Week Eight Personal Post
This week's technology experience was an exciting one - our school hosted 9 guests from a high school in Nashville, eager to watch our iPad's in use as their school prepares to adopt a 1:1 iPad program of their own.
To facilitate, we asked four of our teachers to host a visiting English teacher. While we didn't get a chance to speak with him beforehand, my colleagues and I were eager to have someone come see iPad work in an English class. And I was relieved, over lunch, to hear our visitor assure us that he was happy to see the ordinary, everyday usage of the iPad. He said that he had found a number of "high impact," intense iPad ideas that restructured students engagement with text or writing, but his department as it stands now is more interested in integrating the technology into their current practice.
So each of my colleagues went through our usual practice of helping the students with their daily and weekly agendas and personal organization. Each of us also had some version of in class research to share.
My students were beginning a research project inspired by 1984, so I was asking them to see the difference in their results as they searched a phrase like "totalitarian regime" and helped them add search phrases and Boolean quotation marks.
I've been pleased, as our school moves into conversations about 21st century learning, to see the overlap between those skills and our traditional skill foci - communication (writing), collaboration (peer editing), and critical thinking (reading and analyzing complex texts), and it's nice to see other teachers form other schools following that same path into the 21st century. We just have to be conscientious about helping students move from their digital-native engagement with technology into an educationally rich digital skill set.
To facilitate, we asked four of our teachers to host a visiting English teacher. While we didn't get a chance to speak with him beforehand, my colleagues and I were eager to have someone come see iPad work in an English class. And I was relieved, over lunch, to hear our visitor assure us that he was happy to see the ordinary, everyday usage of the iPad. He said that he had found a number of "high impact," intense iPad ideas that restructured students engagement with text or writing, but his department as it stands now is more interested in integrating the technology into their current practice.
So each of my colleagues went through our usual practice of helping the students with their daily and weekly agendas and personal organization. Each of us also had some version of in class research to share.
My students were beginning a research project inspired by 1984, so I was asking them to see the difference in their results as they searched a phrase like "totalitarian regime" and helped them add search phrases and Boolean quotation marks.
I've been pleased, as our school moves into conversations about 21st century learning, to see the overlap between those skills and our traditional skill foci - communication (writing), collaboration (peer editing), and critical thinking (reading and analyzing complex texts), and it's nice to see other teachers form other schools following that same path into the 21st century. We just have to be conscientious about helping students move from their digital-native engagement with technology into an educationally rich digital skill set.
That does sound exciting. What type of iPad program do you have in your school?
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