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You Can't Buy Change

When:

Session Three: Saturday 3:00pm–4:30pm

Where:

Room 204

Who:

Sylvia Martinez, Jon Orech

Affiliation:

Sylvia:

Conversational Focus/Audience:

All School Levels

Conversation Description:

Do 1-1 initiatives, iPads, IWBs, or using Web 2.0 improve student achievement? ISTE draws up Essential Conditions that discuss Necessary conditions to effectively leverage technology for learning.What ISTE points out, is that too often so-called innovators are merely espousing A digital fix for an analog classroom. In other words, throwing new tools into the same old classroom structures will yield very little change. True, there are some visionaries who see classrooms without walls, independent learning, global communities, as well as other seemingly futuristic scenarios. This in itself can be daunting to the classroom teacher of today who wants to make changes right now. Clearly, a chasm exists between the traditional classroom of today, and learning of the future. However changing today does not lie in an explosion of tools, it lies in the changing of classroom structures. By this, I mean that teachers have the ability right now to change how their students learn for the better within the existing system. Some of these changes include:

Flipped classroom
Writing for authentic audience
Replacing completion with creation
Promoting peer reliance

In this conversation, we will pose the following questions:
What are other ways we can change classroom structures?
Instead of covering content, how do we uncover passions?
How do we develop more balanced, appropriate methods of assessments?
How can we teach Digital Collaboration
How do we enact systemic change? (Do we need to enact systemic change?)
What conditions need to exist to encourage such changes?

Please bring your own questions!

Conversational Practice:

Small and large group discussion, Completion of a collaborative document.