In a recent survey conducted with over 600 leading educators from around the world, Dr. Tyson asked two questions:

• To what extent do you truly believe in your heart that school age children have the capacity to make a significant and meaningful contribution to our world?
• About what percentage of children in your school (or school district) last year do you believe actually did something that you believe made a significant contribution to our world?

The disparity between what we believe is possible and what we believe is actually happening is inescapable. 76.4% of survey respondents stated that they truly believed that school age children have the capacity to make a significant and meaningful contribution to our world. Yet 68% of those same respondents stated that less than 25% of the children in their school actually did something that they believed made a significant contribution to our world with 42.4% stating the number to be less than 10% of their students.

This keynote explores some of the unprecedented changes that have taken place in the last 100 years, including the role of children and the nature of childhood, the transition from an agricultural society to an industrial society to the information age, and the impact of globalization on our lives. With the ever increasing scope and pace of change, how do schools prepare students not just to be competitive in the job market they will face, but to lead and shape the future? Dr. Tyson makes the case for creating an educational framework that strives to make learning irresistible within a context that reveres a culture of personal best and requires meaningful contribution as the highest level of learning.

Can today's children make our world a better place?

According to recent survey data, 9% of online 5th grade boys have actually met a stranger from online! Cyber-bullying is on the rise. Online identity theft is among the most rapid growing crimes in the US. Thousands of pedophiles were identified on MySpace. What are some of the real versus the imagined issues surrounding online safety? How do we effectively teach students appropriate online behavior? What practical resources are available to parents and schools? This session will explore these issues and more.

Dr. Tyson presented the last part of this keynote as the closing keynote at ISTE's Atlanta NECC, 2007. You may watch that portion of this keynote, which is presently hosted at this link on Apple, Inc.'s Learning Interchange website.

Too often in today’s discussions about educational technology we focus on the technology. This keynote, which extends from the keynote: Is It Time to Upgrade? Making the Case for Change, emphasizes leveraging meaningfulness, significance, and the gift of contribution with the tools we now have available to us. Peppered with a generous number of powerful, student-made examples, this presentation reframes our conversation. These students have designed their digital media to be deeply moving and to convey a substantive message in a compelling way that calls for thought and action from everyone who experiences their work. They beg us all to rethink a mindset that underestimates the capacity in our children to have an international voice that can make our world a better place!

While not solely for administrators, this presentation is a must-see for principals and superintendents. Dr. Tyson will guide educators through the design and implementation of MabryOnline.org, a collection of about 100 staff members blogs (from the cafeteria, media center, guidance counselors, nurse, teachers, etc.), and the school's sole web presence from 2005 through June, 2007. He discuses the impact the site has had on the local school's learning community as well as the education profession on an international level. Dr. Tyson discusses the impact of web transparency and the sense of invitation this type of web presence affords. If you are not satisfied with your school's or district's web presence, you need to learn more about the impact of school-wide blogging as an infrastructure for the participatory school.