by Scott McLeod | Nov 7, 2007 | Leadership and Vision, Miscellaneous, News and Events, Planning and Funding, Reading, Research and Evaluation, Tech Integration |
[cross-posted at the TechLearning blog]
At the SETDA Leadership Summit and Education Forum, we’ve been talking a lot about 21st century skills, so I thought it might be helpful to highlight some of the work that the Partnership for 21st Century Skills has been doing.
The Partnership has been quite busy lately. In October, it announced new poll results that showed that a significant majority of voters ‘are deeply concerned that the United States is not preparing young people with the skills they need to compete in the global economy.’ Here’s an excerpt from the full report:
As I noted on my blog earlier this week, on Monday the Partnership, SETDA, and ISTE released a paper on maximizing the impact of digital technologies for 21st century learning. The document contains examples of successful programs that can be used as models, guiding questions for stakeholders, and action principles for moving forward. Plus there’s also this great (if depressing) quote:
No industry or organization can remain competitive today without making comprehensive use of technology as a matter of course in all of its operations. . . . [E]ducation is the least technology-intensive enterprise in a ranking of technology use among 55 U.S. industry sectors, according to the U.S. Department of Commerce.
Today the Partnership released a new resource, Route 21:
[Route 21] represents the first comprehensive, go-to online resource for high-quality content, best practices, relevant reports, articles and research to assist practitioners in implementing 21st century teaching practices and learning outcomes. Route 21 harnesses Web 2.0 features to allow users to tag, rank, organize, collect and share Route 21 content based on their personal interests. Individuals will continuously update the site with relevant examples as well as share their reactions and insights on implementing 21st century skills in their state, district or school.
You can read the press release, watch the 10–minute video, or dive right into the resources and tagging tools:
Also, for those of you who didn’t know, the Partnership recently updated its famous rainbow framework in order to better highlight essential supporting conditions:
[read more about the framework]
In addition to the resources already described, the Partnership has a number of useful reports, issue briefs, and literacy maps, the latter of which are intended to give some examples of 21st century literacies in practice. Many of the Partnership’s presentations are available online, as are some nifty tools for educators and policymakers.
In short, the Partnership is working hard to help us move our nation’s schools forward. There are numerous helpful resources on the Partnership’s main site and in Route 21. I encourage you to check out what the Partnership has to offer.
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by Scott McLeod | Nov 7, 2007 | Law, Policy, and Ethics, Leadership and Vision, News and Events, Planning and Funding, Tech Integration |
SETDA has been a great conference. I have appreciated the opportunity to network with the people in charge of educational technology for each state department and have had some interesting and powerful conversations about the state of ed tech across the country.
Yesterday I was on discussion panels for most of the day so I couldn’t exactly take notes. I was supposed to be on the 21st century skills panel with Ken Kay and others but was moved at the last minute to the panel on transformative leadership. The best part of that move was the chance to meet and spend time with Chris Lehmann, principal of the Science Leadership Academy in Philadelphia.
Chris is my hero. He’s progressive, he’s smart, he’s enthusiastic, and his school is doing really neat things with its 1:1 laptop initiative for urban kids in Philly. In short, he’s a great model for 21st century building-level leadership. If you want to get a sense of what Chris is all about, listen to his interview with Steve Hargadon and check out his blog, Practical Theory.
Today everyone is heading to “the Hill” to meet with Congressional representatives and their staff about K-12 educational technology funding. Wish ‘em luck.
by Scott McLeod | Nov 6, 2007 | Law, Policy, and Ethics, Leadership and Vision, News and Events, Planning and Funding, Tech Integration |
Notes from the 2007 SETDA Education Forum…
What it takes to compete: Seeing U.S. education through the prism of international comparisons
Prof. Andreas Schleicher
Head, Indicators and Analysis Division
OECD Directorate for Education
- Finland gets 9 applicants for every teaching post because it is considered a profession worth working in
- Jobs in lower skill sectors, and indeed entire sectors of the workplace, are disappearing
- In the 1960s, the U.S. was first in the world re: percentage of persons with high school or equivalent qualifications (ages 25 to 64). Today it is 13th. Within two generations, the educational landscape has changed dramatically.
- College-level graduation rates: U.S. international rank dropped from 2nd to 15th between 1995 and 2005
- By 2015, China will have twice the number of college graduates as the U.S. and EU combined
- PISA – international assessment of what students know and can do – covers 87% of world economy – how well can students extrapolate from what they have learned to novel situations
- U.S. fell below the OECD average when it came to the performance of 15-year-olds to extrapolate and apply in mathematics (dozens of countries were ahead of U.S.)
- Levy and Murnane have analyzed demand for skills between 1960 and 2002
- Demand for routine manual skills has declined
- Demand for nonroutine manual skills has declined steeply
- Demand for routine cognitive skills (that are easy to teach, easy to test, easy to break into small pieces) has declined steeply
- Demand for nonroutine analytic skills has increased sharply
- Demand for nonroutine interactive skills has increased sharply
- Percentage of students at Levels 5 or 6 on PISA has an almost linear relationship to the number of researchers per thousand people
- Money explains about 1/3 of cross-country variation in mathematics performance – U.S. and Italy have expensive education systems but get lower payoff than other countries that spend less but differently
- Best-performing educational systems have both high challenge and strong support systems
- Low challenge and weak support = poor performance and stagnation
- High challenge and weak support = conflict, demoralization
- High challenge and strong support = systemic improvement
- Best-performing educational systems have high ambitions, teacher access to best practice and strong professional development, intelligent accountability and intervention in inverse proportion to success, devolved responsibility so the school is the center of action, integrated educational opportunities, movement from prescribed forms of teaching and assessment toward personalized learning
- Only 12% of variation is across schools: the overall system predicts most of math performance
- “Knowledge poor” profession and national prescription = uninformed prescription, implementation of curricula = U.S.
- “Without data, you are just another person with an opinion.”
A perfect storm
Michael Flanagan, Superintendent of Public Instruction, State of Michigan
- “Can we agree that our kids aren’t going to work in a verb conjugation factory?”
- Michigan is facing a perfect storm: changing global workforce needs combined with declining ability of automobile factory workers to make a decent living (or even a living at all since jobs are being exported)
- Many, many educators said “those kids can’t do Algebra 2”
- Trying to move Michigan from teaching to learning
- Requirement for students to take one online course before graduation is an attempt to jump start the situation, turn pedagogy in another direction
- No longer automatically accrediting teacher education institutions every 5 years; now leaning on universities to change their preparation practices
- Showed the video of Paul Potts to emphasize that there is hidden talent in everyone and that we can bring that out if we choose
by Scott McLeod | Nov 6, 2007 | Law, Policy, and Ethics, Leadership and Vision, News and Events, Planning and Funding, Research and Evaluation, Tech Integration |
SETDA, ISTE, and the Partnership for 21st Century Skills released a document last night called Maximizing the impact: The pivotal role of technology in a 21st century education system.
Take this survey and see how you’re doing on the ‘Guiding Questions for Stakeholders.’ Due date = November 14. I’ll publish the results on November 16.
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by Scott McLeod | Nov 6, 2007 | Law, Policy, and Ethics, Leadership and Vision, News and Events, Planning and Funding, Tech Integration |
Michael Flanagan, the Michigan Superintendent of Public Instruction, won SETDA’s policymaker award tonight. My favorite quote: “Quit using overheads! The bowling alley had them before we did AND they got rid of them before we did!”
Lan Neugent, Virginia’s Assistant Superintendent of Technology, won SETDA’s state leader of the year award. Kudos to them both!
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by Scott McLeod | Nov 5, 2007 | Law, Policy, and Ethics, Leadership and Vision, News and Events, Planning and Funding, Tech Integration |
My presentation today with Mary Mehsikomer from the Minnesota Department of Education went well. I got to talk a lot about CASTLE and what we do and got a few state educational technology directors fired up about focusing on the technology leadership needs of administrators. You can download my presentation (FYI, slide 12 refers to higher education). I am hoping that some interesting opportunities will arise as a result…
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by Scott McLeod | Nov 5, 2007 | Law, Policy, and Ethics, Leadership and Vision, News and Events, Planning and Funding, Tech Integration |
More from SETDA…
Making data user-friendly for classroom teachers
Neal Gibson, Project Manager, Arkansas Longitudinal Data System, Arkansas Department of Education (along with Jim Boardman, Assistant Commissioner, Arkansas Department of Education)
- Dr. Richard Wang, MIT: dimensions of data quality (access is the most important!)
- Intrinsic (accuracy, believability, objectivity, reputation)
- Contextual (value-added, relevancy, timeliness, completeness)
- Representational (amount of data, manipulability, interpretability, ease of understanding, representational consistency, concise representation)
- Accessibility (access, security)
- The goal is to empower teachers, to have them own data rather than just having the data pushed out to them by districts and state departments
- State department is working with Triand to develop and deliver online formative assessments statewide
- The Triand system also allows teachers to upload lesson plans into the system and link them to state standards; other teachers can then search and use the lesson plans
- Neal also talked a bit about data mining with the state’s formative assessment data. Very cool…
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by Scott McLeod | Nov 5, 2007 | Law, Policy, and Ethics, Leadership and Vision, News and Events, Planning and Funding, Tech Integration |
I ran into Dr. Lynn Nolan, Senior Director of Education Leadership, and Dr. Don Knezek, CEO, of ISTE. I only see them about once a year so I talked them into a quick picture!
FYI, these are the two busiest people I know.
by Scott McLeod | Nov 5, 2007 | Law, Policy, and Ethics, Leadership and Vision, News and Events, Planning and Funding, Tech Integration |
I’m live blogging from the SETDA Leadership Summit…
21st century skills
Frances Bradburn, Director of Instructional Technology, North Carolina Department of Public Instruction
- State has signed on to the Partnership for 21st Century Skills framework
- North Carolina requires students to complete a 4–component, performance-based graduation project (research paper, product, portfolio, and oral presentation)
- Students also must pass a computer skills test to graduate
- For licensure, has ‘executive’ standards, not principal / superintendent standards
- Joint Commission on Information Technology was a unified voice advocating for the School Connectivity Project (broadband for every school)
- LOTS of neat stuff going on in the state (Learn and Earn, New Schools Project, Learn and Earn Online, North Carolina Virtual Public School, IMPACT, Literacy to Learn, eBistro, Project K-NECT, Quest Atlantis)
- Many initiatives are facilitated by corporations working hand-in-hand with the state department
- Funding technology facilitators, literacy coaches, E-Rate personnel, and regional engineers
- Frances maintains a blog
Brenda Williams, Executive Director, Office of Instructional Technology, West Virginia Department of Education
- State has signed on to the Partnership for 21st Century Skills framework
- Secured critical policymaker support: Governor, Board of Education, legislature
- Had to show folks that 21st century skills are a little different than the old SCANS skills
- Numerous non-technology-related academic policy initiatives align with technology-oriented initiatives
- 8th grade student technology assessment is aligned with classroom assessment (following the Rick Stiggins philosophy)
- Teach 21
- Think.com
by Scott McLeod | Oct 30, 2007 | International, Law, Policy, and Ethics, Leadership and Vision, News and Events, Planning and Funding, Tech Integration |
The
Wikipedia gap
I don’t know about you, but when I hire someone, or go to the doctor or the
architect or an engineer, I could care less about how good they are at
memorizing or looking up facts. I want them to be great at synthesizing ideas,
the faster and more insightfully, the better.
Please don’t tell me that Wikipedia isn’t a real encyclopedia or one that
can’t be trusted. Perhaps it can’t be trusted if you’re prepping for a
Presidential debate, but it is sure good enough to help me learn what I need to
learn–which is how to quickly take a bunch of facts and turn them into a new
and useful idea.
Here’s what just about every exam ought to be: "Use Firefox to find the
information you need to answer this question:" And as the internet gets smarter,
the questions are going to have to get harder. Which is a good thing.
Until teachers get unstuck, our kids are going to be stuck and so will we.
This
changes everything
This is a story about tools and bravery and marketing.
The tools: when you give a kid a net connection, access to wikipedia and to
the rest of the world, things change fast. Things you wouldn’t necessarily
predict. Like a ten year old who can diagnose his dad’s illness. Or a farmer
that can ask his daughter to find out where to get a new part for the tractor.
Or…
…
The marketing: Everything, even laptops for kids, works its way through the
innovation diffusion curve. That means that most countries, most organizations
and most communities aren’t going to adopt this tool for a few years. It doesn’t
matter if it’s perfect… these things take time. Smart marketing embraces the
curve and doesn’t insist that it must change for this project, right now.
One kid (or five kids) at a time. It’s enough. It’ll happen.
