The digital age produced spectacular tools for teaching and learning.  These included innovative uses for free Web 2.0 sites, mobile devices, and traditional applications like PowerPoint, MovieMaker, and Google Search.  Real learning can be formatively assessed more quickly and with greater benefits for learners. They match learners native to the touch screen, who create videos for YouTube, texts on a mobile, and stream video from everywhere. There’s no reason these skills and tools  (often free) can’t be used in assessment.  Bring your laptops, tablets, and mobile and explore new ways to match formative assessments with new learners.
 

Tablets, mobile phones, and iPads can create and share media (video and audio) in the extended learning anywhere/anytime world. Learn how to send images/videos/audio to common, free "channels" to support classrooms, projects, or entire schools. Use QR codes in surprising ways.  Learn about video applications and audio for "dead" phones.  Teachers can receive videos, edit and comment, and send them back---all via mobile.  Finally, explore apps that do chromakey ("green screen") editing, sharing, stop-motion, effects, build previews, and much, much more.  Turn them into video microscopes for less than $5.  Mobiles are digital project kit bags with and media making inside! An iPad will be used, but applications to Android and Windows platforms also apply.  Bring your device and explore.
 

New ‘techbooks’ arrive on tablets --iPads and others-- with cloud-based media DNA: fluid, differentiated, embedded and rich as the World Wide Web. But when the textbook goes digital, the whole game changes. The new book not only touches the cloud, it also becomes its own cloudless backpack with a camera, sensors, encyclopedias, and much more. Interactive projects, assessments, QR codes, and mobile-to-mobile media break the silos of learning into deep and immediate connections to learning.  Content creation, account-based learning, and digital tools are just the beginning. See how engaging learning can be when hands-on, apps, and resources books leave their silos and play well together.
 

From the Pacific to the Atlantic, trailblazing states and districts have begun a serious conversion to digital—a move from trees to bits.  Moving classroom practice more deeply into digital resources provides major benefits for differentiation, extended learning, remediation, and accountability.  But how does it happen? What’s the immediate effect on test scores? Considering the threat of enrollment base erosion from propriety schools, adoption not an option but a necessity.  Explore these issues with examples across the country. And bring your mobiles and machines for an interactive BYOT exercise.
 

Going digital has an amazing unintended consequence for learning. New digital ‘techbooks’ arrive on iPads (and others) with cloud-based media DNA: fluid, differentiated, embedded and rich as the world wide web. This will inevitably pull schools into digital adoptions--but when the textbook goes digital, the whole game changes. The new book not only touches the cloud, it also becomes its own earthy backpack with a camera, sensors, encyclopedias, and much more. Interactive projects, assessments, QR codes, and mobile-to-mobile media break the silos of learning into deep and immediate connections to learning. See how engaging it can be when apps, resources, and digital books leave their silos and play well together.
 

Digital textbooks will hold much more than pdf's: media, social links, avatars, community rooms, and more.  They will be part fixed, part live, part static, part wired.  We have the power to tap the fundamental engagement hotspots for students, Techbooks will do that for teaching and learning.  Participants in the room will be part of this dynamic, real time, curriculum resource. Become a co-author as we turn the page on the old way of thinking about digital resources.
 

The benefits of the digital world have arrived. State legislatures recognized dynamic teaching and assessment environments match 21st Century learning styles. As a result, laws changed in states across the country, enabling digital supplementary materials to replace traditional texts. Suddenly, differentiated instruction became more effective, along with accountability and sharing. Leaders can now build an education that lifts their students into the world where they succeed.
 

What veteran teachers suspected the research has proved: 21st Century students are different. With different attention spans, higher IQ test scores, and social networks, their sophistication comes earlier—with a different skill set. There is a silver lining: We can teach this “New Brain” more effectively, more efficiently, more engagingly. We have the technology! Media has evolved and education must evolve to match.
 

For generations, students lived with textbooks with “print DNA”: linear, undifferentiated, and nondynamic. The gateway to most learning was decoding linear text—a tough task for human brains.  Now new ‘techbooks’ arrive with cloud-based media DNA: fluid, differentiated, embedded and rich as the web. Moving classroom practice more deeply into digital resources provides benefits for differentiation, extended learning, remediation, and accountability.  The "book "moves far beyond text—it can read to students, show them animations to augment print definitions, change languages, font size, grade level, and more. Watch how the magic of tablets (like the iPad and its cousins) bring a deep and immediate connection to learning. Keep your mobile device charged and ready to share.
 

One of the unforeseen consequences into technology’s integration in the social fabric is the creation of new knowledge, including new content and new strategies for teaching and learning. The challenges of content creation especially match 21st Century learners and the digital classroom. Jobs, global problems, and communication will be intertwined with the creation of both knowledge and content, and the ability to look at and analyze what is newly created will become a 21st Century skill. Originally created as a strategy for teachers of the gifted, this approach applies to all learners and gives a new perspective on what to do with all those digital tools.
 

For only a sliver of time in human culture has learning meant decoding the written word. Learning means assimilating information in a way that matches our wiring: responding to the terabits of information in motion and sound. Technology brings education access to the transformative visual tools of an image-based society--- a move closer to the way we truly learn. Follow with a veteran the 30-year path of projects from film to Internet2. Learn what this technology means for your school and what a commitment to simple truths can mean to education.