Adopt and Adapt by Marc Prensky

So, wouldn’t it be nice if this Ed Tech course was offered alongside a course in Differentiaton? Wouldn’t they fit nicely hand-in-glove? I find I can always be a better teacher by changing the way I am grouping the students, changing the “assignments” I give them to make them more authentic, more diverse, and more in line with the students experiences and learning styles. By grouping them differently, assessing them by more than just my old exams and written assignments, I know I would reach more of them more effectively.

That has turned out to be a secondary goal for me taking this class (though I am not sure I am doing more than “Doing old things in new ways.” when I try them out).

I agree that much of my class time is spent with students getting and setting up computers to use them effectively in the classroom. With the new requirement of registering to produce a Word, Excel, or PowerPoint document, I have given up on using class time for students to produce such works in class. Maybe I need to follow up with Ed Tech more about this registration bit.***

Now that I have used Google.doc, I could more effectively use it to check students’ understanding during class. If I became better at quickly writing a form for students to respond to (especially a template that could be used over and over again), I could get a quick handle on students understanding quickly and effectively by a short digital quiz on Google.doc with the results showing up on my screen instantaneously. Maybe that will be a future project.***

Is there a web-site where teachers “try something new each lesson and report back on the Internet what works and what doesn’t”? I guess the entire Internet has a lot of it, but I am not astute enough to find it effectively.Prensky correctly suggests teachers would ask, "When will we have time for the curriculum," they will ask, "and for all the standardized testing being mandated?" But his response, “If we really offered our children some great future-oriented and they could develop their skills in … technology, I bet they would complete the "standard" curriculum in half the time it now takes.” We have heard similar arguments repeatedly in technology-supporting literature. With as long as these innovations have been around, we should by now have the data to support this claim. This data would be some of the most significant information one could learn from a course like we are taking. It would make headlines in many educational journals. The absence of such data in articles suggests the data does not exist and that, in fact, students do not prepare better the core material once they have effectively learned to use the technologies available. This study should be THE major focus of many tech courses. In the previous paragraphs (here and in the article) it was suggested that the teachers “report what works and what doesn’t”. I WANT to hear that technology HAS helped students learn core material effectively better than the “old things the old ways”.