CEDO 540 - Week 4

I was really intrigued this week watching the videos on Bill Tancer.  As I stated in my discussion post I never thought about the data that could be collected by analyzing internet searches.  I do think that this type of data could have a great impact on retail and other businesses.  I do think that there is a limit to the accuracy of this type of data, but it is still useful.  I would like to read Bill's book and find out more about this topic.

I have also been enjoying reading the futurist jobs that people are creating.  I think the idea that we are educating children for jobs that don't exist is one of the hardest things for educators to grasp.  We can do everything in our power to get them ready for the workforce, but will we ever be able to accurately prepare them for the job they will seek?  I think not.  I think, as educators, we need to focus on giving our students life skills that they could use for any job. Examples, working with others, taking responsibility, completing assignments on time, etc.  We also need to teach them the basic skills in reading, math, technology, etc, but unless they obtain the essential skills needed to excel in a work environment they won't be successful at their job.  We also need to be ready to adapt our curriculum and teaching methods to better equip these students for the ever changing job market.  We can no longer ignore how important technology skills are for our students.  In order to do most jobs they will need technology skills.  Technology is becoming as important and reading and math.  I can only imagine what job my 2 year old son will be doing 20 years from now.

Finally, after completing the Guided Practice homework this week I realized how poor of a job we are doing with data analysis in our school.  We do a lot of data driven decisions, but we don't look at the whole picture.  We might take a group of test scores and just look at the mean instead of thinking about the standard deviation and z score.  After doing the assignments this week I realized that is a very naive way to analyze data and if, as a district, we are going to continue with data driven decisions we need to work harder at analyzing our data accurately.