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=**Teaching and learning with technology in the West Vancouver School District**= = =

Welcome to the wiki page for today's conversation. Hopefully you enjoy the chance to play in one of new tools that are available to all of us through the read / write web. If you would like to have discussions about anything that comes up, please go to the **Discussion Tab** and share ideas / start conversations.

This past fall we began the conversation around our learning portal and how it may help support the dramatic changes that are occuring with how students learn as part of [|our district's] commitment to //Teaching and Learning with Technology//.

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This is a continuation of that conversation.


 * “"Man cannot discover new oceans unless he has the courage to lose sight of the shore." //Andre Gide//
 * "It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent, but the one most responsive to change." //Charles Darwin//
 * "In times of change learners inherit the earth; while the learned find themselves beautifully equipped to deal with a world that no longer exists." //Eric Hoffer//

**The World is Changing** - How Do We Challenge Our Assumptions and Unlearn What We Know

 * //Karl Fisch's "Did You Know" Video has been remixed hundreds of times like this one for [|PE].//

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 * Name this country
 * “The most important thing a student can do today is learn to learn." -- [|Richard Riley], (Former US Sec. of Ed.)
 * [|The World is Flat]helped to start this conversation
 * UNESCO says there will be more "educated people" in the next 30 years than in the sum of human history to date. (Cited in the TED Talks video with Sir Ken Robinson)
 * UNESCO says there will be more "educated people" in the next 30 years than in the sum of human history to date. (Cited in the TED Talks video with Sir Ken Robinson)

The Change: The Read / Write Web - Web 2.0
We have moved from Web 1.0 to the read / write web. We used to accept that the web was somewhere we would go and "surf" for information. Now in the [|Web 2.0] world, we want to collaborate and participate.

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Now, we use the 2.0 term to put on many things. We talk about [|Learning 2.0] and [|School 2.0]. For some it is simply about taking what we have always done, and do it in a digital environment. What is much more exciting is that in the "2.0 Era" we can transform teaching and learning.

There are currently more than [|6900 Web 2.0] applications available. It has to be about more than the tools but also the craft of using them.

Changes Outside of School
While we are talking about these changes in our school system, the changes are going on everywhere


 * **Politics**
 * You can get a [|podcast or videocast] from Stephen Harper
 * .Or you can watch Stephane Dion on [|Liberal TV] Online
 * Or even customize your Federal [|NDP Blog]
 * If provincial politics are more your style both the [|Liberals] and [|New Democrats] have Facebook groups to join (login required)


 * **Media**
 * We can now decide what is news with sites like [|Digg] and even traditional sites like [|CNN] are embracing participation through their [|iReports] and organizing news by [|popularity].
 * Industries like [|music] and [|movies] are wrestling with how to deal with all these changes.


 * **Business**
 * We don't look to the newspaper classified ads or even the Buy and Sell to exchange goods when we can use sites like [|Craigslist] for free.
 * Online shopping shows [|no signs] of slowing, and those retailers without a presence online are facing trouble.
 * Industries from [|books] to [|electronics] to [|travel] have been transformed by the participant driven web.

Challenges For Teachers and Schools
We know there are [|statistics] coming out on a regular basis that students are different than in the past


 * more than 70% of people aged 15 - 34 are actively using social networks online
 * teens aged 12 - 19 spend 25% of their media time on the internet
 * 66% of high school student get their news and information from the internet

The notion of privacy is [|changing] and there seems to be a shift in what we believe about intellectual property and [|copyright] and leading to new definitions like the one that governs this wiki in [|Creative Commons].

We have to help students (and ourselves) new skills of information / digital literacy to function in this world. Students need to know that they can [|track the history] of their sites and that they still need to [|find the owner] of what they read. When we limited students to a few books in the library it was easy, now we have sites like [|this], and [|this], and even [|this] that require a new ability to be critical of all information.

We are [|struggling] how to deal with tools and gadgets that have become appendages for our students and [|the jury is still out] on how to use commercial social networking sites in school. Even when we block sites, students quickly can find ways to [|get around] this if they want.


 * //"The model of pedagogy needs to change to address the needs of a generation who have grown up participating, not just being broadcast to" [|Don Tapscott] (author of [|Growing Up Digital] and [|Wikinomics])//

The Rules Are Changing
We are very used to school happening from 9 - 3 in a building. The rules are changing. The competition is still [|Collingwood] and [|Mulgrave] for our students, but it is also every [|DL] school in our province, and soon the competition will be [|Stanford].

No longer are teachers and schools the keeper of knowledge. Knowledge is available for free everywhere. [|MIT] has made all its courses available for free and [|translated] many of them into other languages through its open learning model. The same is true for many other universities around the world. MIT is also beginning to offer [|high school material] for students and teachers.

Education also exists in a completely virtual world, like in [|Second Life]. Harvard, among other schools, have [|courses] that exist completely within this virtual game.

Blogs are being used by [|administrators], [|teachers], and [|students] to connect to networks of people locally and globally.

To educate such students, we don’t so much need a faculty as we need an intellectual network. The program has a large pool of loosely affiliated faculty members who participate in an ad hoc manner depending on the needs and interests of individual students: Sometimes they may contribute nothing to the program for several years and then get drawn into a research or thesis project that requires their particular expertise. Our students’ thesis advisers come not only from other universities around the world but also from industry; they include Bollywood choreographers, game designers, soap-opera writers, and journalists. We encourage our students to network broadly and draw on the best thinking about their topic, wherever they can find it.[| Henry Jenkins]

Tools That We Are Using to Build Our Networks
We share our lives through social networking sites like [|Facebook] and [|MySpace]. Even younger students have found a [|home] in the social networking world. We share our [|photos] and our [|videos] We share conversations using [|MSN] or [|Skype] or [|Twitter] or. . . . We find ways to share our [|favourite websites] and our research We share our [|notes] from class and we can do it as a [|mindmap] if we want We share our music and our [|podcasts] using a range of audio sharing services. We even construct [|our knowledge] together

It is all about collaboration and participation. Millions of [|people are participating] in the new social networking services.

A New Backpack
For students there is a [|Web 2.0 Backpack] that they can carry around with them, replacing everything from textbooks to calendars to calculators.

**The Prices are Falling**
For many years the cost of students supplying their own laptop, or similar device, has been prohitive. Over the last few years, there have been several projects that are trying to mass-produce devices that retail for not much more than a calculator. The most prolific of these initiatives comes out of MIT, the [|One Laptop per Child Project]. Others are also doing similar things, including the [|Classmate PC] from Intel and the [|Eee PC] from ASUS.

Some of the "Cool" Tools To Impress Your Friends
If you want to snap a picture or record a video of anything on your desktop try [|Jing] You can edit your photos for free with [|Picnik] There are also some interesting online office tools that are great for collaborating like [|this one] from Google and [|this one] from Zoho. If you want simple instructions to use [|RSS] feeds, [|Social Bookmarking], or a number of other tools try [|Commoncraft] Videos. You can now [|convert] any file type to any other file type. Try [|Pageflakes] that let's you stop looking for information, and lets your information come to you. If you have a burning question you can [|Text Google] at 466453 for the answer.

Or

If you are looking for some other videos that challenge our thinking about the current system:

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Or for a more global view of this change, any video or audio cast from the [|TED] series

A Preview of Some of Our New Tools That Are Coming to West Vancouver

 * [|School Connects] will allow all teachers to access their files from home and have greater control over computers in the classroom
 * [|Microsoft Outlook] will replace Lotus Notes for e-mail servie in the district [|Video]
 * [|Microsoft Office 2007] will become the new standard in the district, we won't need to worry about getting versions that don't open
 * [|Sharepoint] Learning Portal will be the common platform for district learning and business
 * [|Scholaris] will allow us to integrate student data in the platform
 * [|BCeSIS] will allow us to "talk" electronically on a province-wide student information system

**If We Are Not Moving Forward We are Falling Behind**

 * We now can do simple things that we never could have done even a decade ago. More importantly, we can tell stories, new stories in ways that have never been possible before. We can use technology to help prepare students not just for 21st century jobs, but also [|21st century citizenship]. How can we see global citizenship in new ways, like [|giving loans] to change lives, sharing our [|digital wealth] with the developing world, or giving a [|gift that grows].

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 * How do we learn to help our students leverage the technologies they are already using instead of have [[image:chriskennedy:images.jpg width="132" height="99" align="right"]]them check them at the door? (Especially when our students can [|get around our efforts anyway].)


 * How do we lead the change? How do we re-envision teaching and learning for a vastly changed world?


 * How do we use technology to help us with the 3 P's (personalization, precision and professional learning communities)?


 * How do we take the new technologies and blend them with what we know about instruction and assessment?


 * If we don't really know what learning / schools will look like in 10 years, where do we start?

Once you leave tonight, please go to the **Discussion Page** at least over the next week to continue the conversation.