 Hello, my name is Chris Turnbull, and I'd like to talk to you all about how schools are preparing students to be real-world-ready. As my school embarks on a one-to-one iPad rollout to personalize learning for our students, I've been thinking about the wide chasm between the instructional tools that were available when I was a student and those that were offering our students today, and also how our schools must be preparing students to be real-world-ready today. If I think back to what was in my backpack when I was a student, my tool set that traveled back and forth between school and home every day was limited to a few spiral notebooks and whichever textbooks I needed to complete my homework. My homework usually consisted mainly of practice problems and maybe reading a few chapters in my history book or a literature book. The tools available during my school years were often purchased for the generation before mine, but continue to be used because they had not worn out yet. As you're watching, please think about whether you recognize any of these tools and devices from your own childhood years as well. The trusty paper and pencil and chalkboard were the go-tools of my teachers. Students today often either do not recognize the third tool or they misidentify it as a sewing machine, but it's actually a film strip projector. I used to be the student who got to sit by it in first grade and press the button to advance the film strip every time the beat played in the recording. I knew way back then that I wanted to pursue a career in instructional technology. The Mimeo graph machine at the end of the top row was the original copy machine and churned out scented blue or green colored ink worksheets when you cranked the handle. Those piles of worksheets were always warm and scented and also very comforting when you practiced your math facts. Then along came the Scantron machine, which made it easier for my teachers to give tests, score them, analyze the scores, and retest over and over and over. Sometimes these tests weren't motivating to the students and resulted in Scantron forms filled with intricate Christmas tree designs or other design patterns drawn on them. I was a little bit of a nerd even back then and often finished my math work quickly and then turned my calculator upside down and tried to spell as many words as I could. So my first graphing calculator in junior high was one of my favorite tools since it opened a whole new world of learning opportunities for me with all of the extra buttons, symbols, and letters that I could use to try to spell more words. I was also fortunate enough to have the last tool both at school and at home. At school we used this computer to play educational games. Pause for a few seconds and see if you think you can come up with a good guess as to what educational software game we played at school. And the answer is? That's right, Oregon Trail. So give yourself a point if you were thinking of Oregon Trail. I recently read that Oregon Trail is like the six degrees of Kevin Bacon of the educational world. One in every four people that you meet will have played or know what Oregon Trail is. In fact it spanned three generations over 30 years of active use in schools in the United States. And of course it presented vocabulary learning opportunities as well since almost everyone along the way contracted dysentery. At home though I was using this computer quite differently to learn basic programming by myself and to write programs to accomplish a variety of complex tasks. If I compare what was in my backpack, a few different colored notebooks, and my trusty graphing calculator of course, with the instructional tools and our students' backpacks today, the differences are striking in terms of the level of access to digital tools that can perform a myriad of advanced functions. There are some people who may at first be concerned about the number of games such as Candy Crush and Angry Birds that students might be able to install on their iPads. And they won't be able to see the immense possibilities of how these devices can help to transform the teaching and learning and to personalize our students' education. To better understand why we need to change the way we are teaching, let's start by looking at the timeline of digital access of the students we have in our schools. If we consider the students who just graduated in the class of 2014, most of them were born somewhere around 1996 or 1997. That means that when they were just one year old, Google came into being, putting a world of information at everyone's fingertips. When they were four, the original Apple Click wheel iPod came out allowing everyone to carry their entire music collection with them digitally so that they could always have their beats in their pockets. When they were five, the first flip phones with cameras became available allowing everyone to become a photographer and to begin capturing every event of their lives no matter how insignificant. At the age of seven, a myriad of social media giants including Facebook, YouTube and Twitter emerged enabling quick and easy online sharing of all the selfies, videos and daily news updates that people wanted to share with their friends, families and even strangers. At ten, the first iPhone became available, followed quickly by the first Android phone, allowing everyone to stay connected, share information, surf the internet, play music and take photos with just one small pocket sized device. It wasn't until 2009 when the students first saw a political campaign leverage social media that it became apparent the 21st century tools could be used for more than playing games and listening to music and could in fact be used to change the world and enable a new generation of belief and change. In 2010, with the first iPad, we began to see a movement to leverage the immense capabilities of mobile digital devices that could fit in a student's backpack and transform education. At almost no time during their short lives then have our students not lived in a world in which digital media surrounded them. Over the last few years, research has been released documenting that due to the proliferation of digital devices, multimedia and visuals that our students have grown up with, the way that their brains take in, process, store, access and use information is completely different than the way myself or anyone in previous generations does. Knowing then that our almost always on students brains are wired differently, we have to start wondering how it affects their learning when we as educators ask them to put away their devices in their backpacks when they come to school. Instead, what we should be doing is thinking about how to put a digital device into the hands of all of our students to end the digital divide and to begin preparing our students to be real world ready now. With the digital literacy skills needed for college, careers and to be more global citizens. We need to start incorporating 21st century college and career readiness skills like critical thinking, problem solving, information literacy, collaboration and social responsibility into our curriculum. When talking about school reform practices during his TED talk, Sir Ken Robinson said, what we need is not evolution, but a revolution in education in order to transform our schools. With the ever expanding capabilities of educational apps for iPads and mobile devices, the 21st century classroom allows students to engage in activities that mirror real world tasks that engage, motivate and capture students' attention as they connect and collaborate with classmates at school, across the district and state and around the world like never before. In addition to putting iPads and teachers and students hands, we have to transform our schools and classroom learning environments to move away from straight rows of desks to maximize instruction and learning opportunities. We need to redesign our classrooms, media centers and even our hallways to create learning environments that allow students to collaborate on tasks, explore ideas, display their work and access the internet and digital resources before and after school. We need to learn from the nontraditional spaces of some of the more innovative giants of the business world, like Google, that allows employees to share their ideas, collaborate and learn from each other in more socially oriented environments. And General Mills, which has employees choose the type of work space seating needed for the day based on whether they need quiet time alone for intense work or space that allows for team interaction and brainstorming. We need to incorporate those types of spaces into our schools to allow for student movement, flexible work spaces, student performance areas and shared classroom space designed with walls of glass to allow for sharing and less isolation of good teaching and learning. Personalized Learning, which includes tailored instruction and learning supports, more opportunities for student voice and choice and engagement in a technology-rich learning environment and culturally responsive teaching, which is based on the pillars of rigor, relevance, relationship and realness, help to transform students' school experiences to be more meaningful and motivating. Combining digital devices, re-envisioned learning environments, personalized learning and culturally responsive teaching allows for the creation of 21st century schools that place students at the center of instruction and build connections between home and school to make learning more relevant. With the entrance of one-to-one digital devices into school classrooms, education can learn from the work of Dr. Matsuko Ito, who found that teens' use of the internet and social media falls into two distinct categories. One category of use centers around friendship-driven social activities in which posting, linking and sharing information connects teens mainly with peers who are very similar in terms of age, geographic location and activities. Students posting pictures on Facebook and Instagram of important or daily events in their lives are common examples of this use. The second group, which has more relevance for the educational world, focuses on the interest-driven activities that students engage in online in which they join forums and user groups seeking out others who share the same interests that they do and who they consider to be experts that they can learn from. If we can begin to think of the hours every day that our screenagers, our teens, tweens and even younger students spend online staring at screens large and small, researching digital photography, videography, Minecraft and other interests often not taught at school, Imagine the impact on a student's education. If that same level of engagement could be leveraged in online courses on algebraic equations, effective persuasive writing and balancing chemical equations. Matt Paren engaged in an interest-driven project when he was inspired at the age of 13 while watching a YouTube video featuring someone playing a lead zeppelin tune backward at half speed on a guitar. Midway through the video, the creator reversed the video footage and played it at twice the speed to make the rest of the song sound and look normal. Matt planned to produce a similar video himself of himself lip-syncing a Queen song by taking two photos every day to show himself aging over time and then midway through the song regressing back in age while still lip-syncing the rest of the song. This required careful planning of over 2200 photos and had a position himself in the frame to match the previous day's photo as well as planning the position of his mouth for every single photo in order to make the lip-syncing look natural throughout the entire song. He began taking two photos a day at the age of 15 and spent the next three years continuing to work on the project, which was eventually posted on YouTube and has had over 2.3 million views. Again, imagine if we could sustain that level of effort on our more traditional school subjects. Incorporating students' interest with 21st century tools such as 3D printers and design software is enabling schools to create design labs and maker spaces that allow students to explore, experiment, and mirror the work of engineers, architects, and designers as their dreams and imagination are turned into the reality with the help of technology. The multimedia and creation apps on iPads are allowing students to create, produce, and share multimedia productions and to learn the journalism and filmmaking skills necessary to produce documentary films about how the local Green Line Light Rail project impacted the business community along University Avenue. Students are posting these creative works online for their classmates, family, and the world to see and enjoy, paralleling all the tasks of their real world counterparts of authors, composers, news reporters, and filmmakers. Students are also able to collaboratively engage in complex engineering and computer programming tasks that help to build an interest in careers in math, science, and the engineering fields. Students have even engaged in launching a weather balloon carrying a payload of five styrofoam boxes, each meticulously loaded with cameras set to take photos at timed intervals, video cameras to capture the entire flight, and a myriad of thermometers, probes, and other digital gadgets that recorded information throughout the entire ascent to the lower levels of the stratosphere and during the return flight as the payload and deflated weather balloon dropped back to the ground. Once the weather balloon and payload were tracked and recovered, students were able to analyze the data recorded by the probes throughout the ascent and descent of the balloon as well as watch the entire hour long flight to and from the near space lower levels of the stratosphere. How many times have we created learning activities that were as engaging, motivational, and real world oriented as this one was? As educators, it's mind blowing to think about the jobs and careers like iOS developer, user interface, user experience designer, and millennial generational expert that exists today but did not exist just five years ago. As we prepare our students to be real world ready, we must start by not only providing them with devices to put in their backpacks but also the experiences that our students need in order to learn to use the devices to become flexible creators, designers, collaborators, and researchers to pursue the careers that will exist in the future. Since we cannot predict what sort of jobs and careers might exist five or ten years from now for our students, we need to move away from teaching our students technology skill sets to teaching them to have flexible and adaptive mindsets in terms of knowing when and how to use technology to accomplish what they need to. We can do this by beginning with thinking about how we can use technology to accelerate learning and to create real world collaborative learning opportunities that are meaningful and offer our students experiences that will help them to apply problem solving, research, communication, and collaboration skills. So if we as educators are still holding on to our traditional backpacks that reflect how we were taught and learned, we need to start making a change ourselves. In order to accomplish this task of preparing our students to be real world ready for an ever changing, ever advancing 21st century world, we as educators need our own backpack of digital devices and need to join our students on the digital playground as Kevin Honeycutt says to ensure that we're preparing them with the tools now for their future success. Thank you for the opportunity to share ideas and information about why our schools need to prepare our students to be real world ready now in order to prepare our students for their futures. If you have comments or feedback, please contact me at atturnbullchris on Twitter or check out my blog at playlearnteach.blogspot.com. Thank you!