A Tour of 21st-Century Learning

Organised by Apple Inc. 9 Jun 2008

Key Learning Points

Keynote: Preparing Students for a Global, Digital Economy

1. Today's students are no longer the people our educational system was designed to teach." (2001)
2. Characteristics of digital natives: they are creative, multi-tasking and collaborative producers
3. International Society for Technology in Education 
   • Educational Technology Standards for Students 2007 lists the following 6 expectations of learners
     1. Creativity and Innovation
     2. Communication and Collaboration
     3. Research and Information Fluency
     4. Critical Thinking, Problem Solving, and Decision Making
     5. Digital Citizenship
     6. Technology Operations and Concepts
4. Vision is the basis of education, technology provides the pre-requisite tool
5. There was an overview of the implementation of 1 to 1 Learning Program (1 laptop to 1 student) and the research results that support its successful implementation

Breakout Session 1: Supporting a 2st-century learning environment

1. Hands-on session on Shore Life (Biology, Geography)
2. Students use iMac softwares Skitch, Photo Booth, and iMovie to label photos, string photos and a video clip into a movie lesson
3. Presenter: Jennifer Kee can be contacted at jenniferkee@gmail.com
4. Her blog at http://jenniferkee.wordpress.com/ has many useful resources/software tips for both PCs and Macs

1. Hands-on session on creating articles in a newsletter (History, English)
2. Students use iMac softwares Photo Booth, Pages, iPhoto, save as pdf file and submit to Snapshots Website
3. Approach: self-directed learning, different learning styles, group interaction
4. Presenter: Paviter Singh 
5. His web resources on lesson ideas at  http://web.mac.com/paviter/ReThink/Home.html
6. Other useful resources:
   • http://www.google.com/google-d-s/intl/en/tour1.html gives a tour of creating spreadsheets, calendar, etc. for collaboration and sharing
   • http://pro.corbis.com/ a source of royalty free images
   • http://del.icio.us/ for sharing bookmarks

Breakout Session 3: Enhancing collaboration, creativity and communication

1. Hands-on session on interdisciplinary topic Poetry in Plant Reproduction (Biology and English)
2. Students use iMac softwares Garageband, create a podcast and upload to Mac website
3. Use of Speech feature to read English text, Dictionary features

Others

• The presenters for the breakout sessions were Apple Distinguished Educators (ADE) 
• The hands-on sessions use Mac laptops with a suite of easy to use softwares for image, video editing, movie-making, podcast making, upload to Mac sites etc.
• Personal notes in our context: for similar tasks on a MS XP platform, there are corresponding softwares and sites available from different sources, e.g.
  • photoshop for image editing, simple editing/labelling with Paint, MS Movie Maker for editing and creating videos, podcast softwares downloadable from the internet, google tools for sharing, free Web 2.0 platforms like wikis, blogs, to share and collaborate on projects.