<strong>Radio WillowWeb</strong> is a podcast for kids and by kids from the students at Willowdale Elemetary School in Omaha, Nebraska.

Seventy percent of the jobs available in the workforce will somehow be related to the acquisition and manipulation of digital knowledge. Workers will need to be able to access information, evaluate it for its worth, use it in creative ways, and be flexible enough to change their work product as the information changes. Ninety percent of those jobs will go unfilled if this need is not addressed today in the schools. The time is now.

"There are a lot of terrible educational games out there, where you have to do something unfun, like solve five math problems, so you can do something fun, like play a game," said Ben Stokes, a games expert at the MacArthur Foundation.<br><br> Instead, the experts are interested in the educational benefits of commercially available games that were not expressly designed for school use--simulation games like Zoo Tycoon, in which elementary school-age children can build virtual zoos by selecting animals, creating appropriate habitats, managing food budgets and even setting the prices of popcorn at the concession stands.<br>

Some students spend many hours communicating asynchronously, having a much richer dialogue than could have been possible through the best face-to-face facilitation.

Technological Pedagogical Content Knowledge (TPCK) attempts to capture some of the essential qualities of <a class="WikiLink" id="p-7631a6586157c294aa699e0dcfa6247009df9eb5" href="http://tpck.pbwiki.com/knowledge">knowledge</a> required by teachers for technology integration in their teaching, while addressing the complex, multifaceted and situated nature of <a class="WikiLink" id="p-1c3a09d9d8f9a2f36c4a6a96334e9cb8c8b73a34" href="http://tpck.pbwiki.com/teacher%20knowledge">teacher knowledge</a>. At the heart of the TPCK framework, is the complex interplay of three primary forms of knowledge: <a class="WikiLink" id="p-04a7e13fcccc9ce90d762d5ad9c4442057ac593b" href="http://tpck.pbwiki.com/Content%20%28C%29">Content (C)</a>, <a class="WikiLink" id="p-5130be6af8b735c398544ec6c4e19f0e33182732" href="http://tpck.pbwiki.com/Pedagogy%20%28P%29">Pedagogy (P)</a>, and <a class="WikiLink" id="p-24908791cfef8217a8a27816741bc46d8da4b717" href="http://tpck.pbwiki.com/Technology%20%28T%29">Technology (T)</a>.

As the brilliant German educator Kurt Hahn (the founder of Outward Bound) said, teaching people who are aren’t ready is like “pouring and pouring into a jug and never looking to see whether the lid is off.”

People have radically different learning styles and abilities, and effective learning—learning that benefits <i>all</i> students—is necessarily individualized and self-paced. This is the elephant in the classroom from which no teacher can hide.

Finally, whereas that first compulsory-education law in Massachusetts was competency-based, the system that grew in its wake requires <i>all</i> young people to attend school, no matter what they know. Even worse, the system provides no incentives for students to master material quickly, and few or no meaningful options for young people who do leave school.

In today’s fast-paced world, education needs to be spread out over a lifetime, and the main thing we need to teach our young people is to love the process of learning.

<p> In discussing the need for hands-on science learning, Nichols asked us to imagine parents at the dinner table asking their young son or daughter that age-old question "What did you learn in school today?" The child shrugs, as children often do, and says, "We learned to play basketball." The parents then ask, "How did you do that?" The child answers, "Well, we sat in the gym and the teacher passed out these books, and we turned to chapter one, about passing the basketball, and we learned there are three types of passes: the bounce pass, the chest pass, and the one-handed pass." </p> <p> "OK," parents would say, wanting to know more, "what happened next?" The child continues, "We read the next chapter about dribbling. And another chapter on shooting. We learned there’s the set shot, the bank shot, and the jump shot." After a few minutes of this recitation, the parents, increasingly exasperated, challenge their child: "But did the teacher ever give you a basketball and let you go on the court and play?" "No,” the child says with a sigh. "We just read the book until the bell rang."</p>

To me, technology facilitator isn’t just about bringing technology into the core classrooms, it’s about the process - the process of learning how to plan a new unit in a new way, using new tools…

Indeed, blogging acts as an important motivational tool for learning, said Dean Shareski, head of digital learning for the Prairie South School Board. Students are more motivated when they realize hundreds of people can view their work, Shareski said, noting interest in writing has increased since the blogs began.

<p>The EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative's (ELI's) <em>7 Things You Should Know About...</em> series provides concise information on emerging learning technologies and related practices. Each brief focuses on a single technology or practice and describes:</p> <ul> <li>What it is</li> <li>How it works</li> <li>Where it is going</li> <li>Why it matters to teaching and learning</li></ul>