Edina Digital Age Learning

Modified from https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/ At the start of the school year, Burnsville Tech Director, Doug Johnson had a great post, titled, " Getting To Know You As More Than A Number. " In it, he shared the work of Mark Barnes and Jennifer Gonzalez in  “ Hacking Education: 10 Quick Fixes For Every School ”   The post resonated with me, because for a long time, I feel like the focus on data in education has been about knowing the standardized test results, instead of REALLY getting to know the student, their likes, dislikes, passions, values and dreams. It was just after our district kick-off workshops, where I heard about trying to be respectful of students who are either trans-gender or are questioning, and starting the year by asking the students what they would like to be called as they're first name. In addition, Sharocky Hollie had opened our district-wide staff development on Culturally and Linguistically Responsive Instruction . He...

Today's Meet: http://todaysmeet.com/create14 Doug Johnson , Technology Director for Burnsville, Eagan, Savage, shared his thoughts on creativity at the opening session at TIES 2014 . Vasco De Gamma was an influencer of Doug's in regards to creativity, due to the project his grandson did regarding him. He had created a first person narrative, where he was going to tell DeGamma's story, and was told by the teacher that he couldn't deliver it, and had to just read the report. Perhaps the teacher was so focused on standardized test scores, she couldn't get past that. Goals of the talk; Why is it imperative we take developing creativity seriously? Pink in "A Whole New Mind: Can someone overseas do it cheaper? Can a computer do it faster? Am I offering something that satisfies the nonmaterial, transcendent desires of an abundant age? 60% of an iPhone is pure Apple profit. How can they have 100% markup on a device? Because they have convinced us ...

Yesterday, I had the pleasure of reading to 10th Grade Language Arts classes at Edina High School . Since they are all blogging, I decided to read a blog post that I thought would be of interest to them. I chose a recent post by Doug "Blue Skunk" Johnson, titled Facebook-An Educational Resource ? In the post, Doug explains his philosophy regarding blocking sites for student access and the things he will be sharing with principals in his district about social networking sites like Facebook . I talked to the students a bit about our filter, and why we block sites like Youtube . Since our network sees a 10th grade student the same way it sees a 1st grader, and Youtube has content that may not be appropriate for 1st graders, it needs to be blocked. (I won't go into the question of whether Youtube has educationally appropriate content, or whether our network should be reconfigured to differentiate between 1st and 10th graders...) After reading Doug's post, I asked them if...