Edina Digital Age Learning

On Friday, February  18 th , Twin Cities Public Television aired a program  entitled, Digital Media: New Learners of the 21 st Century . From  the tpt Website: “Targeted at parents, teachers and  anyone concerned with education in America, this documentary takes viewers to the front lines of an education revolution. "Digital Media: New Learners of the 21st Century" examines how mobile devices and digital media practices can empower young people to direct their own learning. Documenting five success stories both inside and out of the classroom, the program demonstrates how digital media, games, smart phones and the Internet are fundamentally transforming the way young people communicate, collaborate, participate and learn in the 21st century.” Several staff and parents watched the program, and chatted about it   here . You may view the program in it's  entirety  below: Watch the full episode . See more Digital Media - New Learners Of Th...

Here is a note we sent out this week to parents, teachers and students. I'm looking forward to the conversation! Edina Parents, Teachers and Students , On Friday, February 18 th , Twin Cities Public Television will be airing a program entitled, Digital Media: New Learners of the 21 st Century at 8:30 p.m. (The program will also are on tpt 2.3 at 2 p.m. on Saturday, February 19) From the tpt Website : “Targeted at parents, teachers and anyone concerned with education in America, this documentary takes viewers to the front lines of an education revolution. "Digital Media: New Learners of the 21st Century" examines how mobile devices and digital media practices can empower young people to direct their own learning. Documenting five success stories both inside and out of the classroom, the program demonstrates how digital media, games, smart phones and the Internet are fundamentally transforming the way young people communicate, collaborate, participate ...

January 26th, Educators in Edina met for an "Engaged and Inspired Student Summit" with the purpose of: To create the ‘Edina definition’ for ‘21st Century Skills’ AND Ask staff to identify where such skills are currently in place within our students’ learning experiences AND Share a common understanding for use in communication and curriculum/instructional design AND Consider what technology has to do with it Dr. Dressen started off our discussion today, asking us to cross out 21st Century skills on our packet and replace it with 22nd. Students in our classroom will be living in the 22nd century, and our discussion today needs to reflect that. He noted that learning is no longer linear, and we need to embrace that fact. Dr. Jenni Norlin-Weaver then led us in a discussion, where each of us had a piece of art, and we were asked to identify how it might be used in the classroom. We then viewed the following RSA Animate video, on Sir Ken Robinson's ideas. Dr. Bruce Locklear, E...

Yesterday, I had the pleasure to sit in on a Webinar put on by John Pederson , Educational Technology Liaison with WiscNet in Madison, Wisconsin (And Tri-State PLP Community Leader!), featuring Christian Long . Christian shared an activity he has created for his students, " The Alice Project ". As John eloquently stated in describing the seminar: This project turns 16 groups of high school students loose on the book The Annotated Alice: The Definitive Edition . Teams of students use various “Web 2.0″ technologies to build a public presence for their learning, develop an ongoing (and carefully edited/maintained) digital portfolio of their discoveries, and demonstrate the use of these tools as story-telling/presentation catalysts. Behind the scenes, Christian is consciously shifting his “teaching” efforts to that of co-learner, collaborator, and advisor. He’s connecting his students with the rest of the world using the technology and helping them experience a real world audienc...

Last January, I had a conversation with John Pederson , at the Educon 2.1 conference in Philadelphia about Powerful Learning Practice , a " a long-term, job-embedded professional development program that immerses them (participants) in 21st century learning environments ", developed by Sheryl Nussbaum-Beach and Will Richardson . He was trying to put together a cohort of districts in Wisconsin, and had asked Will and Sheryl if he could include districts from Minnesota as well to get the the optimal number of participants. Since I was from Minnesota, he wondered if I would be interested or know of other districts that were interested in participating?After pitching it back in Edina and getting the go ahead to proceed, I presented the opportunity to the TIES Learning and Technology Advisory group, and after a lot of conversations and the inclusion of a great group of educators from New Hampshire, tomorrow we kick off the cohort in Oregon, Wisconsin! Our team consists of our two ...

Friday afternoon I spent a few hours observing classes at the Science and Leadership Academy in Philadelphia prior to EduCon 2.1. Here are some of my observations: Students in 9 th grade here have an elective in Technology. Students pictured here are using Google Reader to access blogs to read. The teacher invited them to subscribe to blogs they thought would be interesting, suggesting Principal Chris Lehmann's as an example. I talked with students about battery life on their MacBooks . They have a lot of power strips for plugging in. A lot of times, they will do so during lunch. They have power hook ups in the ceiling of some areas. I stopped Chris Lehman in the hall to talk about the themes they have for each grade level. He talked about how they allow teachers to " serendipitously relate interdisciplinary learning" instead of saying "today we're going to do a project". For Themes, the Freshman focus on Identity , Sophomores on Systems , Juniors on ...

In this session, Oak-Land teachers presented on How Technology Changes Teaching and Learning. Prior to that, there was discussion about staff development, and how implementation is happening. In South Dakota, they gave core staff tablet PC's a few years ago, and have phased in to everyone. Gale-Ettrick-Trempealeau had a tech academy this summer, and also uses Atomic Learning. They admitted that some lessons are not suited to tech integration, and that's ok! The Apple Learning Interchange has resources for staff on specific subject areas, and the new Thinkfinity (Formerly Marco Polo) has a lot of resources for integration with one to one. Oakland's principal mentioned that he is working with staff during observations this year on how they will teach differently with one to one. Laptops in the English 8 Classroom Jesse Fredrickson, who teaches both regular and honors english at the 8th grade level spoke about her experience. She started by telling us how laptops have change...

October 8 and 9 I attended a 1-to-1 Learning Leadership Institute at Oak Land Junior High in Stillwater. Oakland has had a one to one initiative for the last 5 years. ( Twitter blocked on the filter, but Facebook not!) There were folks attending from Warroad (Looking at 6th-8th Grade), Harrisburg, South Dakota (Building a new high school designed with one to one in mind-this year all staff have laptops), Gale-Ettrick-Trempealeau, Wisconsin (Building a new middle school, and looking at best options), and Jim Hawthorne and I from Edina ( "Go Wireless" CoP ) . 21st Century Learning and Learning Tools Paul Musegades from Apple started things off discussing five challenges:Global Competition, Global Interdependence, Workplace Innovation, Ubiquitous Information and Student Experience. He noted that skilled worker growth in Japan is 25 million, whereas in China, it's 300 million! We are both competing with them and are interdependent with them! Ubiquitous information-" ...

I couldn't go to the National Education Computing Conference in San Antonio, but I was able to watch a great session on using streaming video in the classroom, right in my kitchen while I made dinner! Free video streaming by Ustream

Wendy Wolfe from Totino-Grace spoke about integrating Web 2.0 in a K-12 environment. She talked about students wanting to be "entertained", but maybe a better word would be "engaged". "For some reason they want to teach us stuff that any fool can look up in a book." -Calvin Educating the Net Generation - Majority of secondary classes-15 seconds or fewer are devoted to group discussion. 85% of instruction is Teacher centered. Trend- with high stakes testing, instruction is becoming more teacher centered, not less. New Blooms taxonomy -Creating has replaced Evaluation at the top. Wiki's and Blogs allow students to create and to publish. She shared information about the wiki she created for her classes. She saw wikis as a tool for virtually everything she does on the Web. One of the projects had the students creating a video with Animoto . Here is a video that Jen Buckley from South View created using this tool. Comic Generators She then talked about car...