Edina Digital Age Learning

The title of this post was inspired by a conversation lead by David Jakes this past weekend. I'll write more about that presentation in a future post. It's Not About the Tool! This fall, Will Richardson kicked off our district back to school gathering challenging the staff in our district to " Redefine Awesome !" He pointed out that, " The great thing is.." We now have an easy connection between one's passion to learn and the resources to learn it." "Unleashing student passion for learning" is one of the cornerstones of our district technology plan , along with "Empowering great teaching! Even the wording speaks more to educational philosophy and pedagogy, rather than " let's get some cool tools! " To me, the focus of this document, and for that matter the National Educational Technology Plan , which I'm a big fan of, is on LEARNING , not on the tool! The learning is the most important part. If it can be done ...

This session after lunch gave people the opportunity to quickly share new tools. They had 2 minutes to share their idea or tool and then someone else stepped in. Many educators presented, but then the vendors showed up to start sharing their products. I struggle with this, as I would prefer to hear from educators rather than commercials. It seemed that the educators did a pretty good job of keeping to the 2 minute limit. The vendors...not so much! Surprise! Storybird -Social Tool to create a digital book (Flash Based) Goofram -Combines Google Search with Wolfram Alpha QR bar codes -A way to quickly generate them for use in the school or classroom. G-mail Labs -Lisa Thurmann shared how it can be used to enhance your G-mail experience. Mashpedia - A real-time Multi-media Social Encyclopedia. Paper.li -Create a newspaper with a Twitter stream or a hashtag. See more cool things here ! Shareaholic -Scott McLeod shared this as a way to easily share articles and resources. Readability -McLeod...