21st Century teaching – Page 5 – Media! Tech! Parenting!

Word Order: When You Search It Matters!

Posted on August 30, 2014 by Marti Weston

The word order of a search matters in today’s connected world, so 21st Century learners — of all ages — should understand how search results change when a user rearranges the words. A short video on word order, uploaded by Google’s Search Anthropologist Daniel Russell – check out his Search-Research blog – teaches this lesson effectively.

Use this less-than-two-minute video — I found it in a blog post at Free Technology for Teachers — as a quick and succinct teaching tool with students, parents, and other educators.

21st Century Learning, 21st Century parenting, 21st Century teaching, apps, Back-to-school digital reading, digital devices, digital kids, digital parenting, mobile phones, parents and technology

How Quickly Do New Apps Gain Kids’ Attention?

Posted on August 7, 2014August 21, 2019 by Marti Weston

As we get ready to return to school for the 2014-15 academic year, my thoughts turn toward the digital life changes that I’ll observe in the lives of my 21st Century students when we come together in September.

After three months of summer activities such as volunteering or part-time jobs and the less structured time at camps and on vacations, most kids arrive at school with new digital experiences, devices, and apps — and they want to share everything. I’ve especially thought about the number of apps that seem to come out of nowhere — suddenly appearing in kids lives and on their mobile devices — and I know popular new ones will appear this fall.

Below I am sharing three slides from digital parenting presentations that I made over six months, from October to May during the 2013-14 school year.

Continue reading “How Quickly Do New Apps Gain Kids’ Attention?” →

21st Century Learning, 21st Century teaching, connected learning, parents and technology

Do We Support Those Digital-Age Students With Passionate Interests?

Posted on July 11, 2014March 18, 2019 by Marti Weston

Invent to Learn graphic art — Invent to Learn Graphic Art. Click to check out the book.

As my learning activities continue at the 2014 Constructing Modern Knowledge summer institute (CMK14) I’ve spent a significant amount of time thinking about young 21st Century connected learners who come to our classrooms with special talents or unusual interests.

Often our classes include students who discover especially interesting topics, and these kids learn more and more until they develop expertise in the area. Sometimes the students go even farther with a subject, developing a passion and spending enormous amounts of personal time looking for more to learn. Last year at my school a fifth grader demonstrated, over and over, his passion for aviation and his all-consuming interest continues to thrive.

Cam Perron is just such a learner (watch his TEDTalk). Continue reading “Do We Support Those Digital-Age Students With Passionate Interests?” →

21st Century Learning, 21st Century teaching, connected learning, educating digital natives, teaching digital kids

AIMS 2014 Retreat Report #1: Grant Lichtman Presentation

Posted on May 5, 2014March 18, 2019 by Marti Weston

Lichtman graphic — A photo of Lichtman’s title screen. Click to visit his blog.

The 2014 AIMS Technology Retreat is off to a terrific start with Grant Lichtman’s presentation about the challenges inherent in educational innovation and transformation. I’m attending this retreat with 150 tech leaders, librarians, administrators, and teachers representing more than 60 independent schools in the Washington, DC and Baltimore area.

Many of us think a good deal about how our schools might change and innovate. We consider how best to help our students make good use of their 21st Century access to vast amounts of knowledge. Most of us take seriously a new mission that requires us to enable students as they mold themselves into collaborators, dynamic learners, good problem solvers, and experiential learners. We also know that it’s critical to help them become confident enough to learn in a world that continuously changes (and at great speed).

This conversation is actually about becoming better progressive educators.

Continue reading “AIMS 2014 Retreat Report #1: Grant Lichtman Presentation” →

21st Century Learning, 21st Century life, 21st Century teaching, parents and technology, searching

Why Word Order Matters When You Search!

Posted on April 23, 2014 by Marti Weston

The word order of a search matters in today’s connected world, so 21st Century learners of all ages should understand how search results change when a user rearranges the words. A short video on word order, uploaded by Google’s Search Anthropologist Daniel Russell – check out his Search-Research blog – teaches this lesson effectively.

Use this less-than-two-minute video, featured some months ago in a blog post at Free Technology for Teachers, as a quick and succinct teaching tool with students, parents, and other educators.

21st Century Learning, 21st Century teaching, parents and technology, spelling and editing, writing

Spell Check Your Spell Checker!

Posted on April 19, 2014March 18, 2019 by Marti Weston

Spring vacations are just about finished for 2014, so now it’s time to think about staying challenged and strong for the last few months of school.

One aspect of completing a school year is to pay special attention to writing and editing while completing assignments and projects. And an important part of editing is searching for misspelled words using two steps.

In spell-check, step one, a computer program or website, runs through a person’s prose, identifies the misspelled words, and offers the writer options for correcting, changing or leaving a word alone. These days many programs and sites spell check as a person writes, but that is no excuse for not going through the editing process.

The second, more challenging step — and perhaps the bigger responsibility — requires a writer to follow-up the spell checker, searching for errors that the automated process may have missed. Many of the remaining errors are not technically mistakes. Instead they are correctly spelled words that the writer typed by accident (or with the help of auto-word completion) or misused homonyms — accurately spelled but used incorrectly. So the spell checker missed these words. Continue reading “Spell Check Your Spell Checker!” →

21st Century Learning, 21st Century teaching, connected learning, digital kids, digital learning, digital literacy, digital world conversations

Innovative Teaching: How on Earth Do We Get Started?

Posted on March 19, 2014March 18, 2019 by Marti Weston

Years ago as a beginning teacher, I asked one of my University of Chicago professors how it was that my mentoring teacher seemed to do everything at once — teaching one group, keeping an eye on other parts of the classroom, and continuously but quietly communicating with everyone in the room — all at the same time. She even knew when a student some distance behind her was not completing the assigned task.

“She acquired those skills step-by-step,” my professor replied.

Today as we cope with the challenge of transforming our teaching skills to make what goes on in our classrooms applicable to the ever-changing world of digital information (a.k.a. innovation or 21st Century learning), many of us are renewing our commitment to lifelong learning as we explore and acquire a range of new skills and behaviors. We are learning, step-by-step, how to teach differently and stretch ourselves in ways that help students access, process, and use information in innovative but sensible ways. Continue reading “Innovative Teaching: How on Earth Do We Get Started?” →