Why Teach with Technology?
As I come across people writing about how technology can deepen teaching and learning, I'll post them here. Feel free to add your own quotes or insights.
How the tech world has changed:
Learning in Ways Unimaginable Ten Years Ago
From a keynote address from one of favorite ed tech bloggers, Ewan McIntosh:
As we design curricula that inspire students to learn in more independent and personalized ways, the role of the teacher becomes increasingly vital and increasingly complex. It's a role most educators are not comfortable navigating. When we could learn to be enthusiastic for so many learning approaches, tools and technologies, when everyone else seems to be so fluent in change, just where exactly are we meant to start?
Maybe the question has nothing to do with the approaches or tools. Maybe it's all to do with attitudes to our role as teachers and as learners. We may wax lyrical about offering opportunities for our students to be more creative in school, yet how creative do we as teachers get? Is creativity in itself helping to bring around educational improvement, or is there a longer game to play?
In this keynote address, I will show how every teacher and learner can be remarkable, not just creative but ingenious and, in turn, how this is actually being reflected in the work and attitudes of learners in Scotland and beyond.
Today's Students On-Line Outside of School, Learning in 19th Century Ways In School
With a great Scottish accent:
Learning and Cognition in Gaming
A number of researchers are looking at how game developers are so skillfully creating games that "teach" complex processes to children, and at how young people demonstrate complex cognitive skills in gaming. Both of these avenues of research have implications for teaching and learning. Here is one article that summarizes some of this works and recommends websites for reading further about gaming and schools.
Here is a series of blog posts on the multiple ways in which gaming is grounded in complex learning theories and engages kids in complex cognition.
Bridging the Achievement Gap and the Digital Divide
I hightly recommend this article by John Norton on ways in which teachers in low-income schools are engaging their students in complex and meaningul learning as they integrate technology into their classrooms.