digital+students-analog+schools

=**Digital Kids. Analog Schools**=

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 * Here are some choice quotes from the video:**
 * //We have all this access to technology - something that can help us learn better - something that can help us personalize learning - and professors don't really seem to get that.//
 * The workforce is ... moving more towards a creative side. We're not preparing students with skills that are necessary for these new kinds of jobs that we have.
 * //The jobs that colleges are preparing us for are jobs that are being outsourced.//
 * //Anywhere you go outside of the classroom, that technology is being used... and I don't understand why we're not applying it to class.//
 * It seems like in order to progress in the world you need a document that says you've learned, regardless if you've really learned the skills that you need in the workplace.
 * //If your sole purpose is just to prepare them for the future, then you have to go outside and see what the future's going to be.//
 * //If this place isn't perfecting my skills for the new business world, then why am I here?//


 * //A few quotes to spark some conversation…//**

We desperately need. . . we may not survive without. . . a generation of young people who are imaginative, inventive, fearless learners, and compassionate leaders. Yet, what can we say, as educators, about the students we are producing? We can prove that they can read, do basic math on paper, and they are able to sit for hours filling in bubble sheets. No generation in history has ever been so thoroughly prepared for the industrial age. http://davidwarlick.com/2cents/2006/02/16/happy-birthday-jude/

I’m getting tired of hearing people continue to ask for the evidence that technology helps students learn. It doesn’t matter. We know that good teachers help students learn. We need technology in every classroom and in every student and teacher’s hand, because it is the pen and paper of our time, and it is the lens through which we experience much of our world. http://davidwarlick.com/2cents/2006/05/22/curriculum-is-dead/

As educators, we are not grasping (or prepared for) the depth of the change that is occurring under our feet. If it's happened (breaking apart the center) in every other industry - movies, music, software, business - what makes us think that our educational structures are immune? And what does it mean to us? What should we be doing now to prepare our institutions? Ourselves? Our learners? We should all be thinking about that. http://www.weblogg-ed.com/2006/03/07#a4796

While we teach whatever we teach at school, the kids go home and learn the skills they need to survive and prosper in an interconnected global economy. Incrementally changing our teaching methods, slowly bringing people up to speed. . . worked fine when ideas of literacy and education were not rapidly changing; but they are. We need to be able to leapfrog in our understandings, in our methods, and in our tools, allowing us to move to where the kids are. If we do not become leaders to our students, we will be followers, seen as irrelevant, and left to cry in our books while the kids are off setting the agenda. http://remoteaccess.typepad.com/remote_access/2005/11/educational_lea.html

The kids who start school today will be retiring in the year 2065, and yet we know as little about what the world will look like then as we do five years from now. We can give them all the content we want, but in this age, in won’t make much difference if we don’t teach them how to learn first. And they do that not by spitting back at us what they “know.” They do it by being creative, by trying and failing, by succeeding and reflecting. A couple of more notches in the school is irrelevant belt. http://weblogg-ed.com/2006/learning-to-learn-2/

The academic world is incrementalist by nature and. . . this has worked (such as it has) because the underlying structures and assumptions for and by educators have remained the same. . . . Things are no longer the same - technology and students. . . are changing at rates never seen before. . . . A revolution is happening outside of our control, in our student population, and there will be a tipping point in this process when the academy finds itself wholly inadequate and unsuitable to those they presume to serve. . . and no time to patch their outmoded mechanisms.

No one jumps a 20 foot chasm in two 10 foot jumps. http://remoteaccess.typepad.com/remote_access/2006/06/literacy_as_bat.html (see Guhlin comment)

Our kids are connected. Technology is part of their lives. But. . . . it’s not technology, it’s information. These gadgets are their links to information. These gadgets represent intellectual appendages to our children. They are the hands and feet that carry children to new experiences, and cutting these links is like cutting an appendage - and that makes no constructive sense to these children and their world view. Yet we try to cut it off. http://davidwarlick.com/2cents/2005/08/24/our-schools-are-leaking/

One of our problems has been that we have tried to shape the technology around outdated notions of what schooling is about, rather than reshaping our notions to reflect new world conditions. . . . In a rapidly changing world, it becomes much less valuable to be able to memorize the answer, and much more valuable to be able to find and even invent the answers. . . . We can’t keep up with making the technology the curriculum. All we can do is prepare our students to teach themselves. It’s the only way to keep up. http://davidwarlick.com/2cents/2005/12/16/so-whats-different-some-answers/

Information, to [my son], is never finished. It’s just a raw material with which he can make something new. It is important, I believe, that we look at curriculum the same way, that it is a raw material, something that we can mix in different ways, and produce learning experiences that help our students to teach themselves. I think it may also be interesting and valuable to treat our students and ourselves the same way. That rather than graduating finished students, who are ready for the world, that we produce people who are raw material, capable of not only adapting to a rapidly changing world, but also able to continue to learn, unlearn, and relearn, so that they can shape that world into something that is better. http://davidwarlick.com/2cents/2006/03/07/finished-products-are-no-more/

Should we be asking What should we reasonably expect our education system to achieve in the next ten years? or should we ask What should today’s children reasonably expect from our education system over the next ten years? I think that our children have every reason to expect a lot more. http://davidwarlick.com/2cents/2006/01/11/asking-the-right-questions/

When we can not clearly predict our children’s future, it becomes much less important what they are learning, and much more important how they are learning it, and what they are doing with it. Guhlin said that the practices of innovative teachers are considered “untried and untrue because they don’t connect with the traditional environment of school.” I think that the real story is that our schools are not connecting to (relevant to) their own goals, preparing children for their future.

It’s the demands of. . . society and our children’s future that need to be made into a story, and then told in compelling ways back to the community (and to communities of teachers). It requires that we observe, speculate, converse, and construct a compelling story that clearly defines what children need to be learning, and how they need to be learning it, and in what kinds of classrooms (or not) it should be happening in. That story has to connect to a marketplace, to deeply held values, and it needs to be something that we can point to and say, “Isn’t that the kind of education your children deserve?” http://davidwarlick.com/2cents/2006/03/19/reactions-to-podcast-40-redefining-telling-the-new-story/