This page contains resources from my sessions at the 2014 Virginia ASCD Annual Conference in Williamsburg, Virginia. These materials are made available under a Creative Commons attribution-share alike 4.0 international license, which means that you are both allowed and encouraged to use them! Please contact me if you have any other questions about these resources.

December 4, 2014

Moving toward better tech integration

• Session agenda

Student empowerment: Yes, at school!

• OUR BACKCHANNEL

Part 1: Youth out of school

• Scott’s slides
• 3 big shifts, 8 building blocks, and some guiding questions

Part 2: Youth in school

• Scott’s slides
• More of this, please [VIDEO]
• Why we should care about student empowerment
  • Autonomy / self-actualization
  • Kids are bored out of their skulls
  • The declining economic value of routine cognitive work
    • Google app / Siri, PhotoMath, etc.
• Model schools / networks

Part 3: Some ways to get there

• Genius hour / 20% time / passion projects
• J-term / May term
• Makerspaces / maker faires
• Short-term pilots
  • 4 negotiables of student-centered learning
  • PBL projects, Chesterfield County
• Small shifts / easy wins / plant seeds and grow them
  • trudacot
• From ‘yes, but’ to ‘how can we?’ and ‘why not?’
• How NOT to get there
  • Time, place, path, or pace
  • Battling over the meaning of ‘personalization’
  • Personalization v. individualization v. differentiation

Part 4: Where we’re stuck

• Lack of faith or understanding
  • Do students need to learn lower-level factual and procedural knowledge before they can do higher-order thinking?
  • Deeper learning (Hewlett Foundation)
    • Yes, it works [RESEARCH]
    • DeeperLearning4All
  • Struggling with educators’ lack of technology fluency
• Control, fear, inertia
  • Our technology messages are important
  • Which vision are you selling?
• Implicit assumptions / mindsets
• Joy, trust, autonomy, courage, openness, connectedness
  • Teachers need these too
• Typical technology usage
• Replication or empowerment?
• The magic formula for technology failure?
• From ‘yes, but’ to ‘how can we?’ and ‘why not?’

Part 5: Wrap-up

• We’ve got no time, no time…
• 10X thinking / Moonshot thinking [VIDEO]
• Engagement is an outcome of students doing meaningful work
• Schools need vigor, not rigor
• Don’t be the lid [VIDEO]
  • Monkeys, flea jars, crab buckets, and educational risk-taking
• Scott’s slides

Free!

1. Supporting effective technology integration and implementation [BOOK CHAPTER]
2. What’s the biggest ‘game changer’ in education?
3. From fear to empowerment (VIDEO; TEDxDesMoines)
4. Education in a digital world (VIDEO; AEA 267)
5. Iowa, Did You Know? (VIDEO; there’s also a facilitator’s guide)
6. Are schools dangerously irrelevant? (VIDEO; TEDxASB)
7. 27 Internet safety talking points / Rethinking AUPs / Filtering and blocking
8. If we were really serious about educational technology
9. We can’t let educators off the hook
10. Our technology messages are important
11. Some awesome PowerPoint slides
12. Online stopwatch (or see Time Timer software)