Sunday, February 3, 2013

Personalising the learning journal


Last weekend I was at the 21CLHK conference which is a conference held in HK where educators who are using technology in their teaching practice share what they are doing. It is a 3.5day conference, I was only able to attend 1.5 days, but still came away feeling stuffed with new ideas. This post will use the prompts of last weeks post to report on my learning and where I want to follow up.  A lot of this was gleaned from going over the tweets of the weekend, see http://eventifier.co/event/21clhk for a full archive of the weekend.

Warning - the post is long and stuffed with links and learning!

21CLHK 2013

What did I learn at this conference? 
Dr Larry Rosen is someone I need to read more. His research into online time and effects of this across the age ranges is compelling.  http://drlarryrosen.com/. Some of the points made in his presentation :(which can be seen here in full )
  • Preferred ways to communicate of iGeneration is texting, face-to-face only in third place 
  • Generations differ in the ways they communicate and in the types of technology they use 
  • Task switching - young people make use of 'slack time' - even for a few seconds 
  • Teens say they can do 7 things at once - but how many of them well?
  • 'Continuous partial attention' - not multitasking but switching in between tasks, giving only partial attention to each task  
  • "The costs of multitasking are attention difficulties, poor decision making breadth vs depth, info overload etc"
  • Internet addiction leads to poor sleep habits, info overload, 12 hour sleep deficit per week, overuse of caffeine - red bull, monster drinks 
  • Young people will only wait 2 secs for a website to load 
  • "Kids aren't addicted to technology, they are obsessed" -Dr. Rosen 
  • Technology over activates areas of our brain
  • For babies : for every 1 min of tech time you should have 5 mins of non technology time interacting with people 
  • For teens : teens - 5 mins tech time should hav 1 min non tech time 
  • Time away from tech - improves personal communication skills
  • Brain needs time away from technology to stay healthy 
  • Removing smartphones from students causes a rapid increase in anxiety.
  • Concerns for our children : Undeveloped social skills, shallow thinking skills/ habits, changes in brain function. 
  • Non tech time helps with creative thinking, improves calm walking in nature also calms brain.
  • Teach our children digital time management ABC's -> http://bit.ly/XAnEQv
  • WMD..Weapons of mass distraction
  • Study found that students checking facebook every 15mins during study resulted in terrible grades.  
Nichole Pinkard (through the twitter feed as I was not able to attend her session) http://digitalyouthnetwork.org/
  • Participation gap. Kids who create vs those who simply consume
  • Kids have access to the technology but unequal access to opportunities to the learning on how to use them efficiently
  • What does it mean to be literate? It's not just about reading writing anymore. Kids have to be able to communicate in multiple ways
  • Kids need an audience relevant to them for what they create, creating a global audience is a motivator for their work. Provide a wider audience, motivate students to create.
  • Create spaces with models and watching others learn
  • Where are the spaces in our schools to allow younger children to learn from older role models? 
  • Students need to know what steps are needed on the path to a wider variety of identities. "Do good in school" is not enough. 
  • 'identity' and how it shapes who we are and who we want/strive to be
  • Practice, perform, spectate and level up. Does your school provide these places?
  • Media Literacy: skilled mentors, artifact-driven curriculum, social networks, bring skills developed outside the classroom inside 
  • kids get a lot of social capital from freedom Fridays and showcasing their media work 
  • Redesign libraries to have digital creation spaces.
Debbie Abilock
  • Evaluation of information is the most essential skill to teach students
General sessions :
What did I already know about?
Questions/ thinking 
Questions posted on twitter over the course of the conference which resonated with me...
  • What if we critiqued all our work/products we produce in the name of learning with the question, "is this a good product?"
  •  Does digital media take away from traditional literacy? Dr. Pinkard says no, it enforces traditional literacies  
  • We need to restructure our school paradigm. Student led learning and creating should not be relegated to clubs/after school activities  
  • How to bring acceptance of failure learning model (think videogames) into the classroom where failure is not accepted?
  • "Are we explicit enough in the way we teach kids the digital literacy? 
  • Motivating the under motivated teachers http://onion.com/VCZzN4
  • The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn
  • Teachers shouldn't have to be tech experts. They should be able to hire knowledge brokers, freeing them to be content selectors
  • How can we keep up with the new media skills with the traditional skills (writing, reading..) with the same number of school days?

What are some ideas/ resources that are new to me?

What do I want to know more about or follow up?
What is something I would like to tell others about? 

What are some of the important ideas / tools I am thinking about that I might like to implement into my practice?  
  • Reminded me about showing students the difference between search engines to encourage critical thinking http://www.langreiter.com
  • Fail, and fail again, fail better 
  • Polleverywhere http://www.polleverywhere.com/   
  • Gaming can have a place in the curriculum - Minecraft "Lego of our generation" excited about classroom possibilities
  • Having the tools ready for use at all times, MacBooks, iPads, pick them up as they need them - like a pencil, true integration
  • Capturing perplexity all the time ... capture perplexity, share perplexity, resolve perplexity @ddmeyer
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4 comments:

tgaletti said...

What a fantastic summary, Dianne. I loved reading through it!

February 4, 2013 at 6:45 PM
Dx4 Blog Update said...

Love the way you organized, brilliant. Inspired now... (as usual) thanks!

February 4, 2013 at 8:27 PM
Maura said...

Fantastic post Dianne, Maura

February 5, 2013 at 1:07 PM
Wouter said...

Wow, Dianne, Thanks for getting all that down in one post. Nice to catch up with you at the conference and thanks for answering all the hard questions at the end of my session! :-)

February 11, 2013 at 7:25 PM

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