Sunday, October 16, 2011

The Next Step


Innovation in Education!


As GenYES students and technology mentors, one of the most importance facets of your role is to be technology innovators.  Last week you explored the idea of innovation.  Now it's time to BE innovators!


So how do we do this? 


1.  Breeze through this document:  Up to the Challenge  (YIKES! It's 38 pages long! Are you CRAZY MsK?)  No! I just want you to get the feel for what the study* is talking about!  Read a few parts in the beginning.  Stop and look at some pages that get your attention.  Discover some critical skills needed for students (Like YOU!) to be successful.  Pause around pages 17 through 20ish and understand what we (GenYES'ers) are striving for as tech innovators.  Consider what we've built and are building. Why are we creating AMP Zones?  What are we doing with this Compass Lab?  Why did we buy a Promethean Board?  → Comment on points about what you read and how it affects what we are doing.   
Are you up for the challenge?


2. There may be things more important in education than memorization of facts.  After all, we have google for fact finding, right?  The new ideologies are: The 4 C's.   What are they?  






3.  The simple video above is analogous to the way we do classwork now and proposes the idea of discovering new approaches and ideas through ... innovation.  Think about how this movie applies to the classrooms of today and potentially tomorrow.  Be specific.  


4.  What is Compass 2015 about? 


5. In Shadow's part of Compass 2015 what Objective and Strategy are the Compass Lab and Amp Zones listed for this year?  (Listed as digital lab and Amplitude)  What other notes about 21st Century Learning does it say we are proposed to do? 


Note:  Yep this is a long blog assignment!  OK OK...it's worth 100 points AND you will have class time to work on these concepts this week!  
  
*study:  There are many, similar studies and significant data to support this thinking.