In my role as tech advocate, I habitually find myself trying to coax established educators to use new tools and incorporate new methodologies. Here are some ways I have found to be successful in this endeavor.
Principal Matt Renwick explains how his K-5 school is using Digital Student Portfolios to boost student achievement and promote connected learning. Renwick includes samples from actual student portfolios.
“Now that I’ve set up my classroom collaboratively, I cannot imagine returning to a non-collaborative environment,” says online educator Smadar Goldstein. “And whether you’re teaching from thousands of miles away or sharing a physical space with your students, an online component can provide unique shared learning opportunities.”
Are students cheating when they read the work of fellow students in a collaborative environment and then incorporate the ideas into their own responses? Online teacher Smadar Goldstein prefers to define that as “learning.” But if you have concerns, she has suggestions.
Reading support teacher Arwen Kuttner is finding that a combination of tried and true reading instructional strategies and some new technologies have achieved a productive balance among her primary-aged students who are now “eager to ask me for books that they can read independently.”
K12 schools are slow to address digital literacy, says technology coach and teacher Jen Carey, when they view it as more content to cover – not a cross-curricular component of teaching. In this post she suggests a better way, with several examples from her history classroom .
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