Discovery Education Speakers Bureau

Mobile is the next wave in technology. Cellphones text faster than email, spread video faster than cameras, and webcast in real time. They take assignments, document work, translate and podcast. Mobile interfaces with Web 2.0. Best of all:  teachers and students carry them already! Learn what we can adapt to achieve educational goals.  Examples are in place. Mobile is the web all over again—be ready.

The benefits of the digital world have arrived. State legislatures recognized dynamic teaching and assessment environments match 21st Century learning styles. As a result, laws changed in states across the country, enabling digital supplementary materials to replace traditional texts. Suddenly, differentiated instruction became more effective, along with accountability and sharing. Leaders can now build an education that lifts their students into the world where they succeed.

What veteran teachers suspected the research has proved: 21st Century students are different. With different attention spans, higher IQ test scores, and social networks, their sophistication comes earlier—with a different skill set. There is a silver lining: We can teach this “New Brain” more effectively, more efficiently, more engagingly. We have the technology! Media has evolved and education must evolve to match.

The “stand alone” method of teaching is fading and being replace by a model that taps colleagues, content, experts, and communication from both around the world and across the hall.  Collaborative projects with 'real time' elements take boldness and planning but building 21st Century Learners into 21st Century citizens makes it worthwhile . Watch some case study previews of coming classroom practice that tap Web 2.0, state curriculum standards, and student dedication .

The cameras in their cell phones make them citizen journalists. The web is their personal library and media center. Social networks give them enormous group expertise.  They communicate in real time with the ends of the earth. But can they convince their teachers to let them learn at school with help from such powerful tools? Beyond the "wow," technology provides nearly limitless potential for connectivity and education. See examples of how today's technologies can (and should) engage and teach a new generation of students.

One of the unforeseen consequences into technology’s integration in the social fabric is the creation of new knowledge, including new content and new strategies for teaching and learning. The challenges of content creation especially match 21st Century learners and the digital classroom. Jobs, global problems, and communication will be intertwined with the creation of both knowledge and content, and the ability to look at and analyze what is newly created will become a 21st Century skill. Originally created as a strategy for teachers of the gifted, this approach applies to all learners and gives a new perspective on what to do with all those digital tools

For only a sliver of time in human culture has learning meant decoding the written word. Learning means assimilating information in a way that matches our wiring: responding to the terabits of information in motion and sound. Technology brings education access to the transformative visual tools of an image-based society--- a move closer to the way we truly learn. Follow with a veteran the 30-year path of projects from film to Internet2. Learn what this technology means for your school and what a commitment to simple truths can mean to education.