FETC: The Ripple Effect

Cheryl Lemke is a nationally known speaker on policy, leadership and accountability in education technology. In this spotlight session, Ms. Lemke discussed designing tomorrow's lessons using the latest social, learning, and neuroscience research on critical thinking, multi-tasking, multimodal learning, collaboration, and engagement. On Monday, 1/18, her presentation will be downloadable from her company website at: http://www.metiri.com The following are notes from Ms. Lemke’s presentation:

•Definitions: Creativity – You see things that are novel; Innovation – Creative idea ripples through the system and creates change.
•Learners today were born Internet ready.
•21st Century Learning – The intersection of research on how people learn, 21st century learning, and technological innovation. For more information, go to: http://www.metiri.com/features.html
•Democratization of Knowledge – The information is out there and digital resources are abundant. We need to make ourselves aware of the information that is available. See TED video of David Bolinsky and his team at XVIVO illustrating scientific and medical concepts with high-drama animation. http://blog.ted.com/2007/07/high_drama_insi.php Harvard compliments this with Harvard Biovisions. There is also a site Cellular Visitons: The Inner Life of a Cell that describes how the animations happened. Virtual tutoring such as MIT has many courses online for absolutely free. Will your students be more curious leaving school than when they arrived?
•Critical Thinking – Can we teach thinking? Venezuela, CoRT, Odyssey Venezuela actually taught critical thinking. Sometimes our students have all the tools to put something together they just don’t know how. What movies are playing in your kids heads?
•Web 2.0 and Mass Collaboration –We are seeing more crowd sourcing. The website Innocentive connects people that have needs with people that can help them. http://www.innocentive.com/ iStockphoto allows amateur photographers to submit their work and professionals to use. Many times the photos are excellent and very affordable. Ito, 2009 writes about Network Publics in Hanging Out, Messing Around, and Geeking Out: Kids Living and Learning with New Media. Ito also wrote Engineering Play: A Cultural History of Children's Software. Three perspectives on learning: 1) Acquisition (the individual), 2) Participation (the group, community, network, culture), 3) Knowledge Creation (the innovation knowledge community). Collaboration trumps both competition and individual learning. Johnson & Johnson has a definition for collaboration that includes a balance of formal and informal. http://scholar.lib.vt.edu/ejournals/JTE/jte-v7n1/gokhale.jte-v7n1.html VoiceThread is powerful in making children's thinking visible and it is a free resource. http://voicethread.com/ Looking for a lot of sustained discussion. Dr. Burge is another good resource that has done research on interactive gaming.
•Multimodal Learning – Dual memory channels by Myake and Shah is helpful. When you have time, explore visualcomplexity.com Every child has a story to tell. http://www.thinkingmaps.com is another good resource. Take the time to watch the TED video with Hans Rosling (2006). Mr. Rosling is a data rock star. He pulls health and social data from worldwide collections, he uses his brilliant bubble-making software, Gapminder, to stand our preconceived notions. http://blog.ted.com/2009/06/tedstate_hans_r.php GampMinder is the tool Mr. Rosling uses and it is completely free. Check it out at: http://www.gapminder.org/