Schools of the Future annual conference

We stayed until the end.

Leslie Witten, the library media specialist at Island Pacific Academy, and I attended the final session after an energizing day of professional development.  We were rewarded with gold at the end of the rainbow: Rob Mancabelli’s session on Personal Learning Networks.

Exhausted and happy

He explained that all classrooms are now blended; students don’t ever leave their online networks, regardless of school appropriate use policies for mobile devices. Modeling for students how to utilize these devices as tools to learn what they want to know is as valuable a skill as teaching them how to analyze a text.

It is not only a small radical group of educators who believe this but the very traditionally minded National Council of Teachers of English is also on board. According to their position statement: 
Twenty-first century readers and writers need to:

• Develop proficiency with the tools of technology

• Build relationships with others to pose and solve problems collaboratively and cross-culturally

• Design and share information for global communities to meet a variety of purposes

• Manage, analyze and synthesize multiple streams of simultaneous information

• Create, critique, analyze, and evaluate multi-media texts

• Attend to the ethical responsibilities required by these complex environments

It was a great session and I’m glad we lingered long enough to catch it.