ITEC 2012 - Making Learning Meaningful for Millennials

What does it take to make learning meaningful to your millennial students?  That is a question that should be on the lips of every teacher.  The first thing that we need to do is realize that our students today are different than 20 years ago.  They are the first generation to live in a digital world.  They may not be born knowing how to use technology, but they have grown up in a world where digital answers have always been available and they are Digitally Comfy (as Angela Maiers says).

I am sharing my ideas about how we can best address our Millennial students' needs.

Here are the resources that I used. If you have additional ideas, please add them to the comments below.

We will be using technology throughout the session so let's begin with some of the opening resources:

Twitter: For all of your twitterers, we will use the hashtag #ITEC12 When you tweet, include this hashtag in your message so that others can follow along with your ideas. If you want to see what was posted, click on the hashtag above and it will show you what has been said.

Collaborative Notes: We will also use collaborative note taking. This is a Google Doc that I created and then laid open to the world for anyone to edit.  This means that you just need to click on the link and it will take you to the Google Doc. You don't have to sign-in but you will be known as Anonymous???? when you are entering your ideas.  Go ahead and add the info that you find interesting.  Go out on the web during the session to find relevant information and add the link to the document.

The Slideshow

ITEC Making Learning Meaningful for Your Millennial Students from Leigh Zeitz

Who Are the Millenials?

• Millennials: Confident. Connected. Open to Change. (article) 
• Echo Boomers by L. Franklin Devine (video)

Readings, Watchings, Listenings and Doings

• Emerging Instructional Technologies
• Educational Technology and Design
• Seminar: How to Write a Grad Paper
• Selection and Integration of Instructional Technologies 

Millennial Mindset

• Boomers, Gen-Xers and Millennials: Understanding the New Students. (article)
• Is Google Making Us Stupid? (article)
• How Millennial Are You? (quiz)
• Networked Student (video)

I hope that this session has been useful for you. I am interested in knowing if and how this material has been useful to you. I hope that this is just the beginning of our connection.

• Subscribe to this blog using the link in the right column.
• Send me an email at zeitz@uni.edu
• Follow me on Twitter:  @zeitz
• Let's visit on Skype:  leighzeitz

 How else can I help you?

Z

K-12 Online Conference - Purposeful Play

Have you heard of the K12 Online Conference?  It is a wonderful idea!

Once a year, educators submit 20-minute videos along a specific educational topic and then they release these videos throughout a 3-week virtual conference.

The website describes it as a "FREE online conference open to ANYONE organized by educators for educators around the world interested in integrating emerging technologies into classroom practice.  The goal of the conference  is to help educators make sense of and meet the needs of a continually changing learning landscape."

This year's conference topic is Purposeful Play.  It has 4 strands including:
Sandbox Play, Level Up, Story Time and Team Captains.

Each of the presentations is "released" on a blog at a specified time based upon the 2011 Presentation Schedule. They do this so that the presentations aren't released in one huge on-slaught but rather in sequence over the 3-week period (Nov 21 - Dec 13). You participate by downloading or streaming the presentations and then viewing the presentations. After (or while) you watch the presentation, you can post feedback and comments on the blog.

At the end is a culminating live event to celebrate the Afterglow on 2:00 AM GMT on Tuesday, Dec 13.

I have submitted a presentation entitled Gaming to Learn by Learning to Game. It will be released at 1:00 PM GMT (7:00 AM Central Standard Time) on Friday, December 9.

The resources that I used in the presentation will be available in my next posting on this blog, Dr. Z Reflects.

Cover It Live discussion for Dr. Z's "Creating a PLN" presentation at WEMTA

Begin by visiting our Presentation Wiki. It is filled with links for PLNs.

Here is a link to the CoverItLive online conversation that we will have during our presentation Using Web 2.0 Tools to Create Your PLN.

Below is the session window for the discussion that will be held during Dr. Z's presentation. You just need to click on the circle in the center of the window and it should open a window where you can enter your name and then enter your comments.

Begin by saying "Hello" to everyone and your city of origin.
Good luck. If you have any problems, turn to your neighbor. Together you can figure it out.

Z

P.S. The presentation will begin at 10:15 but the discussion will officially begin at 10:00 AM

TWITTER FEEDS: We have enabled this discussion to capture Twitter feeds with the HashTags:
#wemta
#wemtapln

As you may know, wemta are the initials for this conference "Wisconsin Educational Media and Technology Association". Include either of these in your twitter postings and they should appear here.

Embedding Google Presentation in Your Blog

One of the greatest features of Google Presentation is that it can be shared with others. You can embed the presentation in a blog like I did below:




You can also access this Google Presentation through this URL.

When you access a Google Presentation in this way, you can actually become 100% engaged in the presentation because you can add your ideas through the chat window. This requires you to sign-in with your Google account, but you become part of the discussion.
I have borrowed instructions in how to do this from the Tech Tips Tuesday blog.

Here's how it works:

1. Go to http://docs.google.com
2. Upload you PowerPoint file to Google Presentations (up to 10MB from your computer)
3. Warning: Not all formatting features from Design Templates will always be preserved and there is NO animation.
4. When you publish your presentation to the Internet anyone will be able to access and view it online. They will also be able to join the presentation online and chat with others also viewing the presentation. Your document will be assigned a unique address (URL) on google.com. To do this go to Share button (upper right of screen) and choose Publish.
5. Click on the published link and this will open up your PowerPoint online and a chat window will appear on the right side of the screen.
6. In order for audience members to discuss the presentation, they will need to log into their Google account so their name will appear in the chat window.
7. Google Presentations also provides you with the embed code if you want to place your Google presentation in a webpage, blog or wiki.
8. Click HERE to view a sample presentation and its chat window.

Perhaps the best part of this using this Presentation program is that you can have multiple people working on it simultaneously. This means that you and a colleague can be in separate rooms in separate cities in separate countries working on different pages of the same presentation. I especially enjoy doing this while using Skype or Google Chat to verbally discuss what we are doing (and make funny faces at my friend while we work.)

What sort of experiences have you had with Google Presentation?

Z

Web 2.0 Gadgets and Gizmos

I am in the middle of a presentation and I am showing how to post.