It is a honor to be asked to speak to you, a group of educators, who didn’t start out to be educators. I know that in other countries, Canada for instance, prospective teachers must start out with a four-year degree in some program of interest — even elementary teachers. Then they attend a fifth year to learn to be a teacher. In a sense this is what you have done, developed expertise in some area and then chosen to become a teacher.
I want to talk about how the process of teaching, and more importantly, learning is changing in our classrooms. This change is happening, in no small part, because of the increasing importance of learning outside the classroom in the world of work, service and play. ..and more to the point of my talk, how that learning takes place.
I want to suggest, that part of the key to appropriate classroom pedagogue, today, in a time of opportunity, is in the learning pedagogies that our students and many of you practice outside the classroom. Marc Prinsky described, in a foundational paper he wrote in 2001, how our children are now “digital natives” while there parents and many of their teachers are “digital immigrants.”
I think that we need to crack the code of their “native” information/learning experiences.
Online Handouts
- Cracking the Code of the ‘Native’ Learning Experience – http://goo.gl/agyqQ
- Backchannel Transcript – http://goo.gl/hcYSy
What a beautiful venue for this event. If I didn’t have my daughter’s dog at home to take care of, I’d love to have stayed over for a night.
