I’m partnering with some colleagues at EdTechTeacher and Tina Barseghian at KQED Mindshift to write a series of articles about tablets in education. My EdTechTeacher colleagues have developed a pedagogical model for tablet use that tries to help students along a journey from consumption to curation, creation and connection. It’s a framework for thinking about how we can use tablets not just as screens for reading and viewing, but as portable, flexible multimedia creation tools.
The framing for the articles is the idea of “Someday/Monday” in professional development. In conversation, Tina and I realized that we shared a dilemma. When working with teachers about technology, we want them to stretch themselves, to imagine ways that new technologies enable new approaches to teaching and new kinds of learning experiences for students. But those major changes can be intimidating. They can take a summer or a year to reimagine and develop; sometimes they can’t happen until someday down the line. So we also want to give teachers something for Monday, ideas and strategies that they can implement right away in the classroom.
In the piece, I borrow an idea from Howard Gardner:
We're no longer going to have a single canon where a central authority will be able to decide what's great and what's not....Everybody can make his or her judgments about beauty, and it doesn't impinge on anybody else." To develop our own canons, to learn to appreciate beauty, [Gardner] recommends maintaining portfolios or journals of art, music, writings, and experiences in order to better appreciate the distinctions among them - to make sense of which pieces are most beautiful.
That’s the vision for what teachers might build someday. I then offer a few suggestions of tools and apps that are Monday ready. The rest of the article is over at KQED MindShift. Enjoy!
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