digital trends & 21st century learners
Today's world is not the world we grew up in, and today's world is certainly not the world our children will live in. Because of the dramatic changes our world has undergone, today's students are not the students our schools were designed for, and they are not the students today's teachers were trained to teach.
This keynote examines the effect digital bombardment from constant exposure to digital media has on our children in the new digital landscape and considers the profound implications this holds for the future of education. What does the latest neuroscientific and psychological research tell us about the role of intense and frequent experiences on the brain, particularly the young and impressionable brain?
Based on the research, what inferences can we make about kids' digital experiences and how these experiences are re-wiring and re-shaping their cognitive processes? More importantly, what are the implications for teaching, learning and assessment in the new digital landscape?
How can we reconcile these new developments with current instructional practices particularly in a climate of standards and accountability driven by high stakes testing for all? What strategies can we use to appeal to the learning preferences and communication needs of digital learners while at the same time honouring our traditional assumptions and practices related to teaching, learning and assessment?
Participants should prepare to have their assumptions about children and how they learn seriously challenged.
Presentation type: Keynote, breakout, interactive workshop
Theme: Teaching, Learning, Assessment, Future of Schools
Audience: General
Duration: One to three hours
UPDATED SEPTEMBER 2009
download the presentation handoutBecause of digital bombardment and the emergence of the new digital landscape, this new digital generation of students processes information, interacts and communicates in fundamentally different ways than any previous generation before them. Meanwhile many of us, having grown up in a relatively low-tech, stable and predictable world are at best struggling with the unprecedented speed of change, technological innovation, overwhelming amounts of information, and the fundamental uncertainty of today's world.
The implications of how the digital generation responds in traditional learning environments and with current instructional strategies and assumptions are examined against current findings from the social, psychological and neurosciences as to how effective teaching and learning occurs.
This presentation provides a comprehensive profile of 10 core learning attributes of digital learners and 10 core teaching, learning and assessment strategies that can be used to appeal to their digital lifestyle and learning preferences.
Participants will leave the presentation with a clear understanding of the various research-based strategies they need to consider in order to optimize learning for the digital generation in the new digital landscape.
Presentation type: Keynote, breakout, interactive workshop
Theme: Teaching, Learning, Assessment, Future of Schools
Audience: General
Duration: One to three hours
UPDATED SEPTEMBER 2009
In an education system that emphasizes standards and high-stakes tests, is it realistic or even possible to encourage students to think, explore and develop their own understanding? Learn how schools can develop a research-based constructivist model to encourage students to search for understandings - while at the same time still have students excel at the tests. This presentation focuses on a fundamental shift in the basic paradigm of teaching that is required to prepare digital students for the Communication and Information Age. It provides a pragmatic look at current teacher practices and explains why they are becoming increasingly out of synch with our rapidly changing world. It then asks how we can teach effectively in an age when new technologies cascade onto the new digital landscape at an astonishing rate and identifies the principles and processes that transcend these new technologies.
Participants will come away from the presentation with a clear understanding of how to address learning standards and improve test scores to meet both curricular goals, as well as strategies that will prepare students to meet the new realities of the 21st Century. Included is an overview of the 7-layered curriculum model (content, process, tools, school to career, school to community, school to home, and contiguous assessment), the 5A's as well as a variety of inexpensive and free resources that can be used to support the transition to this new model. Participants should come prepared to have many of their present assumptions about education challenged. Counseling will be provided. Co-developed with Ted McCain.
Presentation type: Keynote, breakout session, interactive workshop
Theme: Curriculum Trends
Audience: Leadership and Vision
Duration: One to three hours
UPDATED SEPTEMBER 2009
Thinking About Tomorrow Today
In a world where change is the constant you can't trust your eyes because what you see will be replaced tomorrow. You think your eyes are showing you reality; in fact, they are showing you history. The only way to see the reality of a world on the move is to look for global trends. By carefully examining the significance of several global exponential trends, this presentation profoundly challenges your fundamental assumptions about the world we live and the future that awaits us all.
The presentation begins by examining the culture of TTWWADI (That's The Way We've Always Done It) and considers the role of TTWWADI in our unconscious assumptions about schools and learning. It then explores global exponential trends and considers the effect these trends are having (and will have) on our lives both personally and professionally, and considers how they will affect our children, our learning institutions, the nature of teaching and learning, and even our definition of intelligence.
With this as a context, the presentation then examines how these changes will affect the classroom, the curriculum, learning, instruction, evaluation and assessment. It identifies the shift in curriculum and thinking necessary to equip students for success in the 21st century, and discusses what this signifies for education, specifically in terms of our staff development models.
How can schools prepare students for this ever-changing world? Perhaps by developing an instructional and learning strategy that simultaneously focuses on content and 21st century skills such as critical thinking, problem solving, information and technological fluency, useful failure, project-based learning and metacognitive skills needed to survive in the culture of the 21st Century.
It then examines the big question. How do we effectively engage learners so that they can not only perform exceptionally well on state exams, but also simultaneously learn the critical twenty-first century literacies needed to excel in both school and life?
It then takes a pragmatic look at traditional teaching practices, considers why they are becoming increasingly out of sync with our rapidly changing world, and identifies several principles and processes that transcend the new technologies.
Participants will come away from the presentation with a clear understanding of how to meet both their curricular goals, as well as prepare students to meet the new realities of the 21st Century. Included is an overview of the 7-layered curriculum model (content, process, tools, school to career, school to community, school to home, and contiguous assessment) as well as a variety of resources to support the transition to this new model. Participants should come prepared to have many of their present assumptions about education challenged. Counseling will be provided.
This is truly a twelve aspirin presentation.
Presentation type: Keynote, breakout, interactive workshop
Theme: Change, Technology Trends, Future of Schools
Audience: General
Duration: One to three hours
UPDATED SEPTEMBER 2009
Looking at the Extreme Future
It is said that those who live by the crystal ball shall eat crushed glass. Invariably when futurists make predictions we can be certain of two things. First, in many cases it will take longer than we predict for some things to happen. But conversely, when they happen the impact will be far more pervasive than any of us can imagine.
This presentation is about the extreme future 10, 15, 20 or more years out. This is not a crystal ball, Ouija board future, but an educated and informed look ahead at the good, the bad, the ugly, the scary, the beautiful, the terrifying and the sublime.
Participants will be given an overview of the Extreme Future: the new Energy Age, the new Innovation Economy, the future of globalization, Moore's Law revisited, the new Age of Communication, Biotechnology, Nanotechnology, Neurotechnology, the new workforce, longevity medicine, tomorrow's climate, weird science  and the future of the individual. They will then be asked what the Extreme Future holds for the way we work, the way we play, the way we communicate, the way we learn and the way we view our fellow citizens.
This presentation is not for the faint of heart. Come and get your assumptions about almost everything challenged.
Presentation type: Keynote, breakout, interactive workshop
Theme: Teaching, Learning, Assessment, Future of Schools
Audience: General
Duration: One to five hours
NEW SEPTEMBER 2009
21st Century Fluency For the Digital Age
Powerful technologies and information systems have precipitated a parallel change in the knowledge base. Facts become obsolete faster and knowledge built on these facts becomes less durable. InfoWhelm is causing societies to reorganize their knowledge and breaking down the boundaries between conventional disciplines. This is fundamentally altering the very fabric of our society - affecting the way we work, play, communicate, view our fellow citizens, how we learn, and what's important for us to know. Yet schools in their structure, operation, curriculum, pedagogy and assessment models remain largely the same as they have for decades.
This session outlines exactly what InfoWhelm is and why it's essential that students develop the essential 21st Century Fluency skills needed to operate in the fundamentally different living, working and learning environment of the 21st Century. Being fluent involves learning a transparent, unconscious, internalized process that's as natural as riding a bike. A focus on fluency rather than literacy requires educators to fundamentally rethink current assumptions about teaching, learning and assessment.
It then identifies how Informational, Technological and Media Fluency can be taught in the same structured manner that Mathematics, the Sciences, Social Studies, History and Languages are taught - embedded at every grade level, in every subject area, the responsibility of every teacher throughout the entire school experience.
Presentation type: Keynote, breakout, interactive workshop
Theme: Teaching, Learning, Assessment, Future of Schools
Audience: General
Duration: One to five hours
NEW SEPTEMBER 2009
.EDU meets .COM
As Gutenberg's printing press ignited the Renaissance, today our computers, the Internet, networking and now Google are igniting the Digital Renaissance. Emerging technologies will have a profound effect on the near and distant future of education. Fundamental change will happen whether schools as learning institutions embrace it or not because kids, teachers and parents will be using digital tools and accessing the Internet from home, at night, and outside of the purview of the school. They, rather than our traditions and traditional assumptions about learning and assessment, will ultimately influence the direction of schools and learning.
What happens when the people outside of education who are building information infrastructures start effectively leveraging the immense power of new technologies to deliver instructional opportunities to the digital generation? What will education look like as we make a major shift in the who, what, when, where, why and how of teaching and learning which will be a direct result of the emergence of the Internet as a full-fledged commercial medium? And where is the phenomenon of Google taking us?
This presentation asks participants to reconsider the future of education as we move from Gutenberg to Gates to Google...and beyond. Co-developed with Ted McCain.
Presentation type: Keynote, breakout
Theme: Future Visioning
Audience: General
Duration: One hour
Handout: From Gutenberg to Gates to Google and Beyond
UPDATED SEPTEMBER 2009
(That's the Way We've Always Done It)
It's amazing how we can embrace doing things the way they have always been done without examining where the original decisions came from. We just accept a pre-existing mindset because it's the path of least resistance. For example, the mindset for the structure of our schools is based on decisions that were made in the days of the horse, buggy, kerosene lamp, factory floor, and production line. It's a system in which most students are still released for a few months each summer so that they can harvest the crops based on some European agricultural cycle. This is classic TTWWADI (That's The Way We've Always Done It).
Accepting this pre-existing mindset of what schools look like is easy because they haven't changed that much in a long time. Most educators embrace the entrenched ideas about schools and learning without thinking. However, the world is no longer the stable and predictable place it once was. Technology is fueling an engine of change that is making the world a moving target. What is startling is that the rate of change is picking up speed with each passing day. Radical new developments in technology are having increasingly profound implications for life as we know it. In this environment of change, it is critical that we begin to question the rationale behind TTWWADI in our schools.
This presentation examines the development of our current mindset for what schools look like. It traces the source of many of the foundational assumptions we take for granted in public education. It then looks at some of the key areas of technological development that are putting pressure on schools to change and explore the implications these developments have for what new skills and habits-of-mind we should be emphasizing in our schools to prepare students for life in the 21st century.
We will examine the power of TTWWADI and discuss the difficulties we face in shifting people's ideas to a new vision for schools and learning. Finally, we will suggest a number of ways educators must change in order to keep up with a world on the move, a world that is forcing us to face a fundamental question about the nature of education - are we preparing them for the world of tomorrow, or the farms and factories of yesterday?
Presentation type: Keynote, breakout session, workshop
Theme: Curriculum Trends
Audience: Leadership and Vision
Duration: One to three hours
Handout: New Visions for Teaching and Learning
UPDATED SEPTEMBER 2009
Moving the Educational Debate
In the digital age, why do children continue to be herded into large buildings? Why are subjects fragmented into “periods� lasting from 45 to 60 minutes, regardless of whether the topic is simple or complex? Why are learning activities often unrelated to student interests, purposes and meaning? Why is testing still primarily limited to paper/pencil tests that largely ignore genuine performance? It's time for us to carefully examine the assumptions that underpin schools today and move the educational debate. It's time to reinvent schools and move education to a deeper level.
This presentation examines the real education reform that will not succeed until the adults in charge of education create a new mental model for learning that embraces the future. The answers are already there. But educators need to carefully reconsider how to reinvent teaching, rethink learning, and refocus assessment and evaluation in order to better engage students in the meaningful, complex learning experiences they will need to operate in the new digital landscape.
Presentation type: Keynote, breakout session, workshop
Theme: Curriculum Trends
Audience: Leadership and Vision
Duration: One to three hours
Handout: Moving the Educational Debate
UPDATED SEPTEMBER 2009
15 Ways to Be a Smarter Teacher
Have you noticed that education has become a full contact sport? For example, when is the last time they took something OUT of the curriculum? How do we cope with a world in which teachers are expected to do more and more with less and less? How do we, in the Age of Standards and High Stakes Testing, provide ALL students with the essential skills and knowledge and habits of mind that they will need to survive, let alone thrive in the age characterized by the tyranny of the urgent?
This presentation outlines 15 simple strategies that educators can use to transform the learning experience while at the same time addressing the new emphasis on teacher and administrator accountability.
Presentation type: Keynote, breakout, workshop
Theme: Educational Trends, Leadership and Vision
Audience: General
Duration: One to five hours
Handout: The Future Ain't What It Used To Be
UPDATED SEPTEMBER 2009
