Name: Dennis
Web Site: http://dennisharter.com/blog
Bio: Dennis Harter is the HS Technology and Learning Coordinator at International School Bangkok. He is in his 17th year as an international school educator in both mathematics and technology. His interests lie in technology, education, leadership, and learning which he writes about at his own blog, Building Understanding (formerly Thinking Allowed.) Twitter:dharter
Posts by Dennis Harter:
Is the term 21st Century out of date?
September 21st, 2009Cross posted at Building Understanding.
It began when Tara and I took on the task of articulating our ISB21 curriculum’s standards and benchmarks. I voiced it in a single tweet:
Okay, some background…
Our task is to ensure that the thorough standards from both ISTE and AASL were completely represented, while remaining true to one of our original tenets:
To be a successful curriculum, one that will truly be part of students’ educational experience, it must be accessible to teachers.
This was very important to Justin and I as we began to develop our ideas and remained important as the whole ISB21 team as each member joined the conversation. Eventually, ISTE and AASL caught up with us and now its a matter of fitting their great work into our original framework. But the premise remains. Past models – the best they could be in their time – generally failed because teachers did not believe it was their job to teach technology.
Now, of course, we realize that technology is merely part of a much bigger conversation about Communication, Collaboration, Innovation, and Thinking. Online conversations, articles, video mash-ups, and tweets emerge constantly extolling the virtues of a 21st Century Curriculum for 21st Century Learners. I know…I’ve posted a lot of them. And we have plenty of credible backing – take ISTE, AASL, Howard Gardner’s Five Minds for the Future, or the IB Learner Profile to name a few. They all tell us what we want our kids to turn out like. They all remind us what we need to value in education.
But we don’t.
At least not in action. (GENERALIZATION ALERT:) Schools continue to push content-driven curricula. Teachers continue to plan lessons building expertise within the discipline. And if students get our “21st Century Skills”, it’s because of an exception-to-the-rule teacher, choices the students make outside of class, or just plain luck.
We all know that what we need is buy-in. We see the success stories, celebrate the schools that do it, and ultimately wonder, what does it take to make it work everywhere? Buy-in.
So back to the teacher accessibility issue.
How do we ensure that teachers see teaching a 21st Century Curriculum as part of their job?
Our way has been to remind teachers that they have ALWAYS valued effective communication, collaboration, innovation, and thinking in their students. Only the media and the degree to which each is possible have changed.
How we communicate, collaborate, innovate, and think IS different. Or rather, it can be different. We still need the ways of the past, but have added ever-changing/growing ways of the present and future. This is the core principle of our 21st Century Skills. They are actually 20th Century skills, maybe even 18th Century skills, only they use and will continue to use 21st Century tools.
So how do we build a real and enduring understanding of this?
Half our problem may be the terminology. On the blogosphere (or is it “in” the blogosphere?), we all know what it means when we say “21st Century”. It comes embedded with all sorts of extra implications, meanings, connotations, and suggestions. We understand it, because we’ve read blog posts that converted us, seen videos that shift our understanding, conversed with global colleagues that re-shape and/or affirm our thinking, and joined 100-comment conversations that engaged us so much that we changed the very way we perceived the world, the learner, and our role in education.
But does everyone else get all that when they hear “21st Century skills”? How could they? They lack our experiences and our scaffolding. Not only does it fail to carry the same perspective-shifting connotation, but at worse, may even send a message of “you neither value how I learned nor how I teach. You are telling me that what I value is not valuable.”
Perhaps that is an extreme view, but it may not be far from the truth. In our efforts to spread the gospel, we do our best to explain the significance, but if we want buy-in, let’s remember our audience. Let’s tap into what our educators already buy into. They are professional, care about kids, and want their students to succeed. They understand and value good communication, critical thinking, and collaboration.
Don’t put them off with catch phrases and “excluding” words. (why do we do that , by the way…blog, wiki, tweet, glog, vlog, apps…are we trying to confuse everyone?)
Instead, remind them, it’s about adapting what they already value to a world that requires new ways to do them. Remind yourselves that your teachers have ALWAYS been trying to prepare their students to succeed in the world they will live in. And then collaborate with them on how that world has changed.
As for what we call it instead. I’m open to suggestions.
Stay tuned.
Image, Future or Bust, by Vermin Inc
Image, Into the future but now without the past, by janusz l
Some cool little PC Apps
April 3rd, 2009Having ended my blogging relationship with Edublogs – who I loved and still appreciate – I have not blogged in a while. I publicly broke up with edublogs in my post, “It’s not you, it’s me.” Jeff & Kim suggested I blog the few ideas I have here…thus saving me the embarrassment of the blogging equivalent of drunk dialing were I to post there again.
One of these days I am going to move my blog over to a domain that makes more sense, but I have contributed little to deserve a mention on this blog, so it’s about time I carry some load.
I’ll start slow. No big thoughts here.
I don’t know how many of you out there are Mac Users, but in my work life, I am surrounded by them…I am a lone PC ranger in a sea of Mac Tontos. (Disclaimer: my home computer’s a Mac. Shhhh).
In my time with the PC I’ve found some nice little applications over the past few years. Thought I’d share.
RocketDock – Jealous of the Dock that Mac users get? This works just the same…with lots of looks to match your wallpaper. I like it because I can only put a few key applications in the Quick Launch thus saving room for lots of open windows.
Outlook on the Desktop – If you use the calendar or need to keep an eye on your Outlook email regularly, this one is handy because it shows the screen of your choice from Outlook, embedded in your desktop. I use this to show my calendar constantly so that I don’t forget appointments and have constant reminders of how my week plays out. You can even enter new events right in this view, without opening Outlook. It’s become a must for me and many I know who schedule a lot of meetings (now if it’d only go to the meetings for me too!).
Auto Hotkey – This one is a recent find. Long story short: Laptop goes from work to home every day/night and every time I turn it on in the new venue, I have to open both IE and Firefox, do a bunch of clicks just to turn on and off the proxy settings. Any of you do this every day? Repetitive actions…aren’t computers supposed to be good at this? AutoHotkey allows me to “record” a bunch of actions related to an application. It essentially records by x,y coordinates, my mouse clicks. I can then save these recordings and now I just double click the icon on my desktop and marvel at how fast it does all my clicks for me. Nice.
Here’s a video of it in action…clicks are in real time thanks to Auto Hotkey.
That’s it for now…
Care to share any other little apps that you love?
The death of input devices
December 16th, 2008Maybe that’s an exageration of a title, but a recent study by the Pew Internet and American Life folks predicts the end of the keyboard as soon as 2012 (entire PDF report here). This announcement came within days from a similar proclamation for the death of the mouse, from Steve Prentice, vice president and fellow at Gartner, a market-research firm based in Stamford, Conn.
Photo by Maurício Alcântara
Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs License
The end of the “traditional” input devices (we all remember our first lessons in computers) comes on the heels of the development of voice recognition, touch screens, and motion sensors like in the iPhone and Wii remote.
Have we truly reached an immersed computer world when our speech and touch run the computers?
Now, how much longer for the flying cars?
Photo by eqqman
Attribution-NonCommercial License
Wordle – DIY Word Clouds
September 3rd, 2008My first contribution to the UTechTips site! Firstly, let me say that it’s a great privilege to be working alongside Jeff this year. More than that, it’s just plain fun.
On to the Tips…
Apparently, I am very late on the bus with this particular tool (thanks Jenny and NZChrissy for pointing that out).
However, I looked at whether it had been covered on UTechTips and I think that often with Web 2.0 tools, we find that we are bringing in new readers in our faculty ALL THE TIME. So how do they go back and discover new tools or read some of the great posts of our past? I wonder how many teachers would jump on board were they now to read early Will Richardson or past Warlick. How many past Thinking Stick posts are still meaningful to new adopters? If they are keen to collaborate, shouldn’t they be reading old Always Learning posts. (or is this all just shameless plugging?)
Anyway, again, back to the tips.
A simple site that creates word clouds (like tag clouds) from text that you submit, either by pasting it in or by submitting a web address (URL).
Imagine an in-class visualization of how certain news agencies cover the news. How would a word cloud of CNN differ from one of BBC for example? What words would stand out?
Imagine pasting in a chapter or more of a piece of literature. Visually and textually, how would Pride and Prejudice look? Find out.
What would a student’s own essay look like?
We have often argued that Visual Literacy is at the core of a successful 21st Century Learner. In a world saturated by visual representation, here’s a great tool to expose students to some.
And imagine the discussion that will occur as classmates argue the merit of the cloud and the “worth” of the words that were selected as descriptors.
Do they convey the message of the author?
How do they change or support the way you thought about what you read before you saw the cloud?
What words stand out to you? Why would that be different to my own?
For fun, I “clouded” a graduation speech I gave years ago.
Cool.
More powerfully, here’s Martin Luther King Jr’s “I Have a Dream” speech.
Give it a try.
Images created using Wordle
