David Warlick: Telling the new story: leverage points for inspiring change

David Warlick's short video-web presentation focused on the growing awareness of how our students think and operate in this digital age. An interesting component to his presentation, that was new information to me was where David foresees our future job market. Not only will our future students have choice in engineering markets, but the creative arts jobs will continue to rise as well. David talks about how our society is visual/auditory culture, we are more interested in the new story of how a piece of technology works than how it operates/runs.
This is true for our classrooms. Our instruction needs to still address those basic skills all students should equip themselves with, but the way we present the material and the method we want students to "think" through ideas...creates a new story in our classrooms.
As a teacher, I will work to introduce an on-line blog as a way for my students to publish writings as well as infuse more visual forms to student learning. The idea of project-based learning, and thematic-based learning makes sense. As a teacher working with high school teens, I will continue to rewrite the story in my classroom and keep it compelling.

Frank Kelly & Ian Jukes: New High Schools

I found this lecture from last summer's NECC conference to be both intriguing as well as complex. The beginning of this long lecture provided an exposure as to how high schools look and operate in the 21st century. Basically the model has not changed at all since the beginning of the 20th century. Students still sit in desks, move by bell to bell, our taught mainly through a lecture style, and move from discipline to discipline. What is interesting is that Ian Jukes states, more high schools of the 21st century are infusing technology or 1:1 laptops into the buildings, but technology is not transforming school culture,it is only used as a supplement. Jukes further indicates that students are bored, are not challenged, and the continuing drop out rate indicates our current public school system is not working. The presentation then proposes 6 models.
However, I struggle with re-designing complete frameworks of America's high schools. When America students attend college, most university systems are set up in the same structure. Professors lectures, students take notes, memorize, regurgitate information through exams, write papers, analyze, and complete lab studies. In essence, colleges are just as boring, why don't they have to structurally change their framework? They too have added technology however, its blackboard or eliminating more the paper trail..but it doesn't make college students think creatively, problem solve, etc. Why is it high schools responsibilities to forge ahead, while universities lag behind?
Anyways, I too, think we should change our model, a one-size fits all doesn't work for every American high school, however I don't know how students truly would be assessed on basic skills such as: reading, writing, basic math computations, etc. However there are ideas I like. I too believe education should be more interdisciplinary, education should be project-based or designed, where students can actually "play" with the information in technological forms. I too don't like a bell-to-bell schedule. I also agree with the fact most high schools probably should be an on-going service and not a time-event with school out for the summer..at least not in the 21st cent. I like the idea of looping kids to have the same teachers and for teachers of different disciplines co-teaching and working together to design models for our students to research, collaborate, think through, etc...
In truth, we need to technology, but I agree we probably are not transforming our school culture.