Technology “in” the Classroom

Recently Arne Duncan spoke at “Digital Learning Day,” where he encouraged schools to get digital textbooks in the hands of every student within five years. Apple’s iBook 2 announcement a few weeks ago, suddenly makes this seem like a possibility. This is a fantastic vision – and another positive step – in a series of steps – where technology is used to provide a tailored learning experience to every child.

I believe school and its construct is important. K-12 students spend over 30 hours a week “in school.” Think of all of the teachers who start the day “ready to teach.” Sure the day gets long and there are a lot of students to interface with… but the next morning, there they are – the teachers – “ready to teach” again!  And the students who had a question the night before – and they wanted to learn more about a concept or idea – and came to school that morning with a thought that they might ask the teacher to tell them more about it.

What has come between these two groups?  The teachers who want to teach and the learners who what to learn? What can technology do to bring them together?  I believe it is diversity.  Not of race – but of ideas. Because of the digital wave that has occurred outside of the school walls: the mobile phone coupled with Wikipedia, Google, Khan Academy, YouTube and yes, even Facebook, students are free to indulge their interests… distractions will always abound… and now we must use this same technology to reestablish the learning connection between students and teachers.

This is the first in a series of posts on using technology to reestablish the learning connection between the student and teacher.

 

Search

Popular Posts

  • Data Driven Instruction with Naiku

    Premier educators such as Dr. Paul Bambrick-Santoyo (Driven By Data 2.0: A Practical Guide to Improve Instruction) and Dr. John Hattie (Visible Learning) promote the use of data in enhancing instruction and student learning. In this linked white paper, Dr. Adisack Nhouyvanisvong discusses these techniques and showcases how to implement them using Naiku. Tweet

  • Achieving Visible Learning with Naiku

    Visible Learning is an excellent resource illustrating the effectiveness of student-centered learning which Naiku wholeheartedly supports. In Visible Learning and Visible Learning for Teachers, Dr. John Hattie (2009, 2012) synthesizes research studies involving hundreds of millions of students to show the effectiveness of different approaches to improve learning. Dr. Hattie found that student-centered learning strategies have the highest […]

  • Use ACT Quick Checks for Progress Monitoring

    Naiku provides over 50 ACT Quick Checks for teachers to use for student progress monitoring in all ACT test subjects. ACT Quick Checks are short, topic-focused, formative assessments; typically 6-12 questions in length. Each Quick Check contains questions from a single topic, such as Math-Functions, so teachers can use to easily monitor progress between benchmark […]

Menu