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Tuesday, March 21, 2006

If this is the vision how do we evangelize others

There is an interesting disscussion going on regarding the "new story" on David Warlick's blog. It covers alot of interesting territotry about what is at the heart of what we are doing. I resonate with a great deal of what is said including the concepts that it is more about instruction and learning, and relationships and connections than it is about blogs, computers or podcasts.

Right now for my purposes though the clarification of vision/mission is important. Below is a shortened and slightly edited version of David's conclusion that i think form the nucleus of the importnat message.
  • In this time there is a new notions of the basic information skills — literacy,
  • The student future ecconomic activities will be based far more on their inventiveness, than their ability to perform tasks and retain knowledge
  • Children who are adept at technology, but who desperately need us to teach them how to work the information.

I can write about this or talk about it but how do we communicate it in an experiential way to our stakeholders- teachers, parents...other administrators?

3 comments:

Developer said...

Barbara,

Your stories need to be about the market place (rapidly changing), our deeply held values (our children), and they need to be something that we can model (point to relevant classroom activities).

If I were a school administrator, I would work with selected educators to craft some talking point, and to figure out how to share them as stories (short and long) ("did you know that...?"). And then, at each faculty meeting, as folks who they've told their stories to, what were the reactions, how sould we recraft the stories, and lets tell them more times to more people.

Open house is a good time to tell them. Parent conferences. Around the bridge table, and on the golf course. Just about any where and any time, we have to repaint what, how, and why our children should be learning.

Enough, you know all this. Just wanted ton contribute in some small way.

Barbara Barreda K-8 Administrator, Tech integration advocate, Going 1:1 with netbooks said...

Thank your for the comments David. The stories of the market place seem pretty clear-almost intuitive. The needs of the children can be elusive but working in a multiculutural school there is a lot of scholarly work about the importants of equal acess. I think the whole "my space" issue also talks volumes to the need for good instruction on the importance of "digital citizenship" and real world job related applications of blogs, forums etc. (Am I understanding you correctly re. the first two ideas)
As for stories of relevant classroom activities... well...For the present, the only stories I have to share are my own experiences of blogging and the stories I find from reading the other blogs. I wonder if in the beginning stages after one shares their own enthusiasm if the best evangelizer and teacher is first hand experience. To that end I am taking several of our staff to NECC in San Diego this summer and I am going to go into the 8th grade and start them on some scribe style blogs so the teachers can see them in action.

Anonymous said...

We want to make a new technology based elementary school in our district. We already have Smart boards and cmoputers and the internet. What else we need to make it really cool and make kids wanna come learn the ways of technology.

please reply in the next 10 mins