Over the last few months, a PowerPoint presentation has been doing the rounds, which has a strong message for educational audiences. It works as an opener for conferences or events where the future of education and learning is under discussion, or where you want to provoke a discussion about learning.
- Karl Fisch, of Arapahoe High School in the US, conceived and created the first version of this presentation for a staff development day. And published it on the web via his website. He released it and gave permission for others to modify it under a Creative Commons licence.
- Scott McLeod modified it, to make it more relevant to an audience in a wider context. And published it on the web with a Creative Commons licence
- And then Jeff Brenman, of Apollo Ideas, applied the creative design to Scott’s version. And published it on the web via SlideShare where, incidentally, it won the competition for the “World’s Best Slideshow”
This is the reason from Karl Fisch why this presentation is heppened
“My administration asked me if I wanted to speak at one of our beginning of the year faculty meetings. I often provide updates on what’s new and different with technology in our building and what teachers need to know to get the year started. But this year I’m really focused on staff development and the “vision” of where we should be headed, so I wanted to do something different. I don’t know for sure how it is in your schools, but I imagine they are like mine - a faculty meeting is a horrible place to have the conversations we need to have. In addition, since 49 of my teachers are involved in the staff development described elsewhere on this blog, I felt it would be a waste of time - and possibly counterproductive - to try to discuss anything of substance in the faculty meeting.
So, instead, I decided to take David Warlick up on his idea of telling the new story. I put together a PowerPoint presentation with some (hopefully) thought-provoking ideas. I was hoping by telling some of these “stories” to our faculty, I could get them thinking about - and discussing with each other - the world our students are entering. To get them to really think about what our students are going to need to be successful in the 21st century, and then how that might impact what they do in their classrooms. It would also help the faculty that are not currently participating in my staff development join the conversation.
So I basically said most of the above to the faculty, and then told them that even though I would usually argue that just showing something and not discussing it afterward was a bad idea, that this time - since a meaningful conversation at the end of a long faculty meeting was unlikely - that’s what I was going to do. But that I wanted them to hopefully think about this for their own classrooms, and then hold the conversation with each other over the next few days (and hopefully weeks and months and . . .).
I remixed content from David Warlick, Thomas Friedman, Ian Jukes, Ray Kurzweil and others, added some music, and came up with the following presentation. I was very nervous about showing this and how it would go over, but it seemed to have its intended effect (at least initially - we’ll see if it really helps generate the on-going conversations we need to have).”
Thank you for Youtube.com, Thefischbowl.blogspot.com & Blogs.msdn.com