Marc Prensky Bio

Marc Prensky is an internationally acclaimed speaker, writer, consultant, and designer in the critical areas of education and learning. He is the author of Digital Game-Based Learning, and Don't Bother Me Mom -- I'm Learning.

Prensky is also the founder and CEO of Games2train (whose clients include IBM, Nokia, Pfizer, the US Department of Defense and the LA and Florida Virtual Schools) and creator of the sites www.dodgamecommunity.com and www.socialimpactgames.com.

Prensky has created over 50 software games for learning, including the world's first fast-action videogame-based training tools and world-wide, multi-player, multi-team on-line competitions. He has also taught at all levels.

Prensky has been featured in articles in The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal, has appeared on CNN, MSNBC, PBS, and the BBC, and was named as one of training's top 10 "visionaries" by Training magazine. He holds graduate degrees from Yale (Teaching) and Harvard (MBA).

Marc Prensky on YouTube

This YouTube features Marc Prensky talking about handheld learning.

Read About Digital Learning

Forty years after Joan Ganz Cooney's landmark study stimulated the creation of Sesame Street, Sesame Workshop has established a new center devoted to accelerating children's learning in a rapidly changing world. The Joan Ganz Cooney Center will focus new attention on the challenges children face today, asking the 21st century equivalent of her original question, "How can emerging media help children learn?"

These studies are worth looking at:

Pockets of Potential -- Examining over 25 handheld learning products and research projects in the U.S. and abroad, the report highlights early evidence of how these devices can help revolutionize teaching and learning.

The Power of POW! Wham!: Children, Digital Media and Our Nation's Future -- this paper specifically deals with digital technologies and elementary school students.

Getting Over the Slump: Innovation Strategies to Promote Children's Learning -- this report deals with using media technologies to help 4th grade students get over the reading slump.

Engaging Digital Natives

In the 21st century, teaching is about "engaging digital natives." What this means is that we adults have a lot of learning and catching up to do compared to our students who were born into a digital age and seemingly with digital intuition.

Below is a comprehensive slideshare presentation that outlines the different aspects of "engaging digital natives."

Marc Prensky Articles

Marc Prensky has tons of articles posted on his website.
Our discussions are going to focus on these articles:

Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants Digital
Natives, Digital Immigrants Part II
Backup Education?
Marc Prensky's Essential 21st Century Skills
The Role of Technology and Teaching in the Classroom

All of these articles can be downloaded and none are very long.

Digital Learners New Literacies

This video illustrates Curriculum 2.0

The iTouch for Learning

How can we use technology in learning everyday? You know the students would like it, so why not?

Just the Right Touch: Culbreth Students Show Off Their iTouch and its Capabilities

"About a dozen Culbreth faculty members also demonstrated how the iPod Touch is useful in their classrooms. Pre-algebra teacher Robert Bales showed how students can pull stats from a recent Carolina basketball game, for example, off of the ESPN application. Bales said the stats are a fun and exciting way to learn about important math fundamentals like fractions, decimals and percentages.

Ann Collins said students in the Culbreth writing center used their iPods to look up YouTube videos of Supreme Court Justice John Roberts swearing in President Obama as part of a discussion on the finer points of public speaking."

Trends in Technology

The link below is to the 6th Horizon Report which is published annually highlighting and describing the emerging technologies likely to have a great impact on teaching, learning, research, and creative expression in learning environments. This report is the culmination of a long-term research collaboration between the New Media Consortium and EDUCASE Learning Initiative.

Some of the trends discussed in detail are:

Mobile everything
Cloud Computing
Geo-everything
The Personal Web
Gaming for learning
Cell phones in learning

Reading this report gives a great overview of what is on the horizon in technological advancement.

The 2009 Horizon Report

Horizon Report K-12 Edition

Blooms Taxonomy 3.0

Blooms has been through versions that missed, namely 2.0. But, you can read about Bloom's taxanomy updated for the digial age here:

Blooms 3.0 - large downloadable .pdf

About Jenifer Fox

Jenifer Fox, author of Your Child's Strengths: Discover Them, Develop Them, Use Them will speak at Grace-St. Luke's Episcopal School on Tuesday, March 31 at 7:00 p.m. in the church sanctuary on the corner of Peabody and Belvedere. Jenifer Fox was the President of Purnell School, an independent, girls boarding high school in New Jersey until this fall when she became the full-time director of The Strengths Movement. Passionately written, Your Child's Strengths proposes a strengths-based philosophy that provides the tools to prepare kids for their future in a world that demands greater adaptability and creative thinking than ever before. Fox draws on both her research and her experience as Head of School to show parents and teachers how to identify a child's strength based on their actions, how to encourage those strengths once you have identified them, and how to help kids implement the strengths they reveal. Fox's strengths curriculum, The Affinities Program, grows out of a belief that building on students' strengths is the best way to help them grow into the people they were meant to become. The program provides specific and engaging exercises and activities to help young people discover their strengths and use them to carve out a path toward a meaningful future.

Jenifer Fox wrote and implemented The Affinities Program, the first four year strengths-based high school curriculum, at Purnell School. The Affinities Program won a Leading Edge Award in 2004 from the National Association of Independent Schools. In 2007, Jenifer Fox, the Purnell School and The Affinities Program were featured in PBS Special "Go Put Your Strengths to Work" with Marcus Buckingham. Fox, Buckingham and Purnell School were featured on The Today Show in April, 2007. Fox earned a B.S. in Communications from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, an M.A. in English from Middlebury College and an M. Ed. in School Administration from Harvard University.

Grace-St. Luke's is excited to host Jenifer Fox because her perspective that education should focus on developing each child's strengths and abilities to their fullest potential is a long held belief and school practice. Teachers and school staff are leading the way at Grace-St. Luke's focus on strengths awareness and self understanding by assessing each of their strengths using Tom Rath's book, Strengths 2.0, determining their individual learning styles, which correlate to teaching styles, and by engaging in a multiple day school workshop on Myers-Briggs personality types and conscious communication. Being dedicated to educating children for their future, not our pasts, is driving Grace-St. Luke's initiative to align is programming, organizational learning, and curricular emphasis with the demands of the 21st century culture and marketplace.

Jenifer Fox in Independent School magazine

There are certain things that educators know, and that is why parents and society entrust them to educate children. One of those things is how children best learn.With rapid advances in technology, there have been rapid and paradigm-shifting streams of new information about how children learn and this creates a big challenge for classroom teachers and schools as they strive to know best how children learn. The rub: how to keep up with the most recent and most helpful information. One of the universal classroom tensions that this situation has created is this, as Jenifer Fox illustrates it:

"Tutoring vs. a Developmental Approach to Learning
If, as educators, we understand how children learn, we know that conceptual structures are formed in sequences and these sequences must be achieved through scaffolding of simple understandings to more complex ones. A variety of factors affect these essential linkages and, if one link is weak, each newly added concept becomes confusing to a child...Many teachers and parents believe that one-on-one tutoring works because kids perform better when the focus is only on one child. Or they believe that a child doesn't understand because the child takes longer to learn and, if the tutor can simply take more time with the student, he or she will grasp the concepts. Both assumptions may be true, but the problem is that, most often, tutoring is practiced as if they are always true. When there is a developmental weakness in a child's conceptual understanding, tutoring will not work unless the tutor understands both where the weakness in the scaffolding occurs, and how to ameliorate understanding. Unless tutoring takes a developmental approach, students will not understand the problems simply because the tutor is working one-on-one or taking more time. "

Learning - whose problem is it? This is one of the most crucial debates infusing education circles across the country right now in both the public and private school arenas: Are teachers responsible for teaching or for student learning, or both?

I am not suggesting that Jenifer Fox and The Strengths Movement is the answer, but without a doubt, Fox is weighing in on the paradigm shift and is one of the leading voices in the conversation.

What do you think?

Read full article:
Questioning The Tutoring Paradigm by Jenifer Fox, Independent School Summer 2008

Jenifer Fox Videos and Podcasts

You can listen and hear Jenifer Fox talk about the Strengths Movement here:

The Strengths Movement Videos and Audio