Vision-ary Committee

Interesting new video from Cool Cat blogger Vicki Davis:

I can see details of Daniel Pink’s book Whole New Mind playing out when I read this article in today’s New York Times about amateur video creators being paid for the popularity of their videos.

A number of video sites now pay contributors if their video ends up getting viewed a certain number of times.  

I particularly am thinking about Pink’s comments about the importance of design as a 21st century ability.

Today several of us attended a business fair at the University of Texas, put on by Linda Cleveland’s business class.

Students had to research an invention, be sure it wasn’t patented, create a template and business plan, and create a marketing booth to sell the product at the business fair.  Some of our students from Vicky Abney’s business class were the judges along with other judges.

Some of the inventions presented by the U.T. students  included smart clothing, a smart grocery cart that could tell you what prices were and total what was in your basket, and a gps system that notified your car of available parking spaces nearby.   Two other groups had Ipod devices, including I Tooth which sent bluetooth signals to another Ipod, and IBike which had speakers embedded in the bicycle handles.  Several of the students were trying to work with engineers to actually create these products.

This assignment is a great example of project based learning which we talked about in our meeting on Wednesday, so I wanted to share it!  (It’s also a great example of how we can connect with university students, by having our students attend events like this).

We’ve been focusing our efforts on imagining the future graduate for several months now.

In his blog, Weblogg-ed, which I was reading this evening, Will Richardson referred readers to Karl Fisch’s blog at Arapahoe High School in Colorado where they are pondering the same thing.  Karl Fisch created the following video describing his vision of the graduate of 2020.

It’s a thought-provoking 15 minute view of a fantastical and yet imaginable future.

http://thefischbowl.blogspot.com/  (see the November 27th post for more commentary after you watch the video below or for a link to the video)

What a great idea–to just brainstorm some “future worlds” our students may be living in!  

Any ideas or comments about your own 2020 vision?

Carolyn

My thoughts were here that we can brainstorm some ways to help better support teachers as they are learning new technologies.  Obviously a few of us cannot do it all ourselves, but can we think of some creative, ingenious or systematic processes to help us all as new “tools” come into play?

I just participated in the K12 Online conference, which was the first education conference held entirely online.    Although frankly I think teachers prefer more face-to-face trainings, I found it really interesting.  Each session was posted online as a video or powerpoint or screencast, and you could pick and choose among sessions.  Plus, each session is saved so if you didn’t have time to view it during the two weeks of the “conference,” it is still there to read later.

I participated in some online discussions that were held during the conference about helping teachers incorporate some of the new web 2.0 technologies into their classrooms.   Joel and I have started a weekly workshop and are sharing things on our blogs.

I have had several teachers request more face-to-face time.  How can we facilitate that–any ideas?   Should we talk to the Staff Development Committee?  (I’ve joined that to help be a liason if we need one).

 Any comments, ideas, etc?

Welcome to our blog!   The purpose is to allow us a space to brainstorm ideas, share websites of interest to our committee, organize our thoughts and to bounce ideas off of one another.

 Let’s get started!

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