Are we preparing our students for their future?

Useful Sites for Teachers
Teaching With Contests.com caused me to remember how much my students loved to study using games.  Here is a site full of academic contests students can enter!  In addition, you can find activities for different subject areas, as well as scholarship help and more.
Activity TV is a site that my 9 year-old grandson will love!  It contains hundreds of videos that will teach him how to do something new.  It includes activities for crafts, magic, dance and much more.  Activity TV Jr.  does the same for pre-schoolers.
Black Holes , a part of the Hubble Site, has students making decisions while exploring outer space looking for a black hole.  Great animations of the universe!
Mr. Martini's Classroom has all type of flash cards.  A great place to practice learning math facts in many math topics including algebra, fractions, geometry, the four basic operations and more.

Articles of Interest
Newsweek's Top 100 Books - This is a great list of books that should be read.  You will recognize the name of many books on the list that you will want your children to read.
For Improving Early Literacy, Reading Comics is No Child's Play from Science Daily is an interview with Carol L. Tilley a professor of library and information science who talks about understanding comics as literature. Last Week I provided a site for creating comics called Tap Into The World of Comics  This article points out another important aspect of the comic book.  Professor Tilley says;

Comics are just as sophisticated as other forms of literature, and children benefit from reading them at least as much as they do from reading other types of books.

This School is on a Mission by Grace Rubenstein describes YES Prep North Central. This charter school in Houston's mission is to send every graduate to college.  They are very successful.  I believe it is because they have motivated students (read last weeks blog).  These students achieve that same success at Sudbury Valley School where there are no classes.  YES has a lot of structure and the students come from lower economic background, but motivation is what drives the success of both groups.

Thoughts from Yrisarri
Education Reform and Web 3.0

I began working with technology in the 1960s.  I received an education which enabled me to understand how computers work.  As a library director I filled data bases with information from the card catalog and automated library operations.  Then, as a teacher and as a librarian, I began accessing and interacting with that information.  Thanks to the computer almost anybody today can do what I was trained to do, find infomation and interact with that information with on-line learning or some other variation of research, social, or academic networking program.

So I have worked through Web 1.0 and Web 2.0 and the experts say Web 3.0 is on its way.  Tim Berners-Lee, the creator of the world wide web calls it the "semantic web" which will,

...... enhance every piece of data on the Internet with related 'metadata' . This would, for instance, enable currently passive computer applications to think about the data you enter and advise you.

Wow, I thought my gradparents, born in 1899 and lived to experience the moon landing, had experienced change in their lifetime.  Think about that, you computer will think about the data and it will interact with you!  If I, in my lifetime have experienced such change, what will my grandchildren be wrapping their minds around?

Neuroscientists in their study of the brain have found that our environment literally wires our brain as we grow.  Don Tapscott in Grown Up Digital: How the Net Generation is Changing Your World speculates that;  

....from ages 8-18, the brain is still being built and that kids’ brains are becoming hard-wired to live in a digital culture.

So my grandchildren are going to grow up with a brain hard-wired to live in a digital culture!  What does this mean for education?  It seems that we have embraced web 1.0, still covet that data base of knowledge, and we use web 2.0 technology to present that data to our students.  But are we preparing our students for their future?

David Nagel, in an article entitled Are Schools Preparing Students for 21st Century Learning?  , reports that there is a "disconnect" between school administrators and parents on this topic. 

The findings were part of a report released this week--Learning in the 21st Century: Parents' Perspectives, Parents' Priorities. They were compiled from data collected as part of Project Tomorrow's annual Speak Up survey, which included responses from more than 335,000 K-12 administrators, students, parents, and educators.

The report says that parents think teachers need more training and schools need more "technology-infused approaches to education".  At the same time more than half of the prinicpals in the survey thought they were doing a good job preparing students for the 21st century.

I think that we need more than "technology-infused" approaches to education.  Our children are already infused with a way of thinking that includes technology.  We need to allow them the opportunity to learn to think about the massive amounts of data they will encounter.  How do they make meaning of all that infomation.  How do they deal with a machine that can think about their problems?  Can you teach them how to do that in 12 years?

The Speak Up Survey also notes that students are gravitating to on-line schools in astonishing numbers. Schools may not even have 12 years to help them make meaning of the data because they will be persuing information that interests them on-line. We must begin thinking about educating our children to think critically and creatively and we better be able to do it in a "technology-infused" manner.

Maybe we should begin treating the students and their parents as customers of the education system.  The education system has a product called curriculum that the customers can peruse to find the best  and most effective deal.  Will they know any better than the educaton establishment what is needed for the future?