Tag Archives: thinking curriculum

My Favorite App…

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Drumroll please! My favorite app is the CAMERA. Some don’t even think of this as an app because it is embedded in your iPad, but it has the power to unlock student thinking and creating. Just this one APP and its ability to integrate with every other app makes it invaluable.

Just the other day, I saw a classroom grappling deeply with a math concept. Students were discussing in pairs, manipulative were out, papers were recording information and WHAT did I think about? If only students had their iPads out!!

Students were making their THINKING VISIBLE and we weren’t capturing it.

How easy would it be to capture this deep student thinking, share this thinking with others, and FACILITATE NEW LEARNING? How would this demonstrate we VALUE student thinking and ACTIVELY PROMOTE thinking vs. products?

Sometimes the simplest things are overlooked as we try to find just the right APP or “integrate technology”. At the end of the day we have to stay focused on our goal of facilitating student thinking, valuing students’ process, and building on student understanding. 

As we move to the Next Generation Science Standards, the Engineering components scream for video. It doesn’t have to end up as a finished, polished iMovie with music, transitions and all the bells and whistles. Students build something, capture trials, replay the video to identify strengths and weaknesses of the design, and then rebuild and try again.  This brings real world solutions into the classrooms.

Regardless of YOUR favorite App, shifting our focus on technology as the finished product to technology enhancing the learning process is critical to technology integration. So ask yourself, how can I capture more student thinking to push learning forward?

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Reflection 1: CUE conference…Robots and Augmented Reality

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At a conference there are a lot of bells and whistles today, for me, it was ROBOTS and AUGMENTED REALITY. I am intentionally attending sessions I have no idea what they are talking about or ideas that stretch my thinking in ways I would have never considered using technology in my classroom. From this I have learned my first lesson:

Just because it is REALLY COOL doesn’t make it an AMAZING TEACHING TOOL. What makes these tools amazing is what the teachers are doing with the curriculum. I sometimes fear that we get a little ahead of ourselves when we think about the TOOL first instead of the THINKING. Robots can be an amazing motivator to get kids coding, but we would have to be intentional about our learning objectives to really make the most out of this tool. Augmented Reality (check this out if you don’t know what it is) could be amazingly motivating, but is the time spent worth the learning achieved. One presenter shared, “When they see something this amazing and unbelievable happen in front of their eyes, I ask them to consider what amazing and unbelievable solutions they might bring to solve some of the problems in our world.” To me that is where all the learning would take place!! When students can create and see innovation, that opens their eyes and allows them to imagine so much more.

I hope that as the education world takes this giant leap with technology we will still keep central to the focus of creating spaces where, “thinking is valued, visible and actively promoted.(Ron Ritchhart)

 

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