Pens and pencils are far from obsolete

The idea is simple: by working together, students figure out how to find common ground, balance Rosetta Stone V3 each others' skills, communicate clearly and be accountable to the team for their part of the project. Just as they would in the work place.Watch for: (1) Department of Education working to establish a one-stop shop for teacher networks. (2) Commonly accepted guidelines for using YouTube, Facebook and other social media in schools.2. Tech-Powered.Pens and pencils are far from obsolete, but forward-thinking educators are finding other interactive tools to grab their students' attention. School programs are built around teaching how to create video games. Teachers are using Guitar Hero, geo-caching (high-tech scavenger hunt), Google maps for teaching literature, Wii in lieu of P.E., VoiceThread to communicate, ePals and LiveMocha to learn global languages with native speakers, Voki to create avatars of characters in stories, and Skype to communicate with peers from all over the world -- even augmented reality, connecting students to virtual characters. And that's just a tiny sampling.Creating Rosetta Stone Latin America Spanish media is another noteworthy tech-driven initiative in education. Since media permeates our lives, the better able students are to create and communicate with media, the better connected they'll be to global events and to the working world. To that end, programs like Digital Youth Network focus on teaching students to create podcasts, videos and record music; and Adobe Youth Voices teaches kids how to make and edit films and connects them to documentary filmmakers.Tech-savvy teachers are threading media-making tools into the curriculum with free (or cheap) tools, like comic strip-creation site ToonDo, Microsoft Photo Story 3 for slide shows, SoundSlides for audio slide shows, Microsoft Movie Maker and VoiceThread to string together images, videos, and documents, to name just a few.Students in high school and college are using digital portfolios -- the equivalent of resumes -- to showcase the trajectory of their work on websites that link to their assignments, achievements and course of study, using photos, graphics, spreadsheets and web pages.Watch for: The explosive growth of high-tech companies and venture capitalists investing ever-more capital in the education market. 3. Blended.Simply stated, blended learning is combining computers with traditional teaching. Knowing that today's learners are wired at all times, teachers are directing students' natural online proclivity towards schoolwork. It's referred to as different Rosetta Stone Arabic things -- reverse teaching, flip teaching, backwards classroom or reverse instruction. But it all means the same thing: students conduct research, watch videos, participate in collaborative online discussions and so on at home and at school -- both in K-12 schools and in colleges and universities.Teachers use this technique in different ways. Some assign interactive quizzes and online collaborative projects at home, some use computer time in class, some assign watching videos and lectures at home and use class time for hands-on projects, some place most of the curriculum online and work one-one-one with students in class. However they choose to do it, the best examples of blended learning programs involve teachers who use home-time online discussions and collaborative projects as fuel for content and discussion in the classroom.Watch for: Schools using blended learning to save costs on books and supplements.WHAT THESE TRENDS MEANGiven the growing momentum of these trends, what does [Rosetta Stone ] it mean for students, teachers, schools, and the education community at large?Teachers' and students' relationships are changing as they learn from each other.Teachers roles are shifting from owners of information to facilitators and guides to learning.Educators are finding different ways of using class time.Introverted students are finding ways to participate in class discussions online.Different approaches to teaching are being used in the same class.Students are getting a global perspective.Read more in the MindShift series about the future of curriculum.