EdTech Avenue

21st CENTURY SKILLS - http://www.flowgram.com/p/6zhbew4gth26b3

This is a presentation created on Flowgram, a tool that appears to be something many of us could use!

The content is here is incredible.  Site after site about 21st Century Skills is presented here.

CYBERSMART CURRICULUM - http://cybersmartcurriculum.org/

Cybersmart Curriculum provides free curriculum for K-12 tech literacy.

Units are arranged by broad topics -

•  Safety and Security Online
•  Manners, Bullying, and Ethics
•  Authentic Learning and Creativity
•  Research and Information Fluency
•  Twenty-First Century Challenges

ATOMIC LEARNING  http://www.atomiclearning.com

Atomic Learning created lessons called Lesson Accelerators which provide a video tutorial for each step of the lesson. They also have their how-to movies for which they’re well known.  They’ve referenced these lessons and how-to movies with NETS-S and created a searchable index.

Most movies require a subscription.  I’m not sure whether you need to have a subscription to access every lesson -?  (IHMCS authenticates by IP, so I’m not sure what others see…) However, this could be a valuable resource because it at least suggests some ideas even if you can’t access everything.

From the main page, go to Resources – Lesson Accelerators – Search by State Standards or ISTE NETS-S

It has been decided that much of our focus at our meetings with Archdiocese tech coordinators this year will be on standards.  There is no “standard” standard we are required to follow.  Though many schools are using McREL standards for much of their core curriculum, not all are.  I offered to look over the McREL technology standards to see how they relate to the ISTE NETS-S (National Educational Technology Standards for Students) so that we can possibly come up with a list for our use here in the Archdiocese of St. Paul and Minneapolis.  I am having a very difficult time with comparing the two documents and have been working on this post for almost two weeks now!  The next meeting is tomorrow, so what I have must be posted, ready or not…

The McREL standards state that “fifteen documents were identified as useful for developing content standards for technology,” including the NETS-S by ISTE, but the 1998 version of NETS-S has since been drastically revised.  Looking at the McREL standards, I am finding myself frequently asking the question, “what does that have to do with educational technology?”  Almost half of the McREL standards seem to envelop the very broad spectrum of “technology” to include science, engineering, agriculture, medicine, etc.  While I realize these are all fields related to technology, it is not focused on the same things as NETS-S, which has a smaller focus on computer and media technologies our students would be using in school.  Beyond the first three McREL standards, I find very little relationship to NETS-S from 1998 or 2007.

McREL says very little about multimedia and collaboration and nothing about authoring tools beyond a desktop publishing program.  With Web 2.0 in the forefront of our technologies today, can we afford to overlook this omission?

In my opinion, we will need to look at three different sources when creating a list of standards for the Archdiocese.  These three sources are: NETS-S from 1998, which focuses more on learning how to use computers and related technologies; NETS-S from 2007, which focuses on collaboration and creativity as well as current digital responsibilities of students, with a central focus on activities that use computer technologies rather than lessons on how to use various technologies; and McREL standards for technology, which includes much of what is contained in the previous but has some areas that relate more to industrial technology, which most of our schools do not offer before grade 9.

There is no way to merge the documents together seamlessly because of how each is organized.  So, there are three documents available here.  One is a grid that shows how I feel the McREL standards relate to NETS, side-by-side.  Another is a list of the McREL Standards, each followed by a note that refers to a NETS item.  The final document is a list of the NETS items, along with a “profile” talking about various activities students should be able to accomplish at different benchmark years, and each of these are followed by statements from the McREL standards that I felt related.  In some cases the relationship between the two was obvious, but at other times I really stretched, for example, using the category topics to link some of the McREL loosely to NETS.  Hopefully after our next meeting it will make some tiny bit of sense, but for now, here it is:

Standards – Grid

Standards – McREL base, with NETS items

Standards – NETS base, with McREL items