- Mahatma Gandhi

It’s been around since 2001, and has been talked about and referred to at almost every Educational Technology conference I’ve been to since that time. The terms “digital natives” and “digital immigrants” are now thrown around so frequently that it doesn’t even need to be explained any more.

Prensky’s thinking about effective ways to reach today’s students continues to evolve. He continues to work to apply some of his thoughts from this, his most famous article, to different contexts.

I highly recommend checking out his website. I have just perused it a bit, and really wish I had more time to read more of his stuff right now, but I really must get to sleep soon.

Some of the books and articles that I have also read, or at least are on my list to read are the following (he really chooses great titles, doesn’t he?):
Engage Me or Enrage Me
Don’t Bother Me, Mom — I’m Learning! (his latest book)
…there are many more… I sometimes just love to look at the titles of articles and books, and get an extremely brief version of the main thought of the writing. This is one reason I love to hang out in bookstores so much.

His writing is full of eye-opening quotes, not from philosophers or theologians, but simple statements from these Natives that he has provided such clarity about.

Why am I finally getting around to responding to this article? This week I’m going through SB 472 training, which is a California “thing” (SB meaning Senate Bill) where we get a week of training on our new textbook, in this case, Math. This article was assigned as homework one of the days.

OK, so what do I think of the article itself? Here are the specific points that I found particularly striking, amusing, etc.:

•The phone call asking “DId you get my email?” has happened at my school. We’ve talked about reducing the interruptions to the classroom (silent emails being much less disruptive than a phone call), but viewing this not as annoying defeating the purpose, Prensky has reminded me that the office personnel is probably “speaking with an accent” here

•I was amazed at how proficient my students were at playing certain games they showed me on the internet during the last few days of school, one being Club Penguin. TypeRacer is another example that was spontaneously very successful. Ever since becoming familiar with Prensky’s thinking, and other progressive, forward-thinking experts in educational technology, I have had a passion for trying to figure out how to “get rid of my accent”, and how to best use the “language” of my students, the digital natives, to reach them. I want to figure out how to use games to make learning more engaging, since this is what I am, in fact, competing with. I will be seen as boring and irrelevant if I don’t learn to speak their “language.” We must “engage them or enrage them.” This is more than pithy, clever sayings. This is for real. This is why I get grouchy about those that insist on our students learning the culture of the Digital Immigrants:

•It’s very tempting to conclude, as Prensky “quotes”, My students just don’t ___ like they used to,” etc. What we need to do is to recognize that they ARE DIFFERENT THAN US. We need to change and adapt. We need to learn from them, as well as them learning from us.

•”‘Future’ content includes the ethics, politics, sociology, languages, and other things that go with the software, hardware, etc.” This is one reason I would like to see a more loose policy on cell phones at school. We need to teach them how to appropriately use them (or, in most cases, NOT use them) I experimented with having my students use their cell phones as calculators, but ran into some problems with some very valid issues that administration brought up. Even so, it saddened me that we couldn’t bring some of the technology that they see as absolutely relevant in their lives into the classroom learning experience. I saw many of my students kind of “come alive” when I validated some of their “native” culture. It’s a sticky one…very interesting…

•He mentions games to teach concepts like classical philosophy, the Holocaust, etc.  This renewed my enthusiasm to try and find game to help teach concepts to my students. He acknowledges that many of the attempts at this have been pretty bad (edutainment), but that we must continue to improve, because WE CAN FIGURE THIS OUT! One game that has been successful “in” my 6th grade classroom has been Civilization. Since I teach Ancient Civilizations, this is an IDEAL application. No, I can’t use class time for it. But I can offer a copy or two for checkout to my students. I can refer to it when we’re discussing content from our textbook. I can encourage students to get together in the classroom after school, or at each other’s houses , to play it together. I can affirm the expert in my room who knew about it before I even mentioned it, and had a more advanced version than I did; I can ask him to share with the class what the game taught him about ____ (filling in the concept that we were studying that day).

I’m far from figuring out how to apply Prensky’s thoughts to my own classroom practice, but I feel good about how I’ve started to experiment…

PS – David Thornburg and Hall Davidson have both written recently about Prensky’s thoughts. Thornburg expressed some reasons that Prensky’s thesis is incomplete, inadequate, and/or inaccurate. Davidson sided with Prensky, and did a great job of expressing why. This discussion took place in the OnCUE Journal, published by CUE, Computer Using Educators, with Thornburg writing an article, then Davidson and Thornburg both writing a letter to the editor, continuing the conversation. This will really be something to watch. These guys are both such great thinkers and leaders, I’m not sure I know which one I agree with!! I guess I’ll live in the tension…

In 1922, Fredrick Taylor came up with a model of management planning. Henry Ford used this to organize & manage his famous assembly line. Education used this same kind of thinking to organize itself. Previously, there were 1-room schoolhouses, with teachers teaching 8 grades, with olders teaching youngers, personalized instruction, etc. As a result of the Taylor management, education became squeezed into the assembly-line mold. This was not a problem, though. In fact, it worked extremely well at the time! The problem is that the economy has changed!

We then talked about RSS feeds. It’s his view that every student, in order to graduate from high school, should know how to manage their RSS feeds.

Wikipedia should not be so much a source, but a publishing center. He challenged us to write a wikipedia article WITH our class. Lots of great discussion there.

We discussed the ways we might teach the different perspectives on the American Revolution between the US and Britain. We could fascilitate a debate between American kids and British kids. Kids prepare, they make PowerPoints using GoogleDocs, send the PPTs to each other (across the pond). They then are essentially telling each other the story from their perspective. Then a debate is scheduled via Skype. This is recorded, and it can be put up on iTunes. What a motivation!!!! Compare that to kids that just “learn” the content for the test, and then forget it the next day. The podcast would be something that the students would very likely listen to over and over, would share with many others.

He also showed us how to use Google Custom Search for several purposes. More on this on a different post.

The Keynote address was Marco Torres, an amazing educator. Here are some links that he gave us about him and what he’s done.
http://sfett.com/
http://torres21.typepad.com/flickschool/
http://cinedelagente.com/

He showed us some phenomenal stuff that he does with GarageBand.

——-

My first two sessions went very well, in my opinion. I setup a blog article for each of the sessions. (Just previous to this article)

Now I’m in a session with Mike Lebsock talking about Colonial Williamsburg and Podcasting. What an energetic guy – it was a pleasure to meet him and get to know each other today!
There’s a gold mine of resources for a 5th grade teacher in the form of the Colonial Williamsburg podcast.

I’m interested to find some high-quality podcasts that are specific to 6th grade content, as well. Whether it’s Ancient Civilizations, Science, or whatever…

A Moment in Time, by Dan Roberts is also a good resource for podcasts on American History.

Since he gave us a great packet of handouts, so I’m not taking notes terribly feverishly, as I might if we didn’t have handouts.

He recommended the Snowball mic (got it on eBay for $70 – retail price is about $300)

——

Now I’m in “More than 100 Free Web Based Integration Tools” with John Corippo. For this one, I went with a sort of rapid-fire note taking style. He explained the following tools. Some I was able to get the URL’s for, others, I’ll have to explore more later…

thinkfree.com
googledocs

GoogleApps (http://www.google.com/a/help/intl/en/index.html)
Dance Mat Typing (for Mac) http://www.bbc.co.uk/schools/typing/
TuxTyping (for Windows or Linux)
VoiceThread (http://voicethread.com/)
Tooble/tv
Photoshop for free
Young Frankenstein – puns
Picasa (Google’s version of iPhoto; PC only; upload pictures from any camera)
David Jakes tutorial on Picasa
Jingproject.com (only limitation = 5 minutes)
Screencast
Stock Xchng (http://www.sxc.hu/)
EdZone (http://www.k12hsn.org/edzone/)
Utah Education Network / UEN (http://www.uen.org/)
Contains an improvement on Starfall
http://www.uen.org/3-6interactives/index.shtml

http://ctap7.pbwiki.com/Tech+Integration

There’s just something about going to a conference that is energizing, motivating, stretching, encouraging, and positive! The potency of these ingredients can vary, depending on the conference, but the DEN-NLC included an extra helping of all of these ingredients.

Some conferences are heavy on sessions that could be described as “Sage-on-the-Stage”, handout-heavy, how-to heavy, transmission model, etc. I heard some people describe this year’s NECC this way.

Another powerful part of many conferences is the informal networking (Conversation) that happens between attendees. I went to the CUE conference (CUE is California’s NECC & ISTE affiliate) last March, and reflected on this concept in a previous post.

The DEN-NLC conference went a long way towards recognizing the power of informal networking and learning from each other, as opposed to relying on presenters to be the sole source of knowledge and expertise. Recognizing this dynamic in the planning of the conference made the experience stronger, more diverse, more powerful, and longer-lasting. Perhaps this is because of some of Steve Dembo’s observations. Read his quick blog entry (Conference vs. Conversation), and listen to this podcast. Some of the ideas that he shares really resonated with me. An increasingly powerful part of most conferences, anymore, is the networking that happens. (As opposed to the keynotes and sessions, which are key to getting conversations going, perhaps, informal networking are the more dominant, change-inducing experiences.)

Back to DEN-NLC-specific thoughts: we were from all over the country – two Discovery Educators per each Field Manager. We were put into groups for our week-long project – I worked with teachers from Virginia, Massachusetts, Arkansas, and Maryland. However, we had many other opportunities to connect with people from other groups, as well. I made a point of not clique-ishly sticking to only my group. I was able to meet people from all over the country with whom I will continue to communicate with (and have already!). I hope that I will be able to have other classrooms across the country will be able to read my students’ blogs (I’m excited about the potential of having some students in China connect in this way, but more across this continent will also help to convince my students that their blogs really can be read, and are being read all over the world!)
Some were classroom teachers, others were technology support people (tech coaches, site/district tech coordinators, etc.) It was absolutely wonderful to connect with these educators.
The theme of the DEN is “Connecting teachers to their most valuable resource-each other!” This definitely happened at the national DEN event!! It happened by as we began getting to know each other, exploring similarities & differences in our jobs & experiences. It continued all through the week, as we used USB drives to give each other files & projects. It continued non-stop as we informally gave each other tips, tricks, and demos of what we know how to do with technology. That’s not to say that it was just one big technical how-to session – it was about theory, when to use what, and how to plan in such a way as to make it effective for students.

We talked about how to be effective, relevant, vital, motivating, and exciting in reaching students.
Because our states’ curriculum standards are slightly different, and our testing instruments are different, we couldn’t get sidetracked with some of the testing-mania that is going on country-wide, although state-specific in its details. Also, if you get a bunch of “outside-the-box” thinkers who are fired up about technology and education together, you get some GREAT conversations!

Whenever there is an opportunity to benefit from a peer’s confidence and experience in an unstructured, or at least minimally structured way, great things happen. We were away from home, so we didn’t feel the pressure of other responsibilties like our families, papers to grade, etc., etc. This contributed to this magic, as well.

As I’ve been reading some blogs and reflecting about what made this conference better or different than others I’ve been to, some additional things occur to me:

1. Paper – We didn’t use much of it! As I mentioned earlier, we used USB drives to transfer files to each other. Many notes were typed. There was a bare minimum of handouts given, etc. Many trees were spared!
2. Practicing what we “preach” (using the conference wiki) – We used a conference wiki for everything from •hooking up with each other at the various airports as we arrived to •sharing our final projects and resources. This has continued, because the way the wiki is configured, each of us gets an email when any of us adds or changes anything to it! I encourage anyone reading this to strongly consider using a wiki to keep a school faculty together on an ongoing project.
3. Blogging – Along with the conference wiki, the blogs have kept us connected since the conference.
4. Playtime! – There were lots of other activities that weren’t exactly “on task”.

You can read about several of these activities in Kim Randall’s post. She gives a great blow-by-blow of the whole conference and everything we did. Rather than repeat what she shared, I thought I’d be a little more philosophical and abstract here. She did such a great job, anyway!
For those of you that are members of the Discovery Educator Network, I encourage you to be more active & attend more events. For those of you that are not, I strongly encourage to become a member! It’s been an important part of my professional development, as I hope you can see…