Did You Know?

It has been a very busy weekend around the Downing household.  With three little girls to get ready for trick-or-treating, Halloween can be a hectic time!  It was still a ton of fun and the girls had a marvelous time trick-or-treating in Milford.  Between the Sugar Shack house, the garage full of toys, and all of the other wonderful houses that so generously filled our little beggars buckets, our girls are set for quite some time!

This week I am going to keep my writing short and (hopefully) sweet - rather appropriate for the biggest candy night of the year. :-)

In the past two weeks we have discussed two different aspects of technology integration in schools.  First we discussed the idea of exponential change and what it has meant in terms of computing power.  Last week I shared a story that outlined the power of technology to be used as a tool to increase engagement.  Thank you to all of you who took the time to fill out Grace's survey by the way.  She sits at 112 responses right now and I can't tell you how many times we have reviewed her data.  This week I want to share with you two videos that really made an impression on me when I first saw them and I think they will with you as well.

They are two videos in a series called "Did You Know?"  They are produced by a team of researchers that includes a professor from Iowa State named Scott McLeod.  Scott is the leader of CASTLE (Center for the Advanced Study of Technology Leadership in Education)  Scott is also a well known speaker and blogger.  He often discusses the need to increase technology integration in education and you can find his blog HERE

The Did You Know videos are filled with facts about technology and the changing nature of our world.  There have been four official releases of the video series.  The two that I will share with you are Did You Know 2.0 which was produced in 2008 and Did You Know 4.0 which was released in 2009.

It is quite possible that you have already seen the videos since quite a few people have seen them on YouTube alone (11,631,097 for DYK 2.0 and 1,970,730 for DYK 4.0 or there abouts.)  Check the videos out and I encourage you to leave a comment about the facts or statistics that surprised you the most.  Some of the information is hard to believe but you can check the bibliographies at the end of each video to see where the research is coming from.  I think you will see that these videos really do present some startling information that makes you think and makes a strong case that we are truly living in exponential times.







Have a great week!
-BD

Did You Know?