Wizard of Apps or Will they have an app for that or What we are loading (and learning) along the road

[Joyce Valenza]

Hi Everyone,
I hope you enjoyed our keynote. Here are essential questions we might consider in our Saturday discussion, as well as in this forum:

1. How do we define information/media fluency for the 2009/2010 school year and beyond? What does it look like? What IF apps will our learners really need?
2. Introducing new tools is one thing, making powerful connections beyond the walls of our schools is another. How can we scale meaningful collaboration? What strategies work? Which are sustainable?
3. How do we ensure equity? How can we narrow the access gap?
4. What should we expect a student’s academic digital footprint to look like?

Please see the newly attached script!

[JWagner]

Please let your students know HOW MUCH I enjoyed this..............
and look forward to sharing it with my teachers.

The fun you had I think will take the SCARY out of this with my staff.

Truly learned a lot --
Thanks so much
Jennifer

[Roger Nevin]

Great information.

The student production at the start is first class !

[Kevin Hodgson]

These are all critical questions (and anchored with a fun video, too!).

I would not even want to begin to guess what even next year looks like, which makes it ever more critical that the skills we help students with are those that allow them to adapt to any possibilities. We don't want to pigeon-hole our students because that could stick them into a spot where they are not ready to adapt and create with something unknown at this moment in time.

Equity -- Access -- these are so important and so frustrating, although the lowering cost of technology (and the advent of mobile devices) seems to have some promise to address equity for students and teachers in lower-income areas where technology purchases just are not a top priority (and for some, if the infrastructure is falling down, who could blame them for those priorities, really?).

And -- student digital footprints -- full of creativity, exploration and critical thinking, and expansive across a great area of media.

Kevin

[Alex Ambrose]

Joyce,

Thanks for the show. Very entertaining.

4) In my presentation: "Googlios" Dec 18, I will also be exploring a similar idea of this academic digital footprint. The way I see it is, if we give our students a place-a Googlio (next generation e-portfolio) we can safely and educationally give them space to develop, practice, and maintain their web identity.

Alex

[Janice Stearns]

Joyce,
What an wonderful presentation. So much creativity and thought were poured into this!

I think that in order to make the learning meet the needs of our students, students absolutely need to learn to ask questions and then have the ability to find answers to those questions. They need to know how to harness the power of the tools they use every day to connect with others and build meaning.

I wish I could have been at the fireside chat. I'm sure the conversation was rich. Thanks for sharing the script. How in the world did you find time to come up with something like this? Amazing.
Janice