The articles and slide shows condemned the educational community for not staying current and are not entering into conversation of how to change for the future as an educational community as a whole. NCLB was a top down attempt to bring us into the 21st century, which I believe is not going to get us there.
I know kids love youtube. Unfortunately, the videos I see the students promote are ones where kids are doing very dangerous stunts. Therefore, I agree we have to teach how to become smarter about new sources of information. In an age of overflowing information and proliferating media, kids need to rapidly process what's coming at them and distinguish between what's reliable and what isn't. "It's important that students know how to manage it, interpret it, validate it, and how to act on it," says Dell executive Karen Bruett, who serves on the board of the Partnership for 21st Century Skills, a group of corporate and education leaders focused on upgrading American education. : http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1568480-4,00.html#ixzz0b6NKsY7o. From the same article, Learn the names of all the rivers in South America. That was the assignment given to Deborah Stipek's daughter Meredith in school, and her mom, who's dean of the Stanford University School of Education, was not impressed. "That's silly," Stipek told her daughter. "Tell your teacher that if you need to know anything besides the Amazon, you can look it up on Google." Any number of old-school assignments--memorizing the battles of the Civil War or the periodic table of the elements--now seem faintly absurd. That kind of information, which is poorly retained unless you routinely use it, is available at a keystroke. Still, few would argue that an American child shouldn't learn the causes of the Civil War or understand how the periodic table reflects the atomic structure and properties of the elements. As school critic E.D. Hirsch Jr. points out in his book, The Knowledge Deficit, kids need a substantial fund of information just to make sense of reading materials beyond the grade-school level. Without mastering the fundamental building blocks of math, science or history, complex concepts are impossible. As a 5th & 6th teacher, I feel my job is to have my students master the fundamental building blocks of math, science, and history. I teach with textbooks, but we use various accomodations such as small group instruction, cooperative learning, technology, manipulatives, and drama. Teachers need not fear that they will be made obsolete. They will, however, feel increasing pressure to bring their methods--along with the curriculum--into line with the way the modern world works. That means putting a greater emphasis on teaching kids to collaborate and solve problems in small groups and apply what they've learned in the real world. Besides, research shows that kids learn better that way than with the old chalk-and-talk approach. http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1568480-4,00.html#ixzz0b6NKsY7o
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I believe it was David Warlick who told a story about helping his daughter learn about the Civil War. She learned all of the "higher order" concepts-- causes of the war, effects, etc... but she failed the test at school because the questions were all "lower order" questions, like how many men died at a certain battle, or when a certain battle took place. So there is still a disconnect between the "standards" (either State mandated or teacher imposed) and what's really important for our students to know.
A famous quote attributed to Henry Ford in the early 1900's mentions how he didn't see the need to clutter up his mind with endless facts when he could push a button and have any number of employees provide the information he required. A hundred years later we ALL have such a button: the mouse button!
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