Nuturing the 21st Century History Teacher: Research and Examples

I see that someone has recently added a post about this presentation. I'm including my thoughts on the same...

Why I picked this video presentation to view, I'm not sure. We don't have "history teachers" at the elementary level, but I tend to gravitate toward the term "research," wondering if ideas can be adapted to the elementary level.

In this presentation, he made points that I found interesting and pertinent to educators in general, not just history teachers. Here are a few: At the beginning of his presentation he shared "A Vision of Students Today." One student shared that she will read 8 books this year, 2300 web pages, and 1281 facebook profiles. Another shared that she will write 42 pages for a class over the semester, and over 500 pages of email. Something for us to think about. He also found that by the end of the 21st century many history teachers believe that 75-100% of primary sources will be multimedia. Again, something to think about. Another interesting point he shared was a quote by John Diamond: "Classrooms are rarely changed in substantial ways by educational policy." In today's NCLB era, I thought that was pretty remarkable. Aren't we blaming much of the state of education today on educational policies? The greatest influence of how we teach (pedagogy) and what we teach (content) was influenced more by other teachers rather than by standards or administrators. Hmm, interesting.