Transforming+Teachers,+Transformed+Students

Change is never easy. It is said that it is impossible to change someone else, and extremely difficult to change oneself. But it can be done with hard work and determination. Yet, as educators, we are asked to make substantial changes, to help our students progress from one year to the next, and during that time to help them master concepts and content, develop and refine skills in order to succeed in life, and more immediately achieve a level on the standardized tests upon which our school's success is measured by the Board of Education. School districts around the country, including our own, grappling with methodology and the challenge of a rapidly changing informational landscape, offer professional development to assist their teachers, and many of these focus on how to integrate technology into the curriculum.

The following video, Pay Attention, was "created by Darren Draper in an effort to motivate teachers to more effectively use technology in their teaching." It was presented by Utah's largest school district, the Jordan School District.

Besides this video that challenges teachers to be change agents, the web sites Technology Integration and Game Theory Application and Digital Game Based Learning, provides a mine of valuable resources. Please take a few minutes to watch the video and reflect on what you can do to transform your teaching.


 * PAY ATTENTION**

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It is important to be able to communicate with the [|digital natives] in their own language. If you are a teacher, you need to be cognizant of this. This video was created by Michael Wesch, Assistant Professor of Cultural Anthropology, and his students at Kansas State University. Students, too, have been transformed by how they retrieve information and what they do with it. In the video, we see that there is a gap between the new and the old, and the methods used to bridge the gap: //The Machine Is Us/ing Us// After watching this, consider some ways that you might bridge the gap.

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Think about the technological changes that have occurred since you wrote your first paper using a word processing program and sent your first email. Then watch this speculative vision of the future.

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**Ken Robinson** says schools kill creativity
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Using **Critical Thinking** we are able to evaluate information and our own thoughts in a disciplined way. Critical Thinking helps us refine our thought processes so we can think and assess information in a more comprehensive manner and are better able to identify and reject false ideas and ideologies. See the 5:13 presentation below:

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Jesse Schell, a former creative director at Disney Imagineering Virtual Reality Studio, had a great presentation at the February DICE 2010 conference in which he talked about the rise of social gaming and [|what we can learn from it], which is presented below.

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The Flipped Classroom

 * Top Ten Sites for a Flipped Classroom**

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 * This page, one of many I've created (see the links in the left hand margin) has been developed at the Wikispaces web site. They offer a free [|wikispaces] account for teachers, for which they remove all ads. The account for non-teachers is also free, but it includes ads.**