Highlights of Alan November’s Keynote Address at Tech Forum Conference October 26, 2007

“We have a lot of technology, not a lot of vision,” Alan November said as he began his keynote address of the 2007 Tech Forum Northeast conference.  Addressing a crowd of around a thousand technology leaders and educators, November detailed what he feels are major problems with technology and learning in today’s schools and offered his vision for change.

“The real revolution is not technology, its information, ” November explained. “Its not about technology – its about rewriting the job description of students and teachers. Students need to be taught to be self-directed, self-motivated  and know how to organize information so they can organize learning.”

To achieve that learning goal, November explained teachers need to give up control in the classroom and rewrite the job description of both teachers and students.  He suggested that teachers create student teams responsible for creating screencasted tutorials and podcasts reviewing material covered in the last week and instructed teachers to post those reviews online for all students to see.  Student research teams also need to be developed to scour the web in search of teacher/student-created content already online and bring that material into the classroom as well. November showed the audience a search identifier host:k12.ny.us plus keyword to bring up sites that only show pages hosted on k-12 education sites.

Constantly pointing out the technological disconnection that occurs between schools and students, November said, “Schools block the five things students love to do at home with technology: blogging, downloading music, video games, instant messaging and YouTube.” November advised that educators look at what students are doing with technology outside of school, bring them to school and fill those tool with rich curriculum content to engage students. 

My Commentary:

Inspired by November’s talk, here is a list of some of the good ideas I extracted.

• Teachers should talk while using the smartboard and record it and save it as a tutorial
• Create tutorials online and on dvd for those without access at home
• Each teacher bring two students to staff development
• Teachers should publish their recordings to teacher blogs
• Podcasting review team
• Weekly review of what was covered last week
• Every teacher needs a tutorial design team
• Content review team
• Send a thank you note for information you find online
• Skype
• Start the conversation of PD with: “what do you love to teach?
• Ask teachers to play a video game with the students