ISTE Day 3: Learning Together

San Domenico School's Assistant Head of School, Cecily Stock, shares highlights from Day 3 of ISTE as experienced by teachers from diverse grade levels of our School:

It has been an exciting learning opportunity for me to be able to accompany teachers from all three divisions of San Domenico to this conference.  We have spent our days attending a wide range of presentations, some focused on specific apps and techniques, and others addressing some of the broader conceptual and philosophical issues around technology and education.  In between, we have be meeting up in pairs or small groups to discuss what we are learning and brainstorming on how to best bring back this wealth of information to our colleagues at San Domenico.

Day 3 of the ISTE conference began with an inspiring keynote speech by Dr. Yong Zhao, Presidential Chair and Associate Dean for Global Education, University of Oregon College of Education.  SD high school math teacher and department chair Mike Sloan shares that, "Dr. Zhao challenged policymakers' interest in emulating 'high-performing' education systems (measured through international testing such as PISA or TIMMS,) arguing that the prescriptive nature of such systems fails to produce creative or entrepreneurial individuals.  To paraphrase his concluding remarks, 'The goal of education should not be to teach to increase test scores.   The goal of education should be to teach each child so that they may reach their maximum potential.'  Both entertaining and convincing, Dr. Zhao's presentation was a great start to another informative and compelling day at ISTE 2012, filled with so many resources and so much information, that one can only hope to collect and absorb as much as possible and to further explore in the days, weeks, and months ahead."  Mike also enjoyed a presentation later in the day on "Metacognition in Mathematics."

Primary school teacher, Nancy Goralski, also enjoyed the keynote speech and shares that, "Technology provides intellectual laboratories that will allow us to go further in education by providing a greater range and depth of projects from which to learn.  I'm looking forward to thinking of ways to stimulate the creativity of my students using technology as an essential tool to springboard greater possibilities."  Nancy also attended a presentation on  "Creativity Re-examined in Light of Piaget, Papert, and Bloom" in which she learned about four simple observations (knowledge, comprehension, application, synthesis) that teachers can make during the learning process that are easily understood and redefine creativity.  Within this context, technology is viewed as the most enabling and the least restrictive tool.

Middle school technology facilitator, Kali Baird learned about a new resource:  Apps4iSchool that will be launched this summer.  This app will filter and rate the thousands of educational apps that are currently available for teachers and students.  Math teacher, Valerie Davis learned how to do 3D drawings using Google Sketch-up, while I attended several presentations on digital citizenship, seeking out new resources and assessing what schools around the country are doing in this area.  The high point of the day for 6th grade moderator and math teacher, Brooke Gelber, was meeting the two educators who started the flipping "revolution", Jonathan Bergman and Aaron Sams.  Brooke and Mike Sloan have been flipping their instruction in both middle school and high school classrooms this year, and meeting these two pioneers was in Brooke's words, "So cool!"

ISTE Day 2: Everyone learned something new!

San Domenico at ISTE Day 1

It may be summertime for our students but our faculty have been very busy this June!  We just concluded an amazingly positive iTeach 2012 conference here on our campus.  We are going to celebrate the learning and reflection that happened at iTeach on this blog soon -- but first, we bring coverage from our team attending the National Educational Computing Conference, ISTE 2012.

The first day of the ISTE Conference in San Diego was attended by faculty from all levels of the school, including: Brooke Gelber, Valerie Davis, Natasha McKeown, Cecily Stock, Kali Baird, Nancy Goralski, and Mike Sloan.  The conference kicked off with a welcome and orientation to the conference, which is huge with over 13, 000 attendees from across America and over 62 other countries.

The highlight was a panel moderated by the keynote speaker, Sir Ken Robinson, well known for his TED talks on creativity and author of the book Out of Our Minds: Learning to Be Creative. He began his presentation by questioning current public education policy that places teachers in the role of simply “delivering” pre-determined content rather than “inspiring” students’ creativity and passion for discovery.

The panel discussion then went on to highlight how important it is to inspire this passion because as panelist Marc Prensky, author of Brain Gain: Technology and the Quest for Digital Wisdom, said, “Passion is going to lead us to achievement.” They then turned to the role technology can play. Shawn Covell, who was representing communications giant Qualcomm, underscored how ubiquitous technology is in our lives. In fact, she quoted a stunning statistic that within the next ten years the number of mobile devices used will actually exceed the number of humans globally.  Thus, as Mayim Bialik, actress on the show Big Bang Theory and neuroscientist pointed out, educators now more than ever need to guide students to appropriately maximize the potential these devices provide – ideally inspiring collaboration, innovation and critical thinking.

The panelists’ messages definitely resonated with all of us from San Domenico and very clearly summed up the reasons why we have felt it was so important to boldly introduce one-to-one technology.  We are excited to find out through the hundreds of workshops offered this week how we can continue best meet our teaching and learning objectives.  There is still so much to learn!

-Natasha McKeown