EmTech Preview: Another Way to Think about Learning. Photos courtesy of Matt Keller Seymour Papert, a computer scientist and pioneer in artificial intelligence, once said: “You cannot think about thinking unless you think about thinking about something.” Does this apply to learning? Maybe not. Here is what I mean. As we industrialized learning and created schools, we needed to measure the system’s efficacy and each child’s progress. I believe that we get into trouble when knowing becomes a surrogate for learning. The closest I have ever come to thinking about thinking is writing computer programs. The gods must be crazy Have you watched a two-year-old use an iPad?
The meteoric rise of modern instructionism, including the misguided belief that there is a perfect way to teach something, is alarming because of the unlimited support it is getting from Bill Gates, Google, and my own institution, MIT. One Laptop per Child (OLPC), a nonprofit association that I founded, launched the so-called XO Laptop in 2005 with built-in programming languages. A Look At Google's Massive Library Of Free Lesson Plans. Did you know that Google offers a sortable library of lesson plans that are free to download and use?
It’s part of the company’s big push into education (seems to be quite the trend these days) and involves thousands of free lesson plans just waiting for you to try out. Most incorporate Google products but then again so do most high-tech lesson plans these days. You can sort the listings by the type of Google product you want or, if that’s not your cup of tea, view the plans organized by subject. That’s probably the best way to go for most Edudemic readers. Ways To Sort By Google Product Apps Apps+ Apps & Earth Blogger Computer Science 4 High School Digital Literacy Docs / Drive Exploring Comp Thinking Fusion Tables Google Earth Google Lit Trips Multiple Science Fair Search Sites Sketchup YouTube By Subject Fine Arts Social Studies Language Arts Science Math Computer Science Research Physics Computer Design History – Social Sciences By Age Ages 0-6 Ages 7-12 Ages 13-18 Ages 15-18 Outbreak.
Lesson Plan Search – Google in Education. Ken Robinson. OLPC Project Puts Tablets In The Hands Of Formerly Illiterate Children With Amazing Results. The story sounded far-fetched: OLPC researchers, working with a team of technicians in Ethiopia, created a special “hut” covered in solar panels where the children of a few distant towns could go to recharge some toys they were given.
The toys were boxed Motorola Xoom tablets and every child between the age of four and eight got one. The researchers were expecting the children to play with the boxes and potentially open them in the first week. Instead they turned them on in less than an hour and a few months later were modifying the settings and singing ABC songs. It was, at once, a triumph of technology and of the human capacity to learn. The hut became a focal point for the town’s children, and the kids loved their tablets so much that they slept with them. One kid would learn how to launch a Disney movie and the others would follow. Another kid learned how to unlock the built-in camera.
I’ve been down on the educational value of “throwing” electronics at kids for years. The Future of E-Learning is Crowdsourcing. Call me a skeptic, but the idea of having random people from around the Web collaborating in the creation of e-learning content for accredited online degree programs seems absurd. I went to graduate school for years, read hundreds of books and thousands of articles, sat through countless hours in the classroom, participated in dozens of instructional design projects, created and taught several classes under the supervision of experienced professors, and worked with my classmates and people with real world experience solving actual problems in order to earn my Ph.D. and the right to be both a content area expert and an instructional design professional.
And along the way, I learned one lesson which surpasses all the others: good instructional design requires a collaborative effort. What is Crowdsourcing? Even ten years ago, the concept of crowdsourcing was completely alien to the average person. Image: fotographic1980 / FreeDigitalPhotos.net. Institute for the Future of the Book. "Schools Of The Future Will Have To Astonish Kids" | Stephen Heppell - Gnat Gnat.
Please Don't Mark It Wrong - How Our Schools Raise Children Afraid to Fail. Blogging through the Fourth Dimension. At Waldorf School in Silicon Valley, Technology Can Wait. S Roundtable panelists see bold new horizons, old problems in redefining education. Technology will open up unimaginable new horizons in education – but don't underestimate the power of people. That was a central message on Stanford's Oct. 22 Roundtable discussion at Maples Pavilion titled "Education Nation 2.0: Redefining Education Before It Redefines Us.
" Moderated by PBS' Charlie Rose, the panel included Reed Hastings, founder and CEO of Netflix; Salman Khan, founder of Khan Academy; Kim Smith, co-founder and CEO of Bellwether Education Partners and a founding team member of Teach For America; Cory A. Booker, mayor of Newark, N.J.; Claude M. Steele, dean of Stanford's School of Education; and Stanford University President John L. Hennessy. The emphasis on technology was no surprise, given the presence of Khan and Hastings. But the optimism was perhaps more unexpected. Hastings pointed out that education America has been decrying its educational shortcomings for at least a century and tinkering incrementally with its educational system for just as long. L.A. Twitter in the Classroom - Web 2.0 Primer for Newbies. What is Twitter ?
Twitter is 140 character miniblog that answers the question "What are you doing? ". Each post is known as a tweet and users 'follow' the tweets of their network. Often the tweet describe what an idividual is doing, or working on. However there are many more possibilities, tweets can be responses to other tweets, questions to your twitter network, links to interesting resources. How can it be used in the classroom? (This is neat question because it has not been used to much extent yet, but there are definitely possibilities.) Examples of use. Khan Academy.