Sunday, September 03, 2006
Inspiring Educational Podcasts
Marco Torres is one of the most innovative and powerful educators I've ever encountered. The California Teacher of the Year in 2005 and an internationally touted speaker, Torres is an advocate for students using multimedia as a way to liberate themselves.
Here's an inspiring speech he delivered in May 2006.
Here are some more links about Marco Torres
Alan November is on the cutting edge of an educational paradigm shift. Marco Torres was the keynote speaker at the first day of Alan's amazing conference, Building Learning Communities.
Listen to Alan's provocative speech to a British audience from 2005 and get invigorated.
His thesis (in this speech, anyway) is that schools are designed for the 1890s industrial ages, and that students today need three things:
1. The ability to manage huge amounts of information and to sift through it and locate the relevant information (and identify the bogus information that will inevitably get out there)
2. The ability to work with others, and those "others" will, in our global marketplace (or Flat World, to use Thomas Friedman's book title) be from all sorts of cultures all over the world
3. The ability to be self-directed learners
Our schools are not giving students what they need. Alan sees a "tipping point" in the near future, when schools will have a major paradigm shift away from the idea of filling students with information to regurgitate and towards structures that enable students to develop the three abilities he believes are crucial for people to have in the 21st century.
Here's a video of Alan's presentation (click on the "play video" box).
Finally, here's an interview with Marco Torres talking about empowering students through multimedia.
Here's an inspiring speech he delivered in May 2006.
Here are some more links about Marco Torres
Alan November is on the cutting edge of an educational paradigm shift. Marco Torres was the keynote speaker at the first day of Alan's amazing conference, Building Learning Communities.
Listen to Alan's provocative speech to a British audience from 2005 and get invigorated.
His thesis (in this speech, anyway) is that schools are designed for the 1890s industrial ages, and that students today need three things:
1. The ability to manage huge amounts of information and to sift through it and locate the relevant information (and identify the bogus information that will inevitably get out there)
2. The ability to work with others, and those "others" will, in our global marketplace (or Flat World, to use Thomas Friedman's book title) be from all sorts of cultures all over the world
3. The ability to be self-directed learners
Our schools are not giving students what they need. Alan sees a "tipping point" in the near future, when schools will have a major paradigm shift away from the idea of filling students with information to regurgitate and towards structures that enable students to develop the three abilities he believes are crucial for people to have in the 21st century.
Here's a video of Alan's presentation (click on the "play video" box).
Finally, here's an interview with Marco Torres talking about empowering students through multimedia.
# posted by Mr. G : 7:38 AM
