Lee has warned us that he will be speaking very fast....
Following up from yesterday's presentation (that I didn't attend)
Kids are fundamentally different. Classical conditioning. If you put apes in a cage, and spray if they reach for bananas, soon other apes will prevent any ape from going for bananas. You can replace all apes one at a time will prevent any ape from going for the bananas. The apes learn
TTWWADI - That's the way we've always done it.
This is true of modern day axle width for trains - goes back 2300 years ago from a Roman War Chariot - The chariot was just wide enough for two horses rear ends. Today the Solid Booster Rockets are built to the same 4' 8.5 Inches because they are shipped by rail. The most complex piece of machinery built base the specification on the size of two horses butts.
Education has a lot of TTWWADI.
Why are kids in our classrooms ???? they have no other choice.
There are 5 skill sets in education and life today
1. Obsolete Skills
- once valued - sharpening swords, milking horses, candle maker
2. Traditional Skills
- once important - less mainstream - still valued - handwriting, dewey decimal system
3. Traditional Literacy Skills
- Reading, Writing, Numeracy - Traditional Communication Skills
- just as important today as they are an essential foundation for 21st Century Skills
4. Modified Traditional Literacy Skills
- Emphasis has increased based on the digital culture
- Reading is no longer a linear passive activity
- Writing is no longer reading and writing a report on what you read
5. New Skills
- emerged or are unique to the Digital Age
- This are critical in the world today - online communication - social media
Schools continue to train students to be consumers of content; now students need to be producers and prosumers of content. Students literate with 20th Century skills only will only be prepared for our past and not their future. (What a great quote)
Students need to move to fluency in 21st Century Skills. Fluency is at a level that you no longer need to think about how to do the skill
1. Technological Fluency - you know how to use excel and use it to calculate and think - the focus is not on the hardware, it is on the headware
2. Media Fluency - Beyond creating a podcast or taking a photo - It is about looking critically at the medium and how it is being used to communicate and shape your opinion. Measuring the effectiveness of the message communicated with the media.
3. Information Fluency - Unconsciously and Intuitively interpret information
a. Ask good questions
b. Acquire
c. Analyze - authenticate, arrange, understand bias
d. Apply - within context of real life, real world problem - write a blog, - vision into practice
e. Assess - product and process.
Traditional Literacy and 21st Century Fluency need to both be taught in a structured and valuable way. Our job as educators should be to teach lazy (progressive withdrawl) - empower our students to be independent learners and thinkers with 21st century thinkers - provide them with the skills and knowledge to succeed in the outside world.
Our job is to plan for learners to graduate no longer needing us for them to succeed.
To have learning stick (learning triangle) we need to have students teach concepts to each other and apply it. Now they will remember 90%
Today's students are not the students that schools were designed to teach. Today's students are not the students we were trained to teach. If we don't change how we teach, it is us that has the learning difficulty
http://committedsardine.com/resources.cfm
Kevin
