The following are excerpts from the February, 2010 issue of Campus Technology, page 34.
I recently read some interesting information that was compiled by Project Tomorrow, a nonprofit organization that surveys K-12 students, teachers, administrators, preservice teachers, and parents nationwide to understand the trends in student learning. In 2008, they surveyed 281,500 K-12 students.
“When Julie Evans, the CEO of Project Tomorrow, gives presentations to higher ed leaders, she discovers that they are usually interested in the students that will be going to college in a couple of years – the high schoolers. But she explains that “looking at the middle school students or upper elementary students – in grades 3 through 8 – is actually a better instructional tool for them, because those kids have a very, very different view from their high school peers.”
“As example of those differences, she points to their viewpoints about online learning. ‘The traditional, conventional theory is that high school students take online classes because they want to get college credit and they want to have a class that fits into their schedule. But when we look at middle school students, they’re more interested in blended learning – where they take a traditional class with a teacher and then also have an online component.’
“Her point: ‘If I’m a college CIO (chief information officer) or CTO (chief technology officer), and I’m only thinking about the 100 percent online class that my students are looking for, then I’m not properly preparing for that next generation of students coming up, who want a blended approach. I want to be building for kids I’m going to see five-plus years from now.’”
“Evans lists nine attributes that characterize these students:
- They’re self-directed in their learning.
- They’re untethered from traditional education.
- They’re expert at personal data aggregation.
- They engage in the power of connections.
- They create new communities.
- They’re not tethered to physical networks.
- They prefer experiential learning.
- They’re content developers.
- The process is as important as – and sometimes more important than – the knowledge gained.”
“Ultimately, Evans says, “students want to define and direct their own educational destinies.” That will, she explains, require schools to develop new kinds of learning spaces, move to more social-based learning, tap digital resources that add relevancy, and move learning beyond the classroom walls, whether those walls reside in a district or on a campus.”
Here’s my take on this – Many of these characteristics such as being expert at personal data aggregation, they engage in power of connections, and they create new communities are features that tell me they are very comfortable in the online world. The fact that to them “the process is as important as the knowledge gained” tells me that they would prefer to learn by doing rather than by listening to a lecture or even engage in a discussion. They are content developers. They like to create and experience what they are learning.
So how do we change the learning environment? As already indicated, hybrid learning may help. Connections and learning communities are not made (or at least not as easily) in 50 minute periods. But learning that can be accomplished anytime, anywhere using mobile, portable devices that have wireless access will allow these students to thrive.
At the Web site Alltop (http://www.alltop.com) you can create a Web page that contains RSS feeds of your choosing. You can see the Alltop page I created related to various anatomy and physiology topics by going to http://my.alltop.com/jjohnsonwbc.
Evernote allows you to clip information from the Web and edit the Web pages. You can create your own notes, drag and drop content into Evernote. Also, there is software that you can download that allows enter information and sync it with the Web-based content.
By default, the information is kept private on the Web but you can make it public.
A number of video tutorials are available here. The Getting Started Guide can be found here.
With the free account you are allowed up to 40MB of uploaded files each month. With a Premium account, which costs $5/month or $45/year. the amount of uploaded files allowed is 500MB. There are other advantages of upgrading to the Premium account. Click on this link for more details – Premium account.
You can also embed widgets into your Web pages such as the one below.
Probably many of you are familiar with the various Google Apps but may not be familiar with the relatively new Microsoft Live Workspace.
If you need to collaborate with anyone or if your students need to collaborate, these are tools intended for that purpose although, of course, you can use them for your own personal work.
If you read the comments posted in response to this article, you’ll notice the one particular comment that points out that the article failed to discuss some of the features of Google Apps not found in Microsoft Live Workspace.
So that you don’t have to figure out which comment I am referring to, here it is:
Google Docs is far better than Office Live, especially thanks to its real-time collaboration and mobile access. There are some any other features of Google Docs that should have been presented, such as the chat feature in spreadsheets and presentations or the integration of Google Docs with other apps (you can schedule an event in Google Calendar from a doc, you can integrate a doc in the brand new Google Sites wiki-like application, you can transform a Google Notebook into a doc, you can use a Google Spreadsheet as a web-based bookmark storage thanks to its integration with Google Co-op subscribed links, you can also published in Blogger directly from a doc, you can use a Google Doc spreadsheet template to upload a complex Google Earth map – see Google Earth Outreach, you can access from Gmail a Google shared spreadsheet even if it has been sent as attached email, etc.).
You missed so many advantages of a very web-based workspace, and you seem to ignore that Google is preparing to launch a Google-Gears enable version of their suite that will let you access and EDIT shared docs OFFLINE directly from your Internet Browser. This has been officially announced and is currently tested by Google teams.
MS Office Live is a “workaround” to retain users. To keep Office is to play against the “in the cloud” computing trend, which is the future of collaboration. If you like a continually improved editor, don’t wait years for the next Office version: Google release amazing features every week!
Kerika “lets you share your ideas, documents and projects with friends and colleagues around the world using Graphical Wikis: a unique approach to team collaboration that makes it easy for everyone to understand what your project is all about.”
This seems like a really good idea and the service is free for educators.
If you need to collaborate with others on a writing project, this free web service may be the thing to use. One of the differences between it and a wiki is that you can different versions of the paper you are working on.
This is probably a site to check out to see if you can create your own wiki and use it within a classroom setting since the wikis created at this site are private and not open to the public.
If you would like to create a learning object (something as simple as a tutorial on a subject) that can be shared with the rest of the world, try out this free service.
This could be an interesting site to use in an early grade class. Or at the higher levels, you could have the students draw something more complicated (like mitosis) and then have then save it and send it (two features available at this site).
At this Wiki site, you can learn about how to create your own wiki. This page contains links to sites that host wikis for free as well as hosting services that charge.
The wiki where this page is located is called WikiBooks and it allows to create your own modules (as they call them).
convert this post to pdf. 