Monday, July 5, 2010

Re-imagining Learning in the 21st Century

Last year, Karen Cator was one of the leaders at the 2009 ADE Summer Institute (USA). She led the Challenge Based Learning piece of the Institute. She was hands-on during the process and her conversations with my project group had a terrific impact upon me.

Since then, Karen has become the Director of the Office of Educational Technology at the U.S. Department of Education. Recently Karen spoke at a MacArthur Foundation event at New York City's New School which focused on re-imagining learning for the 21st century. I have included a video of that event. Karen's remarks start at the 4:29 mark.

Karen's theme theme on this occasion was "Re-imagining Learning in the 21st Century". Three points in particular resonated with me:

*The current trends in educational technology are
- Mobility
- Learning outside of formal school
- Proliferation of digital content
- Publication going from print to online

Keys to 21st Century Assessment include:
- Measure what matters
- Embedded assessment
- Real time feedback
- Persistent learning
- Universal design

* And this great quote: "A highly effective teacher is one who is connected-- connected to the data, to the information, to the content and resources. . . connected to experts, and connected to learning environments for themselves and learning experiences for themselves. . . ."

Good stuff. Give Karen a listen. What resonates with you?

2 comments:

Ann Lusch said...

At the risk of sounding like the student who only gets to the beginning of something, the word that strikes me the most is "opportunity." If my blog-reading over the last year or so has convinced me of anything, it's that our school is lucky in terms of the opportunities we have for teaching/learning. Now we just have to continue to learn to use what we have.

There was a lot said that just brought more questions to mind. How are we going to go about empowering and inspiring teachers? Maybe some of those answers are contained in the document itself. "Page-turner" or not, it's probably something that I should finally take a better look at.

Detroit Sports Dork said...

I think that mobile devices are going to deal with "opportunity" much faster than the policy makers will. It's the the greates topic of interest among the ADEs going to Florida, next week.

You make a good point about our school having a leg up technically. But it's the wireless that's the key, not the hardware. In my opinion there has been too much focus on equipment since inception.

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