Pennsylvania

The buzz about the millennials continues since Morley Safer’s 60 Minutes segment aired in November. Poised to enter the workforce, they are hardworking, resourceful, and tech savvy multi-taskers. So why are these Gen Ys taking so much heat? Important to them: self, friends, family, rapid rise. Not as important: the older generation. After my friend, colleague, and Star DE Jennifer Brinson got the faculty room discussion started, our school district’s Director of Data and Technology, Randy Ziegenfuss, blogged about the millennials. He asked if the older generation was not willing to shift their paradigm of work or if the younger generation need to shift their paradigm? Has the concept of work changed from one generation to another? For some of these answers, I turned to A Whole New Mind.

If you happened to attend the Dan Pink webinar, you noticed the chat with 187 participants on multiple threads flew like the Concord. Despite directing comments to @name, at least 6 strands competed with my attention for Dan Pink’s message. So I focused on the main event, and he made so much sense. If we think about the new paradigm for today’s market economy, if we think Pink, then we do embrace a different mindset for the future. We all shift, or perhaps we get left behind, standing somewhere on the fringe in numerical proportion to our resistance to understand the impact of Asia, Automation, and Abundance. While older may struggle with the 3A’s, younger clearly does not.

What always puzzles me is the reluctance to embrace change, especially when there are really not many other options. If manufacturing, mining, and agriculture were the ways to grow money–not merely exchange it–in the agrarian and industrial ages, and if the information highway has been superseded by the creative age, then how we grow learning, minds, creativity, and the wealth of a nation will change. As educators with a challenge to fit digital learning to digital natives, the millennials are waiting–and to their credit, quite patiently, I think–for some of us to catch up. For me, it really has been a journey of Discovery. The good that I bring daily into my classroom comes from the Discovery Educator Network, from your wisdom and talent and from the Discovery Education products. So, as I venture back to blogging, I hope you will welcome a new voice to help Jennifer share the task she has so ably–and dauntingly to me–held for the past year. I’m glad to be back, and hope you will join me in adding your thoughts and comments to our ongoing discussions.

A tidbit: Jannita will be starting A Whole New Mind discussion group. Email her if you would like to continue the conversation.

From the DEN National Blog . . .

Walk to support our Armed Forces and their families

Wow . . . My previous posting about my Online Connections class earned a Cool Cat Teacher Award!

Seriously, I was pretty surprised at the chatter that my class wiki generated.  Though, when I think about it, isn’t that what blogs are supposed to do?  Isn’t that was the DEN is all about - teachers sharing ideas to create the most engaging and meaningful learning experiences for their students? 

I’m glad that the posting generated ideas and conversation. 

If others of you are using wikis, blogs, or other Web 2.0 tools with your classes, please leave a comment with the link(s).  We can all learn from each other’s ideas. 

Thanks to Josh Catone (Read/Write Web) for these resources.

I also posted this on my cliotech blog.

I have been collating digital storytelling resources on my wiki for a little over a year.  The page is very dynamic - lots of alterations based on shared learning.

I just added two new resources that I came across on the Read/Write Web.

JayCut

With JayCut you can create your own movies and slideshows, so called mixes. It is simple to do and free of charge, alone or together with friends. Finally, you can export the creative masterpiece to YouTube, your computer or your blog.

Click here to learn more about JayCut’s features.  I added JayCut to my list of free online editors (that list includes EyeSpot, Cuts, and JumpCut.)

Plotbot

Plotbot is a web-based collaborative screenwriting application where you can write a screenplay with as many or as few people as you like. Adopting the wiki approach to screenwriting, each element is editable by any member of a project. You can also comment on, delete or restore any element. 

Plotbot appears to have some of the functionality of Celtx, without all of the extra features that may be overwhelming for many students.  I like that Plotbot allows users to manage the accessibility of their projects (private or public).

So, more resources for our digital storytelling toolbox . . .

I published this over at my cliotech blog, but know that many of you current are or plan to start using Wikispaces. 

I came across a SplashCast Channel (via Ken Pruitt) created by Jim Gates.  The resources on the channel provide an excellent overview of Wikispaces.

To use this player, after you press play, you must click the arrow forward in the upper right hand corner to scroll through the slides.

I’ve already added it to my wiki workshop wiki page.

Thanks Jim and Ken!

A few weeks ago, I posted a TED video featuring Sir Ken Robinson discussing whether schools are killing creativity on my cliotech blog.

I cam across a similar video today.  The video features Tony Buzan, author and creator of iMindMap software,  discussing a fundamental problem with public education worldwide - that schools are teaching students what to learn but not how to learn.   According to Buzan, in our efforts to teach children what to learn we sacrifice creativity and students fail to grasp how to learn - that we are increasingly turning out graduates who are dependent on others for information.

I have been spending a good deal of time this month developing the curriculum for a Business and Information Technology class I am teaching this coming year.  The class is called Online Connections and the focus of it is loosely centered around the notion that technology has changed the way people learn and work and that we must expose our students to the reality of this changing world.  For a techie and former social studies teacher who often felt somewhat constrained by curriculum, this is like going to teacher heaven. 

I created essential questions and enduring understandings for the course and posted them on the class wiki.  While these statements make a lot of sense to me, I have been challenged by how to make them clear and meaningful for my students (who I will only see for 22 school days!). 

• I created a partnership with a class at the Korea International School,
• generated a learners toolbox that students will use to review Web 2.0 applications and how they can be harnessed to learn and create products of value,
• aggregated various news feeds to help students gain a more global perspective,
• put together resources to help students construct understanding of copyright and online safety,
• and am in the process of developing what I hope will be a Quadrant D (a la Daggett’s Rigor/Relevance Framework) activity with the following task In this challenge, you will imagine that you are an adult and have
  relocated to a new geographic area. Using your creativity and critical
  thinking skills, you will have to develop a set of interactive
  directions for setting up your new life.

I am planning to model the process of digital negotiation when my students collaboratively develop our class contract and Web 2.0 resources evaluation protocol. 

This morning, I created another activity (and blogged about it on my cliotech blog). . .

I want to send out a quick thanks to Vicki Davis (Cool Cat Teacher) for sharing a powerful podcast from Business Week that accompanies their issue on the Future of Work.

Based on activity that Vicki used with her students, I created an activity for the 9th grade students in my Online Connections course:

We have discussed how mega-trends have changed the nature of business and learning. Business Week published an issue about the future of work. This is your future. 

Listen to this brief podcast (about 12 minutes in length), read the article, Which Way to the Future, and answer the following questions on the discussion tab of this wiki page.   

1. What is changing about the workplace in America?
2. What type of people will continue to be employed? What characteristics will they have?
3. What do you find most interesting that was discussed?
4. Are you personally optimistic or pessimistic about future employment opportunities for you and why? 

* Activity adapted from Vicki A. Davis (Cool Cat Teacher blog.)

More Research about the Changing Workplace   

• Web 2.0 Kids Have Stiff Work Demands
• A Look Backward at the Future of Work (slideshow)
• The End of Work as We Know It
• The Changing Work Equation
• Power in Numbers: How wiki software is reforming bloated bureaucracies and changing the face of communication
• The Wiki Workplace

I shared this activity with the DEN because I believe that many of you are also trying to figure out how to bring the reality of the 21st century into your classrooms.  While I realize that I certainly enjoy greater flexibility with regard to time and curricular constraints than most, I think that some of the resources I have collated for my course might be workable in your classes as well.
 

Will Richardson pointed his readers to the current issue of Business Week.  The cover read, The Future of Work.   
Last month, I blogged about a Department of Labor report that addressed this very issue, The 21st Century at Work: Forces Shaping the Future Workforce and Workplace in the United States.

Here are a few salient points from the BW article that should be relevant for educators who are preparing the workforce of the future: 

Globalization and technology together are creating the potential for startling changes in how we do our jobs and the offices we do them in. Offshoring, for one, means work can be broken into smaller tasks and redistributed around the world. And the rapid growth of broader, richer channels of communication—including virtual worlds—is transforming what it means to be "at work."

. . . the modern workplace no longer resembles the factory assembly line but rather the design studio, where the core values are collaboration and innovation, not mindless repetition

My school district is currently immersed in a cycle of continuous school improvement, part of which means actively investigating the demands of the 21st century economy and how we can best prepare students to be competitive in the future workplace.  It is not an easy task when considering how fast changes have been occurring in the open-source revolution.  Though, we must undertake this intimidating task if we are to remain a relevant force in the shaping of America’s youth.

I apologize to the blogger who shared Simple Spark . . . I can’t recall where I read about it, but I wanted to share it here.

Simple Spark:

The Simple Spark Catalog is the place to find all of the really cool web applications, or "apps" that will become an integral part of your life online.

Not only does the Simple Spark Catalog have a comprehensive listing of really cool apps that gets larger every day, but we also give you the tools to organize and share all these apps with your friends. Our catalog is a marketplace where both established companies and independent developers come to strut their stuff.

I’ve already added Simple Spark to my Social Learning wiki page and think it is a nice repository for other Web 2.0 applications and cool widgets.

One of the applications is one that was a subject of one of my recent blog postings on my cliotech blog, Wikiscanner.

So, if you are seeking some cool new Web 2.0 applications, be sure to check out Simple Spark.

I posted a entry about Web 2.0 and Campaign 2008 on my cliotech blog and thought it beneficial for me to share some of those resources with you and solicit the PA DEN’s feedback as well. 

I am in the process of putting together online materials for my students to evaluate the impact of collaborative technologies on political campaigns and citizenship.

I would imagine that many other teachers are also collating resources for similar purposes this year. 

I gathered the following resources on my Online Connections class wiki.

• YouTube You Chose
• MySpace Impact
• 4President.tv (Presidential Campaign Videos Since 1952)
• 4Presidents Blog (2008 Presidential Campaign)
• CIC eLections
• History of U.S. Presidential Elections
• Inside Politics - Political Cartoons

I also embedded a Grazr Google News feed.  (copied below)

Does anyone have suggestions for some other sites that we could use to bring the campaign into the classroom in a meaningful and engaging way for our students?

By the way, I came across a great article in The Christian Science Monitor about the impact of online campaigning, Web 2.0 meets Campaign 2008.