The Most Important Challenge America Faces: Educating the Mobile Generation

Our schools are mired in the past, struggling mightily to deliver curriculum developed in the 1880's to children who are and need to be mobile of body and of mind. The 21st century global workplace demands that we transition for teaching what to teaching how. The catalyst for this transformation is a totally new generation of low cost, light weight, totally personal mobile technologies. We will discuss how these mobile technologies can work in your classroom tomorrow to help children be successful learners.
Elliot Soloway is an Arthur F. Thurnau Professor has appointments in the Dept of EECS, College of Engineering, the School of Education, and the School of Information, at the University of Michigan. For the past 20 years, Soloway and his colleagues in the Center for Highly Interactive Computing in Education (HI-CE) have been exploring the ways in which computing and communications technologies can support inquiry-based pedagogy in K-12 science classrooms. In 2001, the undergraduates at the University of Michigan selected him to receive the “Golden Apple Award” as the Outstanding Teacher of the Year. In 2002 Elliot was selected to receive the ACM SIGCSE Outstanding Contribution to Computer Science Education Award In 2004, the EECS College of Engineering HKN Honor Society awarded Elliot the “Distinguished Teacher of the Year Award.” Elliot is a co-founder and Chief Strategy Officer of GoKnow! Inc, a company that guides K-12 school districts in integrating mobile technologies into the classroom.