he and his family came down to Los Alamos to see a movie because it had snowed where they have been camping at altitude. I was a little envious since at the time he texted it was in the 90’s and very humid in St. Louis.

On Monday when Wes welcomed me as a guest blogger, I knew it before I checked Google Reader because I was getting e-mails alerting me to new twitter followers and requests for membership for Web 2.0 4 Teachers Ning Network. Oh, the pressure. The last time my twitter followers spiked and Web 2.0 4 Teachers had a higher than usual number of membership requests was the weekend after Wes posted his RSS: Ready for Some Stories on April 25 and linked to Ning. That’s the power of a well-read blog. Guess I better contribute to the Ning network and add something worthy of following to twitter tonight, tooJ

And now for the Adventures of Google Earth Girl…

Yesterday, I met with Cindy Lane, a.k.a. Google Earth Girl (GEG), to plan our presentation proposal for the K12 Online Conference. Over coffee at Starbuck’s, we worked out the details of our presentation entitled “Who Needs S.L.E.E.P.?” Assuming our proposal is accepted, and you attend (watch) the conference, you will learn what the acronym means. Otherwise, it will remain the secret of Google Earth Girl and her sidekick (me). We are planning to submit S.L.E.E.P. to the FETC and the METC, too. It does have something to do with a lack of…And now, the adventure begins…GEG found out today that she has been selected to attend the GOOGLE TEACHER ACADEMY on June 25th in Mountain View, California. Cindy will become the first Missouri Google Certified Teacher and will join the elite ranks of only 150 certified teachers in the world. Congratulations to Cindy! You Go, Google Earth Girl!