Keith Christiansen's List: Educational Technology

• To fix fractured methods of evaluating student performance, Tennessee joined the American Diploma Project (ADP), which seeks to standardize statewide definitions of achievement and ensure that students perform at or above the national mean. And to comply with the Tennessee Diploma Project as well, Knox County students will be assessed according to the four areas covered in ACT testing: mathematics, English, science, and social studies. With a generation of students who have grown up with cell phones, iPods, and computers, educators need to approach teaching in a new way. "I am a big proponent of using what kids gravitate to naturally as teaching tools," says Becky Ashe. "The fact that these technologies have made our students vast consumers of knowledge is where the teaching should begin. Their technological literacy makes them "ripe ground" for planting the ideas of being critical thinkers, whether they know it or not, and the technology has given them the autonomy to learn about anything they can figure out how to Google. Our job as educators is to show them how to be discerning consumers of information, how to critically look at a web site or other media and decide if the content is "trustworthy" or not. This, in a way, does prepare them for learning how to apply knowledge better because they are starting with what they think are facts. We can use opposing "facts" on a single subject to show them how to analyze and what criteria make one set of information more reliable than another. That is the best application our teachers can provide for students. No matter where their life paths take them, they will need the ability to discern truth from propaganda."

  • Increased usage of tech yields reults!

• Such notions contradict what we know about teaching and learning and raise concerns that the 21st century skills movement will end up being a weak intervention for the very students—low-income students and students of color—who most need powerful schools as a matter of social equity.

  • Technology can too easily become just another band-aid or distraction from higher-order thinking lessons.
• Skills and knowledge are not separate, however, but intertwined. In some cases, knowledge helps us recognize the underlying structure of a problem.
• Learning tends to follow a predictable path. When students first encounter new ideas, their knowledge is shallow and their understanding is bound to specific examples. They need exposure to varied examples before their understanding of a concept becomes more abstract and they can successfully apply that understanding to novel situations.

  • This thinking really guides my own teaching, both in ELA & in my culinary class. Kids (and all people) learn a specific example first, then generalize the one example.
    
    After testing the one example (hypothesizing) repeatedly, they develop a series of true/false ideas about it. From there, they then understand the more general truths.
• We must have a plan by which teachers can succeed where previous generations have failed.

  • Lord, I have heard this before. It makes my work seems very much like that of Sissyfus.

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• Neuroscience for Kids has been created for all students and teachers who would like to learn about the nervous system.