I’ve nodded sagely as people discussed whether students should help create their own assessment rubric. Of course they should. Why doesn’t everyone do this, I wondered? It just never occurred to me to do it in MY classroom. It wasn’t that I didn’t think my students could do it. I somehow didn’t get my thinking from the “should†to the “I’m doing it.” Until this week.
Recently I got an email from my elementary division head. Our school is piloting a 1:1 netbook program this year, and our administration is interested in how the program is going and the different ways the netbooks are being incorporated into our curriculum. I started putting together a list, and even surprised myself at how much the availability of wifi-ready technology engages my students and supports instruction during the course of a regular school day.
Mix evolving translation technologies, both visual and audio, and then combine them into a program like Facetime or Skype. Suddenly, you have people from anywhere in the world being able to carry on conversations with anyone else in the world. Language will no longer be a limiting factor when people in different cultures and language communities want to share information or go deeper into true collaboration.
Sometimes new learning experiences, just like gifts, don’t work as we expect they will. You probably won’t end up implementing them just like someone else did or the way you originally imagined you might. But in the end, if you’re making a change for the better — if you’re helping students take steps, even baby steps, to becoming more independent learners, that’s progress, and progress is what really matters.
The kind of continuous exploration, reinterpretation and flat-out invention pursued by Rembrandt and his students are at the heart of good education. Their search for empathy and for representations of Jesus that bridged the gap between human and devine suggest to history teacher Margaret Haviland ways in which educators can help students today better understand what they value and how that shapes their decisions and actions.
I teach in an inquiry, project-based, technology embedded classroom. What does that mean? I lecture less, and my students explore more. I create a classroom where students encounter concepts, via labs and other methods, before they necessarily understand all the specifics of what is happening. It’s a place where my students spend time piecing together what they have learned, critically evaluating its larger purpose, and reflecting on their own learning. Technology is embedded into the structure of all we do. It’s part of how we research, how we capture information, and how we display our learning. It’s never an accessory tacked on at the end.
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