keynotes - Doug Johnson and Joyce Valenza

Doug Johnson - Keynote

Unique characteristics of generation y

Discussion - more aware, more social, less tolerant of bad teaching, instant answers, wide of scope of stuff to learn, vocab narrowing

Research
demographics – 36% of US population, 20% have one immigrant parent.
Valued and Sheltered
grown up immersed, fascinated tech. less tv but more in front of a screen, more ‘on demand’, media saturated homes
digital backpack for many students
distracting?

how about using ipod/mp3 for recording instructions, language learning, concentrating
hs see tech not just as passive entertainment but also learning tools
we  need to use tech as a hook. Education 24/7, kids should want to be in the library, use student’s own tech to teach them (mobiles!)
4.1 billion mobile phones, 75% developing countries
information = conversations not authority
schools should not be tech desert

homework assignments – unmanageable workload leads to lack of buy-in and lack of depth or critique when using resources, needs to be relevant, personal, local, topical – that is what engages

also to think about – students as information creators
teachers seen as vital, personal info, learn by doing, visual, hypertext mind, shift attention rapidly, inductive discovery, like to share, expect fast responses
having a problem to solve is best way to engage

Joyce Valenza – Keynote

If learners are ipads – what are the essential apps?

academic digital footprints – make the stuff online about students (or staff) good rather than focusing on keeping inappropriate stuff off

use people search tool eg: pipl
flickr storm – creative commons images search - you can set up a ‘tray’ of images to share with URL

students should put cc license on their own work
also look at fair use – did it add value or re-purpose material?

use tools to make own stuff – eg: jamstudio for music
info fluency – transparent, interactive, meaningful and original
content curation – putting stuff all together as tool for you and others
artstor – for art and history – international – need p/w from local museum

igoogle for personal info portal
btw Joyce is using glogster a great deal to pull stuff together - nice simple idea
Keeping up with changes in search world
mobile apps for databases

hidden stuff in google – like ‘news timeline’
use custom search for favourite databases/tools – for documentary maybe could look at doing this for more ‘tools’ too?
breaking news search – mashpedia
sortfix – for sorting searching, good for search process, thinking tool
quintura visual search, inc quintura for kids
twurdy – returns results by lexile
searchcredible.com – reminds of alternative sources, inc many i recommend for advanced searching (bubl, intute)
reminder about wolfram alpha

rss feeds from database searches - need to look into this for our databases. Info pushed to you. Can do this in google too.
finding dulcinea – pathfinders
evaluation - crap filter 
Students start in youtube and then Wikipedia.

annotated bibliographies – forces evaluation of sources
primary source – who is an expert? bloggers, youtube
creativity is crucial

celebrate student’s creativity online – post stuff, aggregate content
only two clicks – screenshots of everything – thumbnail links
Digitales – inc. interactive rubrics for video stories
communication and collaboration
skype – expert or author

wallwisher for backchat – questions for later or look up – or for content analysis, building on knowledge
hashtag ‘paper to pull together info daily - not a huge fan of these but not unlike flipboard in a way and good for twitter-shy