This past week, I was at a conference in Cedar Rapids, Iowa and connected with an amazing speaker and educator, George Couros. The focus of his presentation was leading innovative change in education. I could blog about many of the topics he presented, but I'll start with one that really resonated with me.
"If you ask students to put away devices, you are losing students' trust and their way of learning."
- George Couros
In my role, obviously I encourage integrating technology into the content areas and it burns me when I hear comments from educators or see posters in schools that say something to the effect of no technology allowed in this classroom. Technology is an extension of our students these days; the worst technology device a kindergartener knows is an iPad 2. They have always had technology as part of their lives. They use devices to connect, to create, to communicate, and believe it or not even to learn.
When teachers direct them to disconnect, in essence they are taking away a huge part of the way they know how to learn. Students do know how to think and communicate without their devices, but why would we want to limit them to only the tools and people in the four walls of the classroom? Parents trust that as educators we are going to allow their students to use the tools so they can learn. Students need to be empowered to use the tools to connect, collaborate, think critically, create, and solve real world problems.
I had a teacher ask me if we could disable Google during tests because kids were looking up the answers to their tests. If kids are Googling the answer, we as educators are asking the wrong questions! As the sign in my office reads....
I can understand the frustration of the teacher who wants to disable Google during tests. I try to write my assessments so that thought is required to respond questions. In this context it is often easy to identify a Googled response. I often mark those responses as if the problem was left blank and communicate to the students that I want their thoughts, not someone else's.
ReplyDeleteLeif,
DeleteIf you are asking them to think and can tell it is a Googled response, then you are asking the right questions; however, I think in this instance they were not looking for in depth answers, rather recalling facts.
I think asking the question and then directing them to a site for the answer would be more hands on and the student might actually learn the concept rather than memorize it. Of course you want the answer to reflect the students thoughts and how it represents what they learned in class and not information they just copied and pasted.
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