#ISTE10 TakeAways Part 2: A New Passion Full of Lessons...

The next session was presented by another person I follow on Twitter, @dwarlick on Cracking the Native Information Experience. Several points stuck with when I left this session. He spoke about the fact that our students live in a social networking, gamer, and hyper-connected world. How can we crack the code and teach the way they want to receive information? How can we change the paradigm of kid-think being “how many pages does it have to be?” to “What do I need to show so that it is evident that I have mastered the concept?” How can education encourage kids to ask questions? Blogging and using video games let them be the creators of their knowledge. Video games with no directions interest students so much that they will spend hours trying to figure out the objective. Do we encourage risk-taking in our kids and encourage them to learn through their mistakes? Don’t chop our kids’ tentacles off when they come to school …Lesson #3!

@reneehobbs gave me a great deal to think about at the session on Copyright and Clarity and Fair Use. I created a presentation for my students last year on Digital Citizenship, and was unaware that I had tapped into her resources already, but they provide a wealth of info for all educators. The message I heard loud and clear from this session is know what transformative use is and how it falls under Fair Use! How interesting it was for the US Library of Congress to decide jailbreaking of the iPhone and mixing video as Fair Use! If your information adds value or repurposes old information then it is transformative use…Lesson #4!

The next session I attended was a Panel discussion on 1:1 Learning—an Update on Mobile Learning Programs in K-12 Schools today. Three schools presented on how they implemented a 1:1 environment and the issues they faced. Most people expressed the fear that the mobile learning devices (MLDs) would come up missing, and everyone was pleasantly surprised to see that the students valued the tools so much that they brought them every day—if not they knew they would have to use paper and pencil to complete tasks with which they normally used the MLD. One school in particular had a great story to share. The school was very old and had difficulty even having two overhead projectors on at a time on a given floor. So with the given infrastructure concerns, there was no possibility of charging a mobile laptop lab let alone have a 1:1 environment. The district decided to work with Verizon and each student received a smartphone that they could then take home to charge at night! Kids brought them back every day as these MLDs are a motivating technology tool for the classroom…Lesson #5!



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