iKids

$295 fee includes continental breakfast, mid-morning and mid-afternoon snack breaks!

Attend this workshop to learn more about our digital natives (students) and how to connect the curriculum to their world. This will not be an all-day lecture format, but an interactive, fun and highly informational workshop in which you will obtain tools and resources you can begin to implement in your classroom immediately. You will learn:

Go back to your school or classroom armed with a plan on specific strategies for incorporating technologies and multimedia into your lessons.

Appropriate for all grade levels. From kindergarten to college and beyond, find out how people are learning, making their voices heard to create positive change, and becoming connected with their communities using emerging technologies.

You may have heard today’s students referred to as “digital natives”, and today’s educators as “digital immigrants”. We are working with students whose entire lives have been immersed in the 21^st century media culture. Today’s students are digital learners – they literally take in the world via the filter of computing devices: the cellular phones, handheld gaming devices, PDAs, and laptops they take everywhere, plus the computers, TVs, and game consoles at home. A survey by the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation found that young people (ages 8-18) mainline electronic media for more than six hours a day, on average. Many are multitasking – listening to music while surfing the Web or instant-messaging friends while playing a video game.

Our students are living in a media-saturated, technology-driven world. From television to iPods, gaming devices, cell phones, instant messaging, and Internet use including searching the web, chat rooms, Blogs, Podcasts, videos (for example, www.YouTube.com and www.MySpace.com), a majority of 7th to 12th graders multitask using these technologies.

Even toddlers (including my 2 year old grandson) are using interactive gaming devices such as Leapster and going online to web sites such as www.pbskids.org and www.nick.com to watch videos, "read" stories, and play games, learning everything from their colors to letters to problem-solving. Many of today's cartoons for preschoolers incorporate the use of multiple technologies (including the Internet) For example, Dora the Explorer or the character, Pixel, on Lazy Town, use many technologies.

Using the Internet and multimedia tools students can achieve entirely new levels of educational experiences which are relevant to them and to the world of the 21st century.

Educators can help students, and therefore, society, by providing well-planned online educational experiences. From web site development to virtual environments, anything can be learned, and at higher levels of understanding. Even physical education can be incorporated into virtual learning environments using tools such as GameBike and wii. And we are all aware of the current epidemic in obesity and overall lack of physical fitness among our youth.

Media literacy is a critical component of education today. Students must be not only consumers and critics of multimedia, but producers. They must be constructors of knowledge, not mere consumers.

Preparing our kids for the future - Today's kindergarteners will be retiring in the year 2067. We have no idea of what the world will look in five years, much less 60 years, yet we are charged with preparing our students for life in that world. Our students are facing many emerging issues such as global warming, famine, poverty, health issues, a global population explosion and other environmental and social issues. These issues lead to a need for students to be able to communicate, function and create change personally, socially, economically and politically on local, national and global levels.

Even kindergarten children can make a difference in the world by participating in real-life, real-world service learning projects. You're never too young, or too old, to make your voice heard and create change that makes the world a better place.

Emerging technologies and resulting globalization also provide unlimited possibilities for exciting new discoveries and developments such as new forms of energy, medical advances, restoration of environmentally ravaged areas, communications, and exploration into space and into the depths of the oceans. The possibilities are unlimited.