#GoogleDocs: Suggesting Mode & Ideas for Using it in Learning

If you are familiar with Google Docs, you know that you can share documents with collaborators and that multiple people can edit a document at the same time. (If you aren't familiar with sharing and collaborating on documents, watch this well-done tutorial from GCF Learn Free.)

Sometimes, though, you just want to get input on something you've written or have a peer check it over for spelling, grammar, and punctuation mistakes. If you share your Google Doc in the usual way with full editing rights, your editor can wind up changing your original work to an extent that it's hard for you to tell why changes were made or even what changes were made. You could use revision history, but that can be tedious if a lot of edits were made.

Using Suggesting Mode

To get input on a Google Doc you own while retaining ultimate control of the edits, you can use Suggesting Mode. The key to using Suggesting Mode is to share the document with Can Comment rights instead of Can Edit rights.  The demonstration I put together below shows how to share the document as well as how Suggesting Mode works.

As part of the tutorial, I also elaborate on the following uses of Suggesting Mode in the classroom:

• Editing practice: General editing or focus on frequent mistakes you’re seeing in student writing
• Peer editing: essays, lab write-ups, history research, descriptions of math processes
• Teacher/student writing conferences
• To learn or review material: Provide students with inaccurate notes or information in a Google Doc and have them Fact Check and correct it using suggesting mode. 
• The Fact Check idea was sparked by this Edutopia article on alternative note taking strategies: https://goo.gl/1Dh1T3 

I hope the demonstration below is helpful. If you think of more ways to use suggesting mode in teaching and learning, please share them in the comments below.

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All original work in this post by Sandy Kendell is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0). Please see specifics on my re-use policy before re-posting/re-using any of my blog content.

Nurturing the Neglected C (Communication) - #TCEA17

Nurturing the Neglected C (Communication)
Lisa Johnson
Eanes ISD

Check out Lisa's book Cultivating Communication in the Classroom: Future-Ready Skills for Secondary Students.

• Pinterest boards for Lisa's research on her book will be posted at www.pinterest.com/techchef4u. 

Email Etiquette:

• How has email changed since you were in school?
• Why is email important?
• What can we do to teach email etiquette to our students?

Email Tips:

• Draft it, then revise it. Bullet it to make it more readable/understandable.
• If you have to go back & forth more than a couple of times via email, it might be time to pick up the phone!
• Lisa is a campus tech specialist. She puts a tear-sheet on her door when she's out of her office with tear strips with her email address on it in case students or teachers come by and need to contact her.

Positive Interdependence:

• How has collaboration changed since you were in school?
• Why is collaboration important?
• What can we do to teach collaboration to our students?

Positive Interdependence Tips:

• Give students a personality/learning types test before putting them into groups
• Discuss this with students and then have them think about what kind of group they'd do well in or what kind of role they might play.
• By forcing kids to balance their self-assessments between two opposite qualities, it forces them to confront their weaknesses.
• The Five Communication Skills
• Use a problem-solving flow chart to help students ask questions when they are resolving issues.

Critically Evaluate Curation & Social Media:

• How has curation changed since you were in school?
• Why is curation and social media important?
• How can we teach curation and social media skills to our students?

Curation is not a full picture of anything. It's a picture of what someone wants you to see. It's marketing. When students grasp this concept, it helps them begin to think more critically about their social media presence.

Encourage students to research colleges by looking at their social media presence. For example, their Pinterest boards.

**************************************************************************************** All original work in this post by Sandy Kendell is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License. Please see specifics on my re-use policy in the right-hand column of my blog before re-posting/re-using any of my blog content.

BYOD in Elementary Schools

Image Used With Permission 

Have you implemented BYOD in an elementary school setting? In the U.S., that's grades K-5, or students aged 5-11.

We're about to launch a pilot at one of the K-5 elementary schools in my school district, and I'd like to collect stories of elementary BYOD implementation, links to videos and anecdotes, training materials and ideas - essentially, anything that has to do with BYOD in the elementary classroom.

Our infrastructure is in place, so technical specs are not something I'm looking for. Oh, and of course I'm going to share back what we have and what we come up with. Here's a link to the BYOD info page from my school district. We started BYOD in grades 6-12 last year, so we have policies and such in place.

But elementary school is a different animal! So no matter what state or country you teach or work in, if you have resources to share for implementing BYOD with younger students and their teachers, please take some time to share in the comments below. Write all the details you want there, or post a link to something you already have posted online elsewhere. If possible, please leave your Twitter handle in your comment so others with questions might connect with you.

Let's collect some fabulous resources so we can all learn from one another and improve instruction for all of our students. Thanks in advance for your contributions!




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All original work in this post by Sandy Kendell is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License. Please see specifics on my re-use policy in the right-hand column of my blog before re-posting/re-using any of my blog content.

Contribute to the #ISTE13 Six Word Story Project!

Here's My Contribution! Now It's Your Turn!

Did you attend ISTE 2013 in San Antonio? Then you must contribute to the Six Word Story Project!

Technology Director Bryan Doyle had an awesome idea for a collaborative project where attendees could capture their ISTE experience in six words and a photo. It doesn't even have to be a photo you took; just one that represents your idea.

The thing is, the project started almost two weeks ago, and Bryan set a deadline of July 12th for finalization of the project. So far, there are 19 contributions. ISTE says 18,000+ people were in attendance in San Antonio, so 19 is not a very good showing!

Come on, education and educational technology advocates - let's show the world the power of collaborative project creation! And let's represent as many locations on the planet as we can!

Bryan explains the project in detail on his blog and provides a link to the Google Presentation you can add to. So don't wait or think you'll come back to this, go read about the project on Bryan's blog and make your contribution now!

Tips for Planning for Technology Integration in the Classroom

As much as I work in educational technology, as much as I read, as many tools as I try, I still find it difficult to communicate what meaningful technology integration looks like. I think the most difficult thing to get across when I'm discussing this topic is "Don't start with the technology. Start with your learning objectives - what do you want your students to know and be able to do - and then let's talk about how technology can support your goals."

The video below came across my radar this week. It is a wonderful, concrete example of how to think about the incorporation of technology into teaching and learning. Although labeled as part of The Teaching Channel's New Teacher Survival Guide, I think all educators can pick up some tips for integrating technology into their classrooms. 

Some things I love about this video:

• It shows what is a real-world situation for the majority of schools and teachers - there aren't enough devices in the classroom for everyone to use one, and the teacher gets access to a computer lab on campus on a limited basis. 
• It emphasizes the importance of collaboration with technology staff
• It highlights the benefits of having a mentor to help plan technology integration. And it shows that if you have access to the Internet, your mentor can come from anywhere!

OK, I'm about to commit the faux pas of revealing the contents of the story before you get to watch it! So, I hope you'll set aside 15 minutes to watch this teacher progress through the planning of an engaging experience for her students. After you watch, I hope you'll share your take-aways and thoughts in the comments so we can all learn together!

Flattening Classrooms, Engaging Minds With @CoolCatTeacher & @JulieLindsay

Notes from FutureofEducation.com Webinar 


Steve Hargadon, Moderator
Vicki Davis and Julie Lindsay, authors of Flattening Classrooms, Engaging Minds
http://www.flatclassroomproject.org/

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Book was three years in the making. Steve says it's like an encyclopedia of how to use Web 2.0 to make education connections. Julie says they really wanted to highlight the work of many great teachers. It is not just about Julie and Vicki.

Vicki says they wanted the book to be an experience that is encouraging. Helping to take Web 2.0 from the early adopters to the main stream. Wanted to tell the story of the classroom teacher and show these things are really happening. It doesn't take a lot of money, but a community of practice to scaffold the learning and collaboration.

Steve loved the quotes from the teachers in the book and an email that shows how Julie and Vicki first connected with each other. They first connected in the K12 Online Conference in 2006. By reading Vicki's blog after that, she saw Vicki's students were reading The World is Flat. Julie's students were also reading the book, so she left a comment on Vicki's blog and the first Flat Classroom project was born through connecting their students. Something magical happened - and that's how it all started!

Thomas Friedman (author of The World is Flat) and Don Tapscott played into the first project. Friedman emailed Julie two weeks into this first project. This email helped them realize they had something and needed to make it scalable. Tapscott was writing Grown Up Digital and also contacted them and helped spread the word with what they were doing. This also encouraged Vicki and Julie to want to nurture other teachers in starting similar projects because they were supported in their first project. Sort of a "Pay it Forward" investment. Humility is important in helping others.

Who is the book for? Julie says for anyone involved in education. Individual educator, school, and student. Professional developers, teacher educators. It's full of stories, tips, tricks, tools, and methodology. There is something for everyone at every level.

"Visionary educators realize global collaboration is not an extra but a pedagogy." (paraphrased quote from book). Vicki says when there is massive change, there is great opportunity to benefit. She showed a chart which shows we are going to have a massive shortage of knowledge workers in the U.S. in the coming years. Where will they come from? You cannot have a world class education without the world.

One of Vicki's biggest problems with the ed reform movement is it keeps talking about what isn't working instead of offering solutions. For example, Vicki asks her admins to evaluate her students' portfolios instead of just coming to observe her for thirty minutes a few times a year. They use Weebly for efolios and post projects on Wikispaces. Teachers today need hope and they need to know there is a way to do this.

Also, there is no excuse to not reach every child with today's technology.

Julie says it is incredibly important for students to have choices. They need opportunities for personal success. Don Tapscott talks about customization of digital tools which leads to customization of learning environments.

Steve says there is a deep thread in the book about the changing role of teachers and how things start with them. Vicki cites the Hawthorne Effect in the book. Chapter 2 covers the role that research needs to play. Hawthorne Effect tried to study what caused productivity to go up in a factory and found that everything did. It was an effect of being studied. So, learning can improve by doing pilot projects. In the Flat Classroom projects, there are researchers observing what is going on. Students do not know who they are, but it allows others to study what is working. It is time for research to evolve and look closer at collaborative projects.

There is great opportunity to improve learning in all areas, no matter how small or large the local area where students are learning.

It is important for teachers to look at their own practice and how technology affects their every day lives personally and professionally. Teacher needs an essential understanding of what the tools are about and digital citizenship issues. They have to be hands on; can't sit back and just let the students use the tools. When teachers come into projects for the first time, it is often a steep learning curve for them. One thing Vicki and Julie do is run Flat Classroom teacher certification courses for teachers before they do their first project or while they are doing their first project. Certification covers most of the content of the book.

Global Projects (Get detailed info at http://www.flatclassroomproject.org/):

• Flat Classroom Project - @flatclassroom
• Digiteen Project - @digiteen
• "A Week in the Life..." Project - @flatclassroom
• NetGenEd Project - @netgened
• Eracism Project - @eracismproject
• Incubator Program - @flatclassroom

Most projects are free. A few projects require them to hire a few people so they have nominal fees. Preservice teachers and higher ed professors come into these projects as advisors.

Taxonomy of Global Connection (p. 54-56 in book)

• Level 1: Intra-Connection (w/in your own class)
• Level 2: Inter-Connection (w/in school/district)
• Level 3: Managed global connection
• Level 4: Student to student (with teacher management)
• Level 5: Student to student (with student management)

Communications in the 21st Century

• Intrapersonal
• Interpersonal (face-to-face)
• Interpersonal (not face-to-face)
• Technopersonal - Where schools fall short because they are fearful of online issues. But in the 21st century, schools must be "bricks and clicks".

Students do NOT innately understand technopersonal skills; they must be taught appropriate behavior and digital citizenship. These lessons cannot be learned in walled gardens.

What is the impact of these programs on ethnocentrism? We can scaffold inter-cultural communication and understanding using technology. No longer are we just reliant on student exchange programs for this. Technology breaks down barriers and helps us understand cultural differences. Different holidays, beliefs, family situations, etc, lead to more awareness of global citizenship. The projects help get people out of their comfort zones. Some live events/trips help supplement the experiences.

Cultural exchanges do not happen without friction. On the first project, Vicki had a parent who thought the students from Bangladesh were going to come through the computer and bomb them. Another example was that her students came to her and said "The news is wrong, all Muslims do not want to come here and kill us." On profile pictures, arms need to be covered. Saying "Yes, sir" like we do in the South in the U.S. is considered rude in the UK. Vicki says 98% of the problems they encounter are due to technical accidents. One of the main things she hopes to teach students is to give others the benefit of the doubt. Building good techno-citizens will serve them well throughout their lives.

Julie on professional development (Chapter 11). Need to work the back end as well as the front end on these projects. This is why there are conferences and the teacher certification projects. You can bring this back to your own school in a methodical way. Process and project based - not just one off lectures or one hour of hands on, etc. Everyone can move folks in their own environments forward.

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Questions from the Audience:

How do you deal with social media website age limits for elementary students? It's not one size fits all. There are different rules in different countries. Kid friendly sites are Wikispaces, Edmodo, Diigo. Look for others working with kids in your age group and emulate what someone else is doing. If you have a conservative administration, find a project and show it to them. It doesn't have to be scary.

What does flat classroom mean? Bringing the world into your classroom and putting your classroom out in the world in a safe and productive manner. Combine what you are doing in your classroom with what's going  on out in the world. Also, teachers are no longer the sun with the students orbiting them. They are now the Star Trek Voyager moving around and guiding their students. Also bring in pre-service teachers and professors - flattening between K-12 and Higher Ed. Students can be moderators and mentors for adults. So flattening between the generations too!

How does teaching about global citizenship happen? There is a lot of unintentional learning. Oh, you can't use YouTube in China? How do you introduce yourself to someone from another culture? How do you create a professional learning environment? VERY important for future employment?

What kinds of responses do you get from previous students in the program? One student got into college and was differentiated because she had managed an international team. One of her former students is now studying social media in college and had been on Twitter since it was five months old and had been doing wikis since he was in 10th grade. His college classmates thought these technologies were all "new". He now believes that it's too late when everyone thinks the technology is a good idea (he thought Twitter was stupid when they first learned it). Vicki doesn't care if her students thank her today, but wants them to thank her five years from now.

This was an awesome webinar! I definitely need to get this book! Thank you Steve, Julie, and Vicki!

Developing a Culture of Sharing #SXSWedu

Notes from SXSWedu 2012 panel discussion/concurrent session.


Philip Schmidt, P2PU

We live in a time where because of digital technology we are able to share in ways we've never been able to share before.

If you are in education and you are not interested in sharing, maybe you are not in the right space. Maybe this isn't the career for you.

Opening Question: What does the culture of sharing and learning really mean?


Karen Fasimpaur, K12 Open Ed

Member of P2PU community. Works in K12 with tech integration - stand and deliver drive by pd which she does not feel is the most effective because there is not enough sharing going on. Has been working for about three years to look for models to promote sharing. She finds in K12 it is hard to promote sharing. She is interested in talking about the vibrant communities we are already in but exploring the 95% of teachers who aren't in that community and how to bring them in .

Jim Groom, Instructional Technology Director at University of Mary Washington

Working with ways to promote open sharing models across disciplines and across the university. What they did not calculate was how far and wide it was going to go. He sees amazing possibilities with the power to share openly. Now, what do we do with it?

Alan Levine, CogDog It

Confused by the title of the session. Who is not sharing in some capacity? (Fasimpaur says people are in environments that prohibit them from sharing.) Levine finds it baffling that there are people not sharing. He holds no professional certifications and has had to depend on the sharing of others to prepare himself for what he does every day.


General Conversation:

There is a notion of sharing that is under attack.

Publishers are taking what we share openly and turning it around to us at horrendous markups.

A lot of learning is locked up in LMS systems.

What does it mean to take control and manage your own data? You can't have these kinds of conversations around LMS systems. Systems like Twitter and Google Apps for Edu are using and selling your data. How do we have these conversations in closed systems?

There are concerns about sharing on behalf of others as opposed to sharing just our own stuff.

It would be nice to think of public learning as a park where everything is open.

There is a phenomenon of lurkers. They are gaining tremendously from others who share. How do we move them to the next level to become sharers themselves.

People new to this might need protected spaces/comfort zones first. Like a closed ning environment.

A course Levine and Groom are involved in is DS106. They created a community in an open framework that encourages sharing. Students create and turn in assignments and create and post tutorials of how to do the assignments.

For some students, getting the first blog comment from a stranger is a huge eye opener. For others, it's using Creative Commons content and then starting to contribute their own content to the open spaces.

Fasimpaur finds teachers are open to sharing when it is presented to them up front. "Everything here is  open for others to use."

How much time are we spending asking students to explore the space where they exist online? Do we let them know people are not going to come find them, that they have to advertise their existence? Being critical about this existence is what we need to do as educators. We are living in cool times.

This could be the golden age of the Internet right now. Don't miss it!


We also have to get out of our little sector box.

Smart sharing can actually save you time and make your life better. Think of how much time we spend re-inventing the wheel when we could be saving time and making things richer.


I made it to the mic and shared the following thoughts from the K-12 space.

• Culture of sharing not promoted in K-12. We are used to staying in our classrooms
• Teachers share their personal lives on Facebook; we need to encourage them to share professionally as well.
• We need more courses like DS106 for pre-service teachers. Train them up in a culture of sharing that will continue with them in their careers and also influence how they teach their students.

@historydoc followed up my comments with the need for practitioners in higher ed to be encouraged to put content out there even if it isn't vetted while not having to worry about it negatively impacting their pursuit of tenure.

Moocs are something to look at for moving more toward a culture of sharing.

YouTube's Google Search Stories Creation Tool

Update March 2013 - It appears the Google Search Stories Creation Tool has gone offline and is no longer being supported as of January 2013. Bummer! More information here.

You know how you open up your Internet browser intending to accomplish something, then you click on a link that takes you on a slight rabbit trail and before you know it you are headed in a completely different direction?

Well, that happened to me this morning. But I'm glad it did, because I discovered YouTube's Google Search Stories Creation Tool, and after viewing a sample story I played around with it to create my own search story. I've embedded it below, but scroll on below it too, because it led me to begin brainstorming ways this tool could be used with students, and it might even trick them into learning some useful search techniques!

So, as I was creating this story, and after viewing a few other stories found at the SearchStories site, I came up with a few ideas for using this tool with students.

• After finishing a literature study, create a search story for one of the characters that helps trace the character's development
• During a literature study, create a search story a character might engage in to resolve a dilemma
• Create a search story depicting what searches a famous historical figure might have done if he/she had had access to Google during his/her period of history
• Create a search story that depicts the essence of a scientific or historical topic you recently studied
• Create a search story which shows a possible educational/career path you are considering
• Use as a culminating activity for a unit/lesson on research techniques as an assessment - have the students generate a question or research topic and let them demonstrate how they would use Google search to investigate
• Create a search story for use as PR, like this one from The Mary Louis Academy
• Create a search story for use as an introductory or summary video for a presentation (this would work well for staff development creators, too!)
• Whatever kind of search story your students create, require them to use at least three different types of searches, some of which can be chosen in the creation tool itself, but many of which you will have to know the proper Google syntax to use.

The SearchStories Creation Tool only allows seven search phrases and makes a 35 second video, which I think makes it a brilliant tool for asking students to focus on the heart of a topic, whatever they might be depicting. I encourage you to try it out, and as it causes you to brainstorm even more ideas, please share them below in the comments!

Join the Conversation - Let's Skype

Notes from a TCEA 2011 Workshop

Cindy Brock, Presenter
cindybrock@misdmail.org
Mary Lemons, Facilitator
Cynthia Petty, Facilitator
Mansfiled ISD Technology Trainers

Online Resource Handouts: http://bit.ly/b9zviV or http://www.tcea2011.org/

Icenhower Intermediate School Class collaborated with a class in Alaska. The teacher in Alaska taught the students in Texas. Students in Alaska also presented PowerPoints to students in Texas. In conjunction with the Iditarod race a musher from Alaska presented to the Texas students and answered their questions.

You can share files and even your computer screen via Skype!

The information part of this session was short and sweet! We spent the rest of the time trying to set up Skype accounts and practice making Skype calls, which didn't go too well due to technical glitches on the computers. Still, based on the experiences of the presenters, I am encouraged to seek further applications of this program in teaching and learning back in my school district.

Reflection on Collaboratively Producing a PSA: Be Careful What You Post Online

In a talk given at the 2008 Apple Education Leadership Summit, Randy Nelson, Dean of Pixar University, defined collaboration with these words:

Collaboration for Pixar means amplification. The amplification you get by connecting up a bunch of human beings who are listening to each other, interested in each other, bring separate depth to the problem. Bring breadth that gives them interest in the entire solution. Allows them to communicate on multiple different levels. Verbally, in writing, in feeling, in acting, in pictures. And in all of those ways finding the most articulate way to get a high fidelity notion across to a broad range of people so they can each pull on the right lever.

Having just participated in a group project which produced a one minute video public service announcement (PSA), Nelson’s words resonated with me as an excellent description of the collaborative process. Collaboration done well takes the individual contributions of invested team members and results in the amplification of those contributions as they become part of an end product that is more powerful  than the individual contributions themselves.

I believe each of the members of our PSA team, made up of Kim G., Alma G., Brian P., and myself, brought their strengths to the pre-production, production, and post-production processes while maintaining  their interest in the entire solution. In pre-production, I offered  the topic of helping educators remember they should be careful with what they post online because it could impact their careers. Although not everyone on the team works in a school district, they all agreed it was a timely topic. An initial storyboard was drawn up and shared for comment via an online Google document that we would continue to use to record our project’s progress over the next three weeks. From the very beginning, everyone was engaged in offering encouragement and ideas for improvement of the initial story idea. To discuss our ideas, we met via a phone conference and continued throughout the project to communicate via email and through our Google document.

As we moved into the production phase, Alma stepped up with her video staging experience and suggested camera shots that Kim, Brian, and myself would not have thought of on our own. Although she lived two and a half hours away from the rest of us and could not make our video shoot, her shot list sent via email was invaluable to the three of us who had much less experience with videography.

In production, Kim, Brian, and I took Alma’s shot ideas, tweaked the dialog I had initially written and Alma had added details to, and shot multiple takes of the scenes we felt would be most effective in the video. On “shooting day” I was primarily an actress, so it was fun for me to watch as Brian and Kim took the ideas the four of us had developed and transform them into scenes for our PSA.

One of the most difficult parts of post-production editing was selecting the best shots because we had so many to choose from. It was a good problem to have as we sorted through the clips, selecting the ones which balanced best delivery on the part of the actors with best overall sound and setting. A second challenge in post-production occurred after Brian had done most of the editing which brought together our video segments, Alma’s graphics, Brian’s narration, and our “camera-shutter” sound effect. Kim was tasked with adding credits and finalizing the video, but we found that Kim’s version of Movie Maker was not compatible with the aspect ratio that our video was shot in. Fortunately, I had a newer version of Movie Maker that could handle the wider aspect ratio, and I did not mind taking over the finalization of the movie. Because of the features of my version of Movie Maker, I was able to format the final .wmv video in a high definition, wide-screen aspect for posting to YouTube. It was just another example of each of us stepping up and jumping in where needed to make the final project a success.

Overall I believe our final PSA is a high-quality product for what was a first effort at video production for most of our group. Most of our video elements were original creations, but we were careful to provide links in our credits at the end of the video for elements from other sources. Credits for the graphics point to http://www.shuterstock.com/ where Alma has subscription access to the graphics files she used as backgrounds for the text elements in our video. Credits for the “camera-shutter” sound effect point to http://www.freesound.org/samplesViewSingle.php?id=42862 where we downloaded an audio file posted by user crk365 and licensed for free creative transformation under a Creative Commons Sampling Plus 1.0 license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/sampling+/1.0/).

One improvement I would like to see in the PSA would require the graphic elements to display a little longer on the screen, perhaps a second or so after their words are narrated to give time for additional visual impact on the viewer. We were exactly at the one minute time limit, though, and we had to sacrifice some on-screen time for the graphics to fit all of the dialog in. We could have shortened our dialog in spots, but we really wanted to make some points about how easy it is for inappropriate content posted to the Internet to be shared and how students, parents, and administrators might react in those situations. I suspect with experience we would be able to strike the right balance on these aspects.

The creation of this PSA was a very positive experience for me. I feel our original idea was indeed amplified by the collaborative process. I am also encouraged to know that everyone on the team enjoyed and learned from this experience, as evidenced by our debriefing at the bottom of our collaborative Google document.

This blog post would be incomplete without our final project. I hope you enjoy watching Be Careful What You Post Online as much as we enjoyed making it!



Reference

Nelson, R. (2008). Learning and working in the collaborative age: A new model for the workplace. Edutopia. Retrieved September 25, 2010 from http://www.edutopia.org/randy-nelson-school-to-career-video

What's The Most Important Thing Teachers of Today Need to Realize or Learn?

An educator I follow on Twitter,  thecleversheep, tweeted this this morning:

Care to share your wisdom? Looking for global representation in a preso on Collaboration: http://bit.ly/4gfNqy (retweets appreciated)

When I clicked the link, here's the question I was faced with:

What is the most important thing teachers of today need to realize, or need to learn?

One of those thought provokers! Here was my response:

The World Wide Web was invented in 1989; it is 20 years old. For students in K-12 education today, the Web has always existed. There has never been a world without it. Teachers who are 30 years old or older had little or no exposure to "growing up online" or learning online when they themselves were students. They certainly did not have the unsupervised access to technology that today's students have - nor did they have the opportunities for global learning. To stay relevant in our pedagogical approaches and to equip students to survive and thrive in the digital world where they already live, we must become adopters of the technology ourselves. We may never be immersed to the extent our students are, but to ignore the digital world in our personal and professional lives is a great disservice to our students.

How would you answer that very same question? Post a comment here, and while you're at it, post a response for thecleversheep's pesentation.