Jeff Utecht – Educator, Consultant, Author
Posts tagged 21st Century Learning
What’s your focus teaching or learning?
Aug 27th
So many times we use the phrase “Teaching & Learning” but really we need to be asking ourselves:
Are we focusing on teaching or learning?This came up in a discussion with Kim earlier today, (BTW….the two of us in a room for longer than 10 minutes is enough deep conversation to keep me going the rest of the day) that what we are focusing on is not necessary student learning, but instead teachers teaching. It’s easy to get caught up in the moment and take our eye off of what we’re really here for.
As we continue to support teachers using technology tools More >
What’s your connection speed?
Aug 3rd
A recent comment about Mac or PC in schools has cut my sleeping short the past two nights.
That sounds like a great help to your colleagues. Our school has all macs – the entire district actually. Some of the people that have come from industry have brought up the point that by using macs we are not preparing our students for the workforce (even though there are so many neat applications on them). What do you think? (N.D.)
What do I think?
I think if we are worried about the OS of the machine we’re focusing on the wrong part!
If we are More >
Can you become Creative?
May 27th
A great article out of the New York Times entitled: Can You Become a Creature of New Habits? Has had me thinking today about creating creative cultures in our schools.
David Warlick wrote a post recently that looked at the top 25 economic cities in the U.S. and how a “creative class” played a role in the rankings.
What I found interesting was the Bob Cook, who evaluated the cities factored in the portion of the population (that) were in the creative class. This includes scientists, engineers, artists, and teachers. The belief is, and this is consistent with Richard Florida’s writings, the creative class More >
Learning to Change a video
May 13th
Are You Smarter Than A 5th Grader? My version
May 9th
(Full Disclosure: It comes on right after American Idol on our TV so watch it by default….I’m in China our choices are limited! )
1) Grab your laptop and go to Google.com
2) When a question is asked see how long it takes you to find the answer.
3) Think about all the useless content we teach students 1-5 grade.
- What does this say about what we’re teaching?
- How much of the content that we teach in grades 1-5 is useless to us in the “real world”
- Think like a 5th grader today: “Why should I learn this stuff when I can find it on google faster More >
Fourth Graders know
May 8th
So I still have Shirky’s post running through my head.
Here’s something four-year-olds know: A screen that ships without a mouse ships broken. Here’s something four-year-olds know: Media that’s targeted at you but doesn’t include you may not be worth sitting still for. Those are things that make me believe that this is a one-way change. Because four year olds, the people who are soaking most deeply in the current environment, who won’t have to go through the trauma that I have to go through of trying to unlearn a childhood spent watching Gilligan’s Island, they just assume that media includes consuming, More >
Why Not take a risk?
Mar 19th
We can not expect teachers to take a risk and try something new if we ourselves are not willing to try something new.
I held a PD session for K-12 teachers after school today. It was one of 5 technology sessions we offered to teachers in what is known as TECH Wednesdays. Basically one Wednesday a month is set aside for tech PD. Today’s sessions included:
Blogging: (Brought 15 more teachers online)
Netvibes: Learn about Ginger and the new Universe function (Netvibes is the dominate RSS reader at our school)
Photoshop: Basic photo munipulation (resize, crop, rotate, etc)
Beginner Basics: For those who need just More >
Moving from Consumer to Producer of Information
Mar 12th
(A blog post I wrote to 11th graders and to myself)
Some interesting research has come out in the past couple of months that looks at the use of social networks and blogging and the trends that are happening in society today.
Nearly half of 18-24 year old social networkers (45%) told Future Laboratory researchers that if they had 15 minutes of spare time they would choose spend it on social networking sites rather than watching TV, reading, talking on their mobile, or playing video games. The impact of this trend is so significant that a quarter (25%) of respondents state that the rise in More >
