Shift Happens (Slideshare may need to be viewed outside of school)
Perian (Swiss Army Knife for Quicktime)
It's not about the technology.
It was about how technologies can be applied to help our students improve their learning capacities. It's always about the pedagogy and improving the learning opportunities for the students.
Classroom Passion (excerpt from Remote Access Blog:Clarrence Johnson)
The problem with innovation is that once it is out of the box it often can't be controlled. Instead it takes us into places that we never would have imagined.
This can be scary but my question is: should we be worried about this? Should we be concerned?
Can we control passion?
Passion drives us into new places. Passion helps us overcome obstacles and take chances. But educational systems hate passion for that very reason. We still want to think that we can control learning, mandate it and lock it down into a bunch of required outcomes. We're up at the front of the classroom giving what we think is an amazing powerpoint presentation on the history of the Roman empire meanwhile the kids are looking at the slides you have made and spending their time thinking about colour schemes and designs.
We need to learn these things:
1.) Kids will learn things they are interested in and passionate about. Grammar worksheets they'll forget at home for weeks. Projects they are interested in they will work on for 12 hours a day.
2.) Classrooms need to shift to become places of guidance, network construction and ethics and far less about required content, testing and exams.
3.) Passion drives creativity. Creativity = a very good thing in our changing society.
4.) Passions can be local or global. Both are possible, valuable, useful and relevant in an interconnected society.
5.) Why do we worry about these things? What are we scared of? Are we afraid that kids will learn things that are inappropriate or will become experts in things that we aren't?
Free Clip Art
Free Images
Pics4Learning Pics4Learning is a copyright-friendly image library for teachers and students. The Pics4Learning collection consists of thousands of images that have been donated by students, teachers, and amateur photographers. Unlike many Internet sites, permission has been granted for teachers and students to use all of the images donated to the Pics4Learning collection.
Tutorials: How to use our software
Apple's Pages
Podcasting
| 