Monday+Symposium

Comments from Monday:

David Warlick was a very intersting and motivating speaker. He challenged all educators to model learning we as teachers need to be life-long learners and must practice learning. To do this we have to be willing to give and to take in the learning process. Another interesting concept is the fact that we need to understand our students today learn differently than we did. They learn in digital formats and allow them to learn and teach each other in their learning experience. We need to prepare them for their future not ours. There has been a misunderstanding that we need to integrate technology; when in fact we need to stop integrating technology and begin to teach literacy that applies to thier learning. Literacy is more than being able to read and understand content, students need to be able to aske questions about information that is found. Students need to Expose (find, decode, evaluate, and organize) information. They need to Employ the information by decoding the numbers to help define or tell the story. In addition they must be able to Express their ideas compellingly based on the information they have found. Finally they all need to be able to understand and demonstrate the Ethical use of the information that is found and gathered.

We need to "Crack the code" for the digital natives. Instead of trying to continue to force today's students to learn like we did. There is an abundace of information that is available to students today that we did not have access to in our learning processes. Based on this it should change how and what we currently teach in our classrooms. Digital native learners provoke conversations among peers and experts alike as they learn and teach one another. Native learing forces responsiveness from one another, it inspires personal investment in a process, and finally they are guided by safely made mistakes along the way. Information is changing along with the opportunities to distribute the information as well. We as educators need to adapt and change the way we gather, apply, and teach the information that is available. As educators we need to be engaged in professional development on a daily basis. The information that we can access today is instentaneous, but is unreliable or questionable, as educators we need to be able to access not just the answer, but also the reason for why the answer is credible and accurate. A large part of being a teacher is being a learner alongside those that you teach.

A final thought that I really appreciated on Monday was flipping the classroom. The traditional model of education doesn't work in our non-traditional students. Time and understanding are two variables; time is the constant in our tradtional model and understanding variable. What needs to happen is a switch understanding needs to be the constant and time the variable. Class time needs to be used for practice and application time when they can get help immediately from the teacher. Homework could better be served with lecturing as a videopodcast that can be accessed before the lesson is taught in class.