content

More Cs!

2 Layers of Learning and Teaching with Technology | IGNITEducation.

Great post with a new framework for thinking about teaching and technology. To summarize: Three Cs for students, Three for Teachers.

Student: Collect, Create and Contribute

Teachers: Curate, Conduct and Connect

(We are, of course, familiar with the other Cs – collaboration, creativity, critical thinking and communication. In my work, we add content and context!)

From a personal point of view, I definitely don’t see this happening in my daughter’s school. It’s more like memorize, regurgitate and fill in a bubble.

Professionally, I can see keeping this framework in mind as a model for building content for schools. How do we make content available that students can collect? that teachers can curate (although we do the initial curation for them)? How do we make it available that it can be repurposed into various types of projects?

How can we finance the time it takes to curate the content into something manageable for teachers or students? How do we finance the tech infrastructure that is necessary to deliver this content in a manner that is usable? How do we find tools that all schools/students can work with? In this era of ever-shifting platforms, tools and approaches, it’s impossible to land on one solution that fits every need.

dy/dan » Blog Archive » Waterline & Taking Textbooks Out Of Airplane Mode

I’ll show you what I mean while simultaneously badgering publishers of digital textbooks. (As I do.)

Think about the stretches of time when your smartphone or tablet is in airplane mode.

Without any connection to the Internet, you can read articles you’ve saved but you can’t visit any links inside those articles. You can’t text your friends. You can’t share photos of cats wearing mittens or tweet your funny thoughts to anybody.

In airplane mode, your phone is worth less. You paid for the wireless antenna in your tablet. Perhaps you’re paying for an extra data plan. Airplane mode shuts both of them down and dials the return on those investments down to zero.

Airplane mode sucks.

Most digital textbooks are in airplane mode:

Textbooks authored in Apple’s iBooks Author don’t send data from the student’s iPad anywhere else. Not to her teacher and not to other students.

HMH Fuse includes some basic student response functionality, sending data from the student to the teacher, but not between students.

In the Los Angeles Unified iPad rollout, administrators were surprised to find that “300 students at three high schools almost immediately removed security filters so they could freely browse the Internet.” Well of course they did. Airplane mode sucks.

The prize I’m chasing is curriculum where students share with other students, where I see your thoughts and you see mine and we both become smarter and life becomes more interesting because of that interaction. That’s how the rest of the Internet works because the Internet is out of airplane mode.

via dy/dan » Blog Archive » Waterline & Taking Textbooks Out Of Airplane Mode.

This is an awesome post by one of my favorite bloggers. He was one of the bloggers I found early on in this research, and his approach really pushed me out of my box. I continue to find his work motivating and inspiring – even if he does teach math and I‘m in social studies!

This chunk of his post is especially relevent to my world right now…. I wish it was easy to create this, as he wants. But it isn’t — yet. I know it’ll get better, easier to do. And I will keep pushing for it. Just can’t quite get there yet. The technology just isn’t there to do in a large scale (at least in a way for a small publisher to do), and honestly, not all teachers are at this place yet. 

Thankfully, he’ll keep asking. That’s what will get content to the right place.

 

Video

Understanding Ukraine: The Problems Today and Some Historical Context – YouTube

I love John Green. He talks so fast, I think he gets in twice as much info as anyone else….

I cannot evaluate the content in this video, as I know next to nothing about the situation in Ukraine.

I do know, however, that John Green has nailed how students – and adults – learn. I learned more about the situation in this 6 minute video (which I watched twice) than I have in the last few weeks.

Green makes great use of using history to understand a current situation. There is really no way to understand what’s going on there without knowing the history, but he does a great job moving through the essentials, and demonstrating how history, geography and politics all contribute to the current situation.

Wouldn’t it be great if students were empowered to do this type of assignment? Not only does video production require writing (like a paper), it also requires visual literacy skills. Yeah! 21st century skills!

Professionally, I would love to be able to produce content out this quickly as it relates to current events. I’m not keeping my fingers crossed….