Kitty Boitnott, a media specialist at Chamberlayne Elementary School in Henrico County, VA, has spent the last year as president of the 60,000-member Virginia Education Association (VEA), the largest and oldest professional organization serving public schools in the Commonwealth of Virginia.
How is Virginia making sure students learn about 21st-century skills?
My most recent job was in Henrico County, VA, where in 2001, Henrico County Public Schools had just entered into the largest laptop initiative in the country with Apple. Every child in high school received his or her own iBook that he/she was allowed to keep 24 hours a day, 7 days a week during the school year. At the middle school level, students starting receiving their own laptops in the middle of their sixth-grade year. And for the first several years of the initiative, every classroom and every library in every school got at least five iMac desktop computers. more » » »
Say it with words and you're lucky if they hear it or bother to read it. Tell your story with imagery, and it grabs attention, evokes emotion, and is more instantly processed. Sixty thousand times faster, say some researchers. At Hong Kong International School (HKIS), we have concerns quite similar to those of teachers in the U.S.: We want to engage student interest, we want to efficiently scaffold for students to construct meaning, and we want to motivate and empower them to communicate. Like all educators, we have students who deserve to learn 21st-century media skills and literacy to communicate in ways that are relevant in a new century. Article continues
Advice about leading successful ed-tech initiatives ...
This is a visual display of the different types of information presentation. Deigned as a periodic table, it is well organised and can be used for all sorts of purposes - presentations, planning and information literacy come to mind.
http://www.visual-literacy.org/periodic_table/periodic_table.html
free new web site -- http://www.makebeliefscomix.com
-- where students can create their own comic strips. The site offers fun
animal and human characters with different moods, thought and talk balloons
to fill in with words, and story prompts.
