RIMS CTAP DPLC

Educators, here is a video of our future students, Please Pay Attention. But of course you will have to watch this at home or on your mobile device. Because it is blocked at your school location.  I will see if I can find it on Teacher Tube and post it later. If you watch the video carefully you will notice that the child is multi-tasking..listening to music and then scrolling through the pictures to show one of the pictures to her parents.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jVm1qyUuXI0&feature=player_embedded

Sorry the video is not posted on Teacher Tube.  I will check again later this week.

I posted the New Digital Natives blog post on the Calaxy site, K12HSN, on the same day that I posted on the DPLC to get more coverage. I was suprised to find a number of comments from other educators on the Podcast News site, so if you are interested here is a link to those comments - http://www.k12hsn.org/calaxy/blogs.php/johndurham/2010/01/20/the-new-digital-natives/

Remember Keep Up the Tech!!!

A Kaiser Family Foundation survey revealed some new information about 8 to 18 year olds using media throughout the day.  Everyone life has changed with the introduction of "New Media" into the mainstream of cultures worldwide.  The article discusses why publishers may be willing to move to a new delivery system for this media.  Here is the link for more information from the website 9 to 5 Mac -http://tinyurl.com/ycxtuly 

Updated:

Just viewed the Kaiser Family Foundation live broadcast of the discussion of this report.  I managed to capture some of the video with a panel discussion of the findings of this report.  I am including a link from the Kaiser Family Foundation that includes downloads of the report and the PowerPoint presentation from the event. Here is the link: http://www.kff.org/entmedia/mh012010pkg.cfm

Op-ed piece by SF writer Robert J. Sawyer, illustrating very well the real conflict between 21st Century education and the “last gasps of the couch-potato generation.”

“All Screens Are Not Created Equal”

We have an epidemic of attention deficit disorder — or, at least, we have an epidemic of diagnoses of that condition. And the culprit most often named: the use of computers.

But is there really something wrong with huge numbers of young people today? Has computer use rotted their brains? Or is it — perhaps — that there’s something wrong with how we’re defining normal?

Our psychological tests for measuring attention were developed between the 1950s and the 1990s. But that was an aberrant period in human history. It was the era of the boob tube and couch potatoes, of people sitting passively in front of television sets for hours on end. Now, in a world in which young people constantly shift their attention from one thing to another, we brand them as ill if they don’t sit still in class.

Today's students could fail at life, says Harvard's Tony Wagner, because their schools are too busy teaching to the test  Hello CTAPers in Region 10. Just thought I would share this article that I saw in the eSchool News today. Really struck a chord with me and I thought you might appreciate a summary. I have pasted excerpts from the article below as well as the link to the entire article. EnjoyWagner suggested that states and schools move from contentstandards to performance standards, and he urged education stakeholders tothink of ways to start assessing 21st-century skills. Wagner presented a list of seven "survival skills"that students need to succeed in today's information-age world, taken from hisbook The Global Achievement Gap: Why Even Our Best Schools Don't Teach the NewSurvival Skills Our Children Need--And What We Can do About It. It's a school'sjob to make sure students have these skills before graduating, he said: 1. Problem-solving and critical thinking;2. Collaboration across networks and leading by influence;3. Agility and adaptability;4. Initiative and entrepreneurship;5. Effective written and oral communication;6. Accessing and analyzing information; and7. Curiosity and imagination. "We are making [Adequate Yearly Progress] at theexpense of failing our kids at life. Something has to change," he concluded.http://www.eschoolnews.com/news/top-news/index.cfm?i=56127&page=1 

The Fresno local ABC News Station, Channel 30 produced a news special in partnership with some local businesses and the Fresno County Office of Education called Technology: The Good and the Bad. According to Region 7 Director Emy Lopez, what resulted was a fantastic report on technology's impact on kids and families. This 1/2 hour special takes a look at the social impact of kids using technology like texting, computers and video games.

There are some interesting topics addressed, including how parents should set limits, cyber-predators, student-produced video, community grant programs that bring technology to students of poverty, and Promethean boards in kindergarten classrooms.