Keynote RockStars

Matt Miller:

Their Voice, Their World

  • Why is it so important to give students an audience?
  • Follow your writer's voice.
  • Students already have a voice. They need opportunities to use it.
  • Your voice is your soul, your essence, your inner being.
  • What is student voice?
    • Choice
      • Ask students
        • How do you want to learn?
        • Where do you want to learn?
        • How can demonstrate it?
        • What do you want to change?
    • Action
      • Use voice to make a change.
      • Impact globally.
      • Asking good questions.
      • Asking the hard questions.
      • Create something beautiful.
      • Stir others to action.
    • Skill
    • I have a voice video.
    • Let students surprise you.
    • Easy to forget kids have a unique perspective. Ask them!
    • Don't underestimate our students just because adults don't know.
    • Student ideas might change the world.
    • The only one who knows what kids think is the kids.
    • One of the most powerful things we can teach kids: Their ideas have VALUE.
    • Speak change into existence.
    • Their voice changes the world.
    • What does it look like when they believe?
    • Confidence: It starts small
      • Ask students to express opinion.
      • What do you think?
      • Listen to students answer.
      • Ask how to do things differently and try to make a change
      • What would be best?
      • What would you like?
    • Create culture for students to try and take a risk.
    • From Greatest Showman: "They are going to love you. They just don't it yet."
    • You have to have a voice to speak loud and give your ideas . . because your ideas might just change the world.
    • Whenever students change the world we get to change the world through them.













Holly Clark:

Meet Generation Z

  • We have an amazing opportunity to do things with our students which have not been done before. It's amazing...and it's SCARY!
  • This is the student's information revolution, it is up to us how we respond to it.
  • We can inspire kids to think, create and make meaning in the world.
  • We need to understand those who sit in our class.
  • Gen Z are kids who were born after 2005.
  • Gen Z does images > text.
  • Kids born into a world with smart phones, tablets, and computers.
  • It is not technology. They are born with this.
  • Do not consume on two devices but 5.
  • Phones are hub of their social life. But they do not talk.
  • If you say "Ok Google" or "Alexa" someone answers.
  • Attention span of 8 seconds
  • This generation does not settle for the status quo.
  • They create and develop what they perceive as missing---outside the classroom.
  • Why aren't we doing more of this INSIDE the classroom?
  • Gen Z! They have an attention span of 8 seconds but are going to solve our problems and think creatively and critically!
  • They live outside of mediocrity.
  • This generation will not have to do some of the things we considered rites of passage.
  • Focus from best practices of teaching to being open to new ways to learn.
  • Transliterate: Fluent across all mediums of information not just reading and writing.
    • Images
    • Video
    • Social Media
    • Tell your story
  • Drivers licenses...because they will have self-driving cars.
  • Fewer jobs as a result of AI; who needs counter help when a computer screen allows you to self order?
  • Kids need to be transliterate- fluent across multiple media sources.
  • We must disprupt our definition of literacy.
  • Literacy vs. fluency- it is important to know the difference just as it is important to move from consumption to creation and differentiate between making meaning and transfer/application of knowledge.
  • Flipgrid provides a perfect vehicle for transfer of knowledge to be expressed and curated.
  • Skipping the transfer of knowledge.
  • "We need to understand how people learn when they have a choice, and bring that into places where they are required to learn" ~David Price
  • Every kid who walks into our classroom is our kid.
  • "Education is not the filling of pails but the lighting of fire." ~William Yates
  • Knowledge is not understanding.
  • If you try something new, you must practice everyday for some period of time.
  • Freeing our brains from predetermined biases is difficult.