Teacher-Ideas

Some Thoughts About the Future

On the previous page, I focused on applications that many of us already use. One very popular tool for education is the free online office suite provided by Google.com. Google Docs allows users to compose Microsoft Word documents, create spreadsheets and enables users to make online surveys. At the same time, it gives groups of people the chance to collaborate online while creating files - they can chat within a shared document, engage in discussions that are saved for other collaborators to read later, and of course, can edit files simultaneously. This Blog is another example of a collaborative tool - with shared access, anyone could edit this site along with me.

But... you may ask...

"Why should our students use collaborative tools?"

The obvious answer is that it helps them to collaborate on school assignments. However the more compelling reason is that they will need to be ready for their future working lives where they will all experience "the second Internet" - the social one that includes collaboration.

In Figure 3 at the bottom of the fourth page of the following report published by Wedbush Securities, the #1 work productivity software in the offline world was (is?) of course, Microsoft Office. That of the "first Internet" is listed as Google Docs, but in the "second Internet" column? The researchers predict that it will be a company called Jive Software.

The Second Internet

View more documents from Lou Kerner

The reason that we have not heard much about this company is that it creates software for businesses. Your first impression may be that Jive has nothing to do with education, but I found it fascinating to watch the one minute promotional video on the company's website. I feel that this shows how in the future, companies will indeed require employees to work even more as a team. No matter how much some students hate to work on group projects...
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The Flipped Classroom and New Literacies

If you have not yet looked carefully at the Wordle that appears at the top of this blog, please do so now. In order to create it, I Googled "vision future education", and then selected words from summaries of pages that resulted. I noticed that there were both positive and negative words, plus there was reference to Salman Khan. I included his "Khan Academy" not to promote Khan's commercial enterprise, but to point out that we are in a period of change that will be so revolutionary that our classroom practise may indeed be turned upside down. Please take the time to watch his Ted talk presentation about his vision for the future of education and how some schools are literally flipping the classroom... delivering the lecture on video for homework and assigning the exercises during class when the teacher is available to help. I don't anticipate that this will work for every subject, but if you are a math, science or business education teacher, I'm sure that you will find a tutorial of interest at the Khan Academy Website.




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