CoLearners

A professional web site for David Warlick

Apr 22

Emerging Technologies Conference at Noble & Greenough School – Massachusetts

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Geeking Out

It is a pleasure to be back in Massachusetts, especially working with Noble & Greenough School and independent school educators from across the state. This is going to be a very specially education conference because it is about learning. “I don’t understand. Shouldn’t an education conference be about learning?” Certainly, but technology conference are often about the gadgets. But this one is not merely about teaching students, but more specifically about educators using these tools to teach themselves.

My kickoff will be about literacy. But I hope to make the point that literacy has changed in some substancial ways, owing to the substancial ways that the nature of information has changed. But there is another element to this change. Literacy, when I was in school, was for the sake reading — the ability to read a newspaper, letter, etc. More recently, in many schools, literacy has been for the sake of being able to read text, so that you can answer questions about it.

Today, in a time of rapid change, when our students will be learning for the rest of their lives, Literacy should be for the sake of continued learning — learning literacy –

The skills to use your information environment,
To learn what you need to know,
To do what you need to do.

After the keynote and after Liz Davis and Tom Daccord’s presentation, I will follow lunch with a session about casual professional development. This will hopefully piggyback on Liz and Tom’s presentation, offering some practical and surprising techniques for literally mining a global conversations that is content generating and often the very latest in ideas.

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