What it all means (week 5 reflection)

I really enjoyed reading the “What It All Means” chapter of Will Richardson’s book this week for class. It helped me wrap my head around a couple of things.  With the increasing amount of information available online and the collaborative nature of content creation, as educators we need to prepare students for their life after school, which includes more than just reading and writing literacy.   

What this means for students:

• Students need to be critical reviewers of the information that they sift through, no longer can they depend on the publishers and editors of the print world to validate the information.
• Students need to understand the ways that they can publish and share their ideas.
• Students need to learn how to manage the heaps of information that they consume everyday; they need to learn to do this safely, efficiently and effectively.
• In the end, if the education system is successful, students can learn how to use the internet’s connectivity to change the world or at least impact it in a positive way.

What this means for educators:

• As educators, we need to help connect students with the content they need, as well as connect them with other knowledgeable experts (and experts can take many, many forms).
• As educators, we need to model the skills that we want our students to learn; we have to coach them. This includes creating our own content and continuing to build our own PLN.
• As educators, we need to use the internet resources to be true collaborators, in order to grow ourselves and provide the best for our students.
• As educators, we need to be a part of the change we want to see.  Embrace technology and take responsibility for our own learning.  Isn’t this what we are preparing our students for?

So, what does that actually mean to me.....?  One of the things that I want to do is create a WIKI (which also happens to be an assignment of ours) to help me organize, collaborate and share the many tools that we’ve learned about in class.  For example, I played around with Voki, Yodio and Screen-o-matic tools to create podcasts/screencasts for the new student management software that our school staff uses.  I want to collect these useful “How To” items in one place and ask my fellow teachers to create their own pod/screencasts to add as they learn about a new feature of the student management software.

Off to create I go!