Alan+November

Alan November

He has been a dorm counselor for at-risk students, a classroom teacher, a technology coordinator, an alternative school director, a city planner, a new school designer, an university lecturer, and a consultant. Each of these jobs gave Alan November an insight to the course that technology has taken for students, educators, and businesses. He along with a few others have created November Learning. The idea, as I understand it, is to create a Global learner, a student that will always be a student, a 21st century worker for a 21st century workplace. Alan November would like to see students prepared for the world, prepared in the classroom, becoming a global communicator, a global researcher, an internal collaborator, and a tool builder. All skills that he states are needed for the job market of today. I was intrigued by what the website as well as blog and vimeo had to say. I also would have to say that I agree with him. Students are not prepared for the world when they leave school and how they use technology is not a benefit to them. The students are not thinkers, or problem solvers. I really liked his ideas of how to help them prepare for the world before them. I enjoyed listening to his ideas of using students to discover their assignments using the internet (learn how they want to learn, as well as discovering different ways to learn a topic). Assigning a student to be that researcher, or allowing students to reflect on what they have learned through podcasts and then having that podcast to download on their i-pods so that they could reflect on it. Using Google Docs to create a collaborative environment where the students can take notes together to check each other to make sure that their notes are correct. As well as other ideas. AA