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21st century learning.
Created and maintained by Emily Vickery

Observation: //The next disruptive innovation is personalized, customized learning.//
September 2009 Education Leadership: Teaching for the 21st Century

"We are at the threshold of a worldwide revolution in learning. Just as the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, the wall of conventional schooling is collapsing before our eyes. A new electronic learning environment is replacing the linear, text-bound culture of conventional schools. This will be the proving ground of the 21st century mind." From [|What Would Socrates Say?] in Education Leadership, September 2009

**How Is Your School Using Social Media?**

 * Check out these resources -**


 * [|Can You Hear Me Now? - School Marketing and the Social Web] From Independent Schools Journal**


 * [| Interview with Bay Ridge Prepatory School's Media Relations Coordinator/Assistant to the Head of School]**


 * [|Video: Social Media Reading List for School Leaders]**

[|As Classrooms Go Digital, Textbooks May Become History] NY Times Article - 08-09-09 “I don’t believe that charters and vouchers are the threat to schools in Orange County,” he said. “What’s a threat is the digital world — that someone’s going to put together brilliant $200 courses in French, in geometry by the best teachers in the world.”

Click [|here] for a collection of bookmarks on ebooks.

"What’s the point of Twitter? Why should educators get involved? What difference does using Twitter make?" Read the blog post [|Nine Great Reasons Why Teachers Should Use Twitter] by Laura Walker to find the answers.

Education Institution Change? Check Out These Resources -

I[|STE at NECC09 Debate: Brick and Mortar Schools Are Detrimental to the Future of Education] (Note: The first 35 minutes or so is music and awards ceremony. Go to minute 50 to view debate.) [|The Edgeless University: Why Higher Education Must Embrace Technology] [|The Future of Learning Institutions in a Digital Age]

From Chief Learning Officer, May 2009: [|Become a Chief Meta-Learning Officer] by Jay Cross and Clark Quinn.
 * "Today's organizational turmoil is more than just a temporary downturn. The implications will be long-term and significant, calling on CLOs to rethink how they approach their work.**"

"Technology enables networks, but the major changes in store are not about the technology. Our challenge, according to Yochai Benkler in his article "Complexity and Humanity," is "to build systems that will allow us to be largely free to inquire, experiment, learn and communicate, that will encourage us to cooperate, and that will avoid the worst of what human beings are capable of, and elicit what is best."


 * VoiceThread** Click [|here] to view a wonderful collection of VoiceThread presentations! The recently published //[|Horizon Report]// from the //[|New Media Consortium]// refers to VoiceThread as one of the emerging technologies "likely to have a large impact on teaching, learning, research, or creative expression within education", with a 'time-to-adoption' horizon of one year or less.

Click here to view a **National Association of Independent Schools** 2009 conference presentation.
===Association of Supervision and Curriculum Development (ASCD): Susan Patrick, president and CEO of the International Association of K-12 Online Learning, discusses her upcoming ASDE conference presentation--===

**//Why All Teachers Must Learn How to Teach Online//**
Click [|here] for the blog post.

Click [|here] for her pre-conference podcast.
"If Harvard Business School's Clayton Christensen is right, half of all instruction will take place online within the next 10 years--and schools had better get into the online-learning market or risk losing their students to other providers." Christensen spoke to the American Association of School Administrators in February. Click [|here] to read the article.
 * ALSO SEE**

[|Disrupting Class: How Disruptive Innovation Will Change the Way the World Learns] predicts that the growth in computer-based delivery of education will accelerate swiftly until, by 2019, half of all high school classes will be taught over the Internet.

Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development -

Special Report: [|How Teachers Learn (Part I)] "In educators' busy lives, teacher learning often takes a back seat to students' achievement. But when done right, professional development can maximize the effectiveness of teachers and help students learn as well."

Special Report: [|How Teachers Learn (Part II)] "Successful teachers never stop learning. Effective training strategies -- such as professional learning communities -- can encourage teachers to improve their techniques, inspire educators and ultimately help students."

EDUCAUSE releases their Top Challenges for Teaching and Learning 2009.


 * Creating learning environments that promote active learning, critical thinking, collaborative learning, and knowledge creation.
 * Developing 21st-century literacies among students and faculty (information, digital, and visual)
 * Reaching and engaging today's learner.
 * Encouraging faculty adoption and innovation in teaching and learning with IT
 * Advancing innovation in teaching and learning (with technology) in an era of budget cuts.

Click [|here] for more information.

[|Top Principals Share Common Traits] "Great principals treat their students as family, their staff as professionals and parents as partners, writes National Teacher of the Year finalist Cindi Rigsbee, a nationally certified North Carolina middle school reading educator. Top administrators also promote teamwork, use data to improve instruction, help educators develop their own leadership skills and seem to have endless reserves of energy, she says."

// Connecting in a Networked World //
In an information-rich world, it is an imperative that we are able to connect to various sources for learning. Sometimes referred to as a Personal (or Professional) Learning Network, we use digital tools--such as readers, RSS feed, social bookmarking, wikis, blogs, VoiceThread-- to connect to content experts and others as we pursue our interests.

The following two videos explain what it means to be a 21st century learner and the importance of Personal Learning Networks.

[|21st Century Learning Expert Will Richardson Explains Personal Learning Networks]

[|The Networked Student]

The Networked Teacher This graphic shows a comparison of what a networked teacher was in the past compared to the networked teacher of today.

Click [|here] to view Stephanie Sandifer's Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development presentation //It's 5 O'clock Somewhere//: In this session, learn about tools that allow you to collaborate globally with other educators or with other classrooms. The presenter will introduce a selection of easy-to-use, free tools that make global communication and collaboration possible and include strategies for developing a personal learning network with other educators. She will highlight some successful classroom projects that have allowed students to collaborate with other students around the world.

This video--The Future of Learning--speaks to the growing demand for preparing students for lifelong learning through networked and customized passion-based learning.

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//National Education Computing Conference Webcasts!! Click [|here]. "The NECC Program features a broad spectrum of content focused on the standards, curriculum, best practices, and essential conditions for creating a 21st-Century learning environment for students." Several fascinating presentations--filmmaking, podcasting, global awareness, social responsibility, cell phones. Don't miss out!!//

Will Richardson's wiki space A Web of Connections: Why the Read/Write Web Changes Everything "This is a very challenging moment for educators. Our children are headed for a much more networked existence, one that allows for learning to occur 24, 7, 365, one that renders physical space much less important for learning, one that will challenge the relevance of classrooms as currently envisioned, and one that challenges our roles as teachers and adult learners." You can find his taped presentations [|here].

//The problems that exist in the world today cannot be solved by the level of thinking that created them.// - Albert Einstein

Don't let those tests defeat you. Don't let those tests define you. -- First Lady Michelle Obama, speaking to students at Denver's South High School, November 16, 2009 Mrs. Obama related that she herself was not a great standardized-test-taker.

Computing is not about computers anymore. It is about living." - Nicholas Negroponte, architect and computer scientist

All learning begins when our comfortable ideas turn out to be inadequate. - John Dewey

Social tools don’t create collective action – they merely remove the obstacles to it -Clay Shirky

Technology is anything invented after you were born, everything else is just stuff. - Alan Kay

The task of leadership is not to put greatness into people, but to elicit it, for the greatness is there already. - John Buchan

Learners are encouraged to discover facts and relationships for themselves. - Jerome Bruner

Wisdom is not a product of schooling, but of the life- long attempt to acquire it. - Albert Einstein

Never interrupt someone doing something you said couldn't be done. - Amelia Earhart

We are living in a time that is marked by “the death of education, but the dawn of learning.” - Stephen Heppell, CEO, Heppell.Net Ltd., UK

For any given organization, the important questions are 'When will the change happen?" and "What will change?" The only two answers we can rule out are never, and nothing. -Clay Shirky

A life spent making mistakes is not only more honorable but more useful than a life spent doing nothing. - George Bernard Shaw

Who dares to teach must never cease to learn. - John Cotton Dana

To fly, we have to have resistance. - Maya Lin

The achievements of an organization are the results of the combined effort of each individual. - Vince Lombardi

===In education, however, the product - the grade, the final draft, the test mark - still often takes precedence over the process of learning - the sense of personal journey without which the final destination is meaningless. What is even worse is that many of our students are very comfortable with that idea. To them, school is often about “playing the game.” They follow along, raise hands, submit assignments, study for tests. Of course, there is nothing wrong with these activities as long as they do not impede their progress as independent thinkers, researchers, and writers. Unfortunately, most of the time, “playing the game” means following the rules that we’ve set up for the students. We bring in the hoops, and the students jump through them. It’s an easy process for everyone involved.===

- Konrad Glogowski
Only connect! That was the whole of her sermon. Only connect the prose and the passion, and both will be exalted, And human love will be seen at its height. Live in fragments no longer. Only connect… //– E.M. Forster,// Howards End

//We need to build strong relationships with these children, using the Human Network of hyperconnectivity, so that each of us can infect the other. We need their passion to move forward without fear in a world where the human universe has shifted beneath our feet. They desperately need our wisdom to guide them into healthy and stable relationships throughout the Human Network. To do this, we need to bring these kids inside our heads, and we need to get ourselves into theirs, so that, together, we can make sense of a world so new, and so different, that we all seem but little children in a big world.// //-Mark Pesce//

//We can’t solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them.// //- Albert Einstein//

//The future is not some place we are going to, but one we are creating. The paths to it are not found, but made, and the activity of making them changes both the maker and the destination.// //- John Schaartest//

//The future is here, it's just not evenly distributed.// //- William Gibson// //Pattern Recognition//

//The future belongs to a very different kind of person with a very different kind of mind - creators and empathizers, pattern recognizers,// //and meaning makers. These people - artists, inventors, designers, storytellers, caregivers, consolers, big picture thinkers will now reap society's richest rewards and share its greatest joys.// //- Daniel Pink// A Whole New Mind

//The function of education is to teach one to think intensively and to think critically...Intelligence plus character - that is the goal of true education.// //- Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.//

//We must prepare students for their future, not our past, and their future will increasingly be wireless.// //- Wesley A. Fryer//

//The rate that content is being created in today's world simply outpaces our ability to learn it in twelve short years---which requires a different approach to "mastery" on the part of tomorrow's teachers and students. Mastery in the 21st Century is primarily about learning to use technology to retrieve, evaluate, synthesize and manage information---and (more importantly) to network with other learners. "Digitally prepared children" will know how to use web-based tools to create, communicate and collaborate around areas of personal and professional interest. They will be creators--rather than simply consumers---of information.// //- Bill Ferriter//

//“Any educator worth their salt knows that today’s kids are fundamentally different from the way we were when we were kids. These differences have little to do with their clothing, hairstyles, body parts they pierce, tattoo, and/or expose, or even the music they listen to. These differences have everything to do with the fact that many of today’s kids, part and parcel of the Instant Messenger (IM) Generation, are growing up in a global, digitally-networked landscape filled with innovative, interactive, and powerful communication technologies. For most of this generation, there’s never been a time when such technologies haven’t existed. They are ‘digital natives’ operating at ‘twitch speed.’ In fact, the younger they are, the more digitally fluent they are.”// //- Ian Jukes//

//Students will use engaging technologies in collaborative, inquiry-based learning enviroments with teachers who are willing and able to use technology's power to assist them in transforming knowledge and skills into products, solutions, and new information.// //- A Vision for K-12 Students Today [Click [|here] to watch the video]//

//You have a generation faced with a society with fundamentally different properties thanks to the Internet. We can turn our backs and say, ‘This is bad,’ or, ‘We don’t want a world like this.’ It’s not going away. So instead of saying that this is terrible, instead of saying, ‘Stop MySpace; stop Facebook; stop the Internet,’ it’s a question for us of how we teach ourselves and our children to live in a society where these properties are fundamentally a way of life. This is public life today.// //- Danah Boyd, Fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School// //Read her blog post on [|The Economist Debate on Social "Networking"]//

//The curriculum is the key—not the media. We’ve fallen into this trap of considering that the use of technology is going to be an automatic silver bullet that’s going to make kids learn more, be more motivated. But we forget that it’s not the technology, not the media. It’s the content, and it’s the way those media are used. In other words, it’s the pedagogy, it’s the message, it’s the design—it’s the approach—that is the critical element.// - Michael Simonson, Professor, Instructional Technology and Distance Education, Nova Southeastern University//

Teaching young people how to develop a public voice through the use of digital media links their natural interest in identity formation with civic engagement practices: learning to use blogs, wikis, and virtual communities as media of self expression within a context of public voice should be part of 21st century civic curriculum. - Howard Rheingold

As society and the world of work change, the skills that students need to live and thrive in it also change. The competition will be fierce and can come from anywhere in this flat world. In some ways, students today are ahead of their elders. Technology is second nature to them and they accept and use it without question. Schools lag behind. - Gwen Solomon and Lynne Schrum From __Web 2.0: New Tools, New Schools__

The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read or write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn and relearn. - Alvin Toffler

Education is a social process. Education is growth. Education is not a preparation for life; education is life itself. - John Dewey

In times of rapid change, the learners inherit the earth, while the learned find themselves beautifully equipped to deal with a world that no longer exists. - Eric Hoffer

The Internet is not a fire hose. It’s a bean stalk. - David Warlick

We are moving from: “do your own work” to “work with others” “just in case” to “just in time” learning “hand it in” to “publish it.” - Will Richardson

The object of teaching a child is to enable them to get along without a teacher. - Elbert Hubbard

Our students are facing an unpredictable future, much more so than any of us faced. Yes, we didn’t know exactly what our future would hold, but this generation is the first generation in history to really have no idea what the world is going to look like when they are adults. They need to be continual learners, to be able to teach themselves, to seek out and refine their own learning networks so that their learning doesn’t end when they walk across the stage at graduation. - Carl Fisch

The computer is the primary instrument for intellectual and creative work in our society. - Gary Stager

These are just technologies. Using them does not make you modern, smart, moral, wise, fair, or decent. It just makes you able to communicate, compete, and collaborate farther and faster. - Thomas Friedman

We need to be forward looking in order to adapt our educational system to the evolving needs of the economy and the realities of our changing society. Those efforts will require the collaboration of policymakers, education experts, and--importantly--our citizens. It is an effort that should not be postponed. - Alan Greenspan

Education is key to building the sense of global citizenship that global problem-solving requires. - J.F. Rischard

The best companies are the best collaborators. In the flat world, more and more business will be done through collaborations within and between companies, for a very simple reason: The next layers of value creation – whether in technology, marketing, biomedicine, or manufacturing – are becoming so complex that no single firm or department is going to be able to master them alone. - Thomas Friedman

United States economic growth in the 21st century will be driven by our nation's ability to innovate. - [|Arizona Gov. Janet Napolitano] National Governors Association Chair, 2006-2007

A successful creative economy is one of the government's priorities, and a key source of jobs of the future. The only way that we will compete in these new sectors is through the talents of our people. - The Prime Minister, the Rt. Hon Tony Blair MP in 1999

The kind of questioning, collaborative, active, lateral rather than hierarchical pedagogy that participatory media both forces and enables is not the kind of change that takes place quickly or at all in public schools. -Howard Rheingold

“The future arrives too soon and in the wrong order.” -Alvin Toffler, American author

I hope that I die in a workshop...because the transition between life and death will be so subtle. Quote from an educator

Never be afraid to try something new. Remember, amateurs built the ark. Professionals built the Titanic. -Unknown