The New York Times SCHOOLS FOR TOMORROW CONFERENCE

On September 13^th, 2012 I attended the New York Times Schools for Tomorrow Conference-Building a Better Teacher in New York City.

The list of speakers included the Times Op-Ed columnists David Brooks, Bill Keller, and Nick Kristof. Speakers, such as Stanford professor Linda Darling-Hammond, Aneesh Chopra the former Chief Technology Officer for United States under President Obama, Lori Breslow, Director, Teaching and Learning Laboratory, MIT, and Daniel Russell, Uber Tech Lead, Search Quality and User Happiness, Google.

For a complete list of the speakers go to: http://nytschoolsfortomorrow.com/speakers.php

The conference opened with a panel about the importance of raising the low social status of teaching. Linda Darling-Hammond stated that students have a romantic notion of teaching until they actually do it. The American system of how we train and mentor teachers is in the dark ages.

The Chicago teacher’s strike was addressed, and the issues surrounding teacher evaluation based on students test scores was discussed.

Darling-Hammond also made some simple yet important points. Teachers need time to learn from one another, and to learn together. Teachers need time to plan, think and develop curriculum. Technology was one of the major conversations at the conference.

 Vivek Wadwa, Vice President of Academics and Innovation, Singularity University, made the point that technology has changed the entire educational paradigm. He went on to introduce Jim Coulter, the co-founder of the private equity fund TPG Capital who spoke about the Top Ten Technological Evolutions in Education.  Too see his talk go to:

http://www.livestream.com/nytschoolsfortomorrow/video?clipId=pla_f5879bc8-7e85-435c-be01-17737bd28c6b

1. Education needs to be more adaptive moving from a rigid model to adaptive model.
2. We need to teach technology--curation, search, digital health
3. Evolution of the units in education, different ideation of segmenting learning, Textbooks can be adapted quickly in the digital world. Semesters are no longer meaningful-just look at Coursera.
4. Classroom and student management will change, paper planners versus cloud based knowledge regarding student relationship management.
5. New concept of classrooms and study groups, 20 to 200 person lectures versus 100,000 people enrolled in an online class. Social Media helps support study groups. (Twitter etc.)
6. Crowd sourced approval, content will be approved through teacher based feedback rather than government approval
7. We need to learn from other countries national policies; Korea, Singapore etc. have been very effective in developing policy. We must learn from them. They have a vast infrastructure in the schools.
8. The role of the teacher will change from Sage on the stage versus guide on the side.
9. We need to move towards learning paths; the concept of 7^th grade math is absurd. The Khan Academy model
10. We have to Wi-Fi schools-we are moving to mobile learning-it is all about tablets and mobile phones.

In closing, Coulter stated: “Technology can fundamentally change the student-teacher relationship in a very positive way. It is happening now, and we have to get behind it”.

Welcome to the new Academic Year!

Reflect/Tech

Welcome to the new Academic Year!

To kick off the new Academic Year and celebrate Art and Design’s new technology initiative this first blog post will focus on ways to dip your toes into the digital waters.

Lets start with three simple ways to introduce yourself to the world of social media and education. Social media has become increasingly important in education, but what does that mean? The best way to find out is to start exploring for yourself by focusing on your own professional development.

1.    Start a Twitter Account

     Forget all your preconceptions about twitter. It is not all about what I had for lunch.  Twitter is a major force in education these days. Educators connect to each other and follow each other on twitter.

Sign up for Twitter and create an account.

Once you create an account, you can start to follow a few educators (I recommend three to start, an easy number).  Some great educators that I follow are: John Seely Brown (@jseelybrown), Clay Shirky (@cshirky), Howard Rheingold (@hrheingold) and danah boyd (@zephoria). You don’t even need to tweet yourself to start with, but I am sure you will soon want to join in the conversation.

2.    Read Blogs

If you are looking to read more than 140 character about different topics, you will have to read blogs. Blogs are basically web-based online diaries. They are usually organized chronologically, and are composed of a mixture of text and images. They are generally used to document and share hobbies, passions, foods etc. Some of my favorite blogs are:

www.designsponge.com

www.thesartorialist.com

www.thestylerookie.com

www.zephoria.org

www.socialmediacollective.com

www.culturedigitally.com

www.readwriteweb.com

www.mashable.com

www.davidlebovitz.com

These are a mixture of education, design, technology and one favorite food one.

3.    Write a Blog

Blogs are a great way to get into digital conversation. Blogs are helpful in reflecting on your teaching practice, and share your ideas. There are many blogging platforms out there, some of the better known ones are wordpress, blogger, edublog and tumblr—which is a more image-based platform.

Blogs can also be useful as a classroom tool, my students blog about their experiences working in a company. By blogging they are able to share their experiences not just with me, but with their classmates.

Conclusion

Twitter and blogs are a great way to join the digital conversation. Enjoy!

Follow me @slmarkusnyc (twitter)

http://reflect-tech.blogspot.com (blog)

La Langue Du Jour

I realize that I have not written on my blog recently, mostly because I spend all my time in front of a screen learning how to write code.Until this year, I had never though much about programming—I used a computer all the time, but never thought about how this all worked.

Being in the instructional technology and media program at TC, two semesters of programming are required—I chose flash action script—primarily because I am familiar with other adobe programs, and consider myself a visual person. Over the course of the last year I have struggled to learn code, and probably spent more time programming than I ever imagined possible. In the last week, I have had a breakthrough—I am becoming a programmer! I can build an interactive website and understand the power of the code to do that. I have become so interested in programming that I began to look around for other opportunities to learn code, preferably online. Websites that cater to learning various programming languages; JavaScript, ruby, HTML or building websites are exploding. Many educators believe that to understand how to program is an essential 21^st century skill. Doug Ruskoff, in his book, Program or be Programmed states: “The real question is, do we direct technology, or do we let ourselves be directed by it and those who have mastered it?”

I signed up for Codeacademy, which offers free online tutorings about JavaScript. The lessons are interactive, fun and offer rewards (badges) for learning achievement. This is really my first experience with trying to learn online. I have never taken an online class and am curious about my success with self-directed learning.

Two Stanford instructors started a company called Udacity, where more than 160,000 students signed up to learn online. Another interesting company is Treehouse (teamtreehouse.com) advertises, “What do you want to learn today?”

I was also very interested in Girl Develop It—“Teaching women how to code!”

There are so many new sites to learn to program: Code Racer, Women Who Code, Rails for Zombies and CoderDojo among others.

If Major Michael Bloomberg can make a New Year’s resolution to learn how to code so can I!