School 1.0

• Rituals, rules, and routines
• Focus on the right answers
• This is okay.

School 2.0

• Engaged
• Self-directed
• Project-driven
•  Independent problem solvers
• Teachers and students are empowered
• Learning community

Meaningfulness + Significance + Connectedness =  Contribution

EXAMPLE:

Conrad calls the school during summer vacation, wants to come to school to work on his video project.  He won’t take no for an answer.  The school secretary forwards the call to Principal Tim Tyson.  The principal explains that it is too late to make your class grade better, the report cards have already been printed.  “But Dr. Tyson, I got an A”, Conrad explained.   “You said if the project was perfect, you would put it on the school website and into the iTunes Store for the whole world to see”, he continued.  The next day, Conrad showed up at 9am with two of his partners to get back to work on his project.

For the first time, schools can have access to true global distribution.

MabryOnline & iTunes

• School website serves up 1.5 million files per month on average.
• In June 2007, it served up 4 million files.
• People can subscribe to school content via iTunes.

The deal that Dr. Tyson put forth to his students:

• Your work has to be the best of the best
• Ask yourself: “What is it about your work that is so great that it needs to be out there for the entire world to see?”
• Students from New Dehli, Tasmania, Beijing, Shanghai, Peru, Georgia, Australia, UK are viewing their work.
• Students feel a great deal of satisfaction when their work is globally relevant.
• This is authentic assessment: when an A is not good enough for a student.

When does meaningfulness start?

• First job?
• Graduate college?
• Right now!
• We need to have a meaningful activities for students right now.

Project on Human Embryonic Stem Cell Research

• The students approached Dr. Tyson with their topic.
• Two weeks later, the students (on their own) had already scheduled a field trip to Emory University to spend two hours with Dr. Chetta in her research lab.  She presented one of the same intro presentations that she does for her doctoral students and physicians.
• Produced a movie that Patrice Weaver said was the best thing she’d ever seen.  Won the film festival.

Students wanted to make a difference, not just report:

• Commercialization of Drinking Water
• Human Embryonic Stem Cell Research
  • Shot everything but the video of the sonogram.
• Child Slave Labor on the Ivory Coast
  • “Social studies, but more grown up.”
• Saving African lives from Malaria
• Captivity of Elephants
• Poverty in China
• Organ Donation
  • Done like the series 24.
  • Students created every scene except for two that were recorded in the operating room by Emory University.
• Immigration in United States
• Genetically Modified Food
  • Students changed the way their principal buys his food.

Not all about technology and connectivity

• “I wish we could get away from this argument in our profession.”
• The effective educator is the one who bridges the gap between technology and meaningfulness.
• Students want to go beyond preparing for the next year, they want to make a contribution today.
• School 1.0 = Taking it in
• School 2.0 = Giving it out
• We need to stop simplifying our students’ education into tiny little segments.

Dr. Tyson’s closing keynote video/slides can be found here.

Link to session information page here.

Higher education institutions are putting their research videos on ResearchChannel.com. Also check out TeacherTube for video.

Recommend the use of SurveyMonkey, ZOHO Polls, SurveyScholar, Zoomerang, and Response-o-Matic for original research.

We need to make sure that were teaching ethical usage of the polling services when we let students administer their own research.

Allow students to choose RSS feeds that they will be responsible for reporting back to the class. This could be used in tandem with writing this news to a blog.

Wikibooks

Respect of intellectual material. Emphasis needs to be placed on attributing ownership to original authors.

We want students to share, but once content is uploaded to the web, they have to ask permission from all of the content owners. Focus on using Creative Commons material.

Advice for professional social networks: use professional user names.

We need to speak up for issues that prevent students accessing the information and tools to which they need access.

Students need access to good (free if possible) to get their work done.

The presenters plugged all sorts of wikis for various levels (class wiki, class/play wiki, team wiki, etc.)

PrimaryAccess.org to put audio and still images together (similar to Snapkast?)

Train thyself: Hitchhkr.com, edtechtalk.com.

Link to session page here.

What makes a global citizen?

Going beyond learning about the world to learn with the world.

One who can connect with any person from any heritage or background, one who does not think one culture is the epitome of all cultures, one who is not afraid to borrow from another culture.

In order to acquire the skills needed for the 21st century, we need to step back and accept that everyone has strengths. Many countries have been isolated culturally and linguistically. Many of our students do not understand the value of other cultures; that there is wisdom out there in cultures other than ours.

There is nobody out there that knows too much that they cannot learn from another culture…there is nobody out there that is not smart enough that they cannot teach someone from another culture.

Students need to expand their appreciation of other cultures, or at least come to an understanding that there is value in other cultures. Many companies today are looking for this kind of appreciation.

This session was multicast to several places in Georgia. Barry Joseph came in at one point via Second Life to talk about Global Kids.

iEARN sponsors communities of practice both online and face to face. Engages about 2 million students every day in interactive curriculum based collaborative projects with peers in 118 countries.

EF Tours has a mission to make sure that every student has an international experience by the time they leave high school.

TakingITGlobal is an online community started by young people to take action worldwide.

Link to session page here.