Skip to main content

Afraid of Technology?

A student had to make a presentation about the peoples of Mombasa. He was all set to write a report in word but was again debating whether he should create a power point instead.

I asked him if he was willing to try something new and I could see the heistation in his eyes. He feared that anything new might be rejected. Probing deeper, I found he was afraid of basically three things: Firstly, taking risks in case he did something that was not expected; Secondly, incase people did not know how to use the new technology and lastly, getting poor marks! Are we not as educators supposed to encourage children to take risks and go for it? Should they be stifled because we are not abreast with technology? Kids will surprise you with how quickly they can decode complex instructions. Well, this child decided to go for it and here's what he came up with. I am positive his teachers will be thrilled with this. I am just happy I was able to nudge him along.





I'd like to add a link of an interesting blog which talka about the same thing.

http://transformingtechnology.blogspot.com/

This is an excerpt:

As teachers we need to be aware that many of our students are living two lives: a digital one at home and a non-digital one at school. Many students can do so much, just using their mobile phones, yet these are often banned by schools. The phone is a communication device where students can go to make things - where they change from being consumers of media to creators of media. He asked: What is the next big thing we will ignore at school?

Comments

  1. Wow! What a great presentation. This student certainly needs a pat on the back for showing us how presentations could be done. Keep it up. :)

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Thank you for taking the time to read my blog.

Popular posts from this blog

Classification -Designing Your Lessons for Conceptual Understanding (Part 1)

In this series, we will discuss how we can design lessons for conceptual understanding. Having recently completed an upskilling course with IB, I felt we may all benefit from looking at some of these strategies and how they might look like in our PYP classrooms. Strategy 1: Classification    Source: Ibo.org In this post, I will be focusing on the research-backed strategy, "classification".  Chadwick (2009) highlights that classification helps develop conceptual understanding by allowing students to organize information, recognize patterns, and understand relationships among concepts.  Here are some examples across several disciplines on how I have used tools to classify. Math Class 1) In my math class (Grade 3) instead of having students simply rote learn the names of the shapes and their properties, have them sort the shapes  based on the number of sides, angles and symmetry. Even better, use the Concept Attainment Strategy (I keep returning to this strategy be...

Generalization-Designing Your Lessons for Conceptual Understanding (Part 3)

This post is the third of our blog post series on how to design lessons for conceptual understanding. Part 1 here Part 2 here Strategy 3 : Generalizations You may have come across Lynn Erickson's diagram on the structure of knowledge. In my IB workshop's I always like to present the avocado model alongside this diagram when I am talking about facts. The intention of inquiry-based teaching and conceptually-driven understanding (or Concept-based inquiry- whatever terminology suits your fancy)  is to enable students to make generalizations. In other words, can they transfer their learning to a new context because they have understood what they learnt.  In order to make generalizations, we need to first plan lessons that help students acquire facts/topics that are interesting  and worth knowing. Bringing in local and global issues that are relevant to the topic help students as they begin to compare the topics and see emerging patterns. Remember, facts and concepts have a syn...

8 Strategies to Overcome Math Anxiety in the Classroom

  Have you ever considered what math anxiety may look like in your classroom? As I prepare to begin my lesson, handing out notebooks or math prompts, I look around and observe my students. As the lesson progresses, I continue to look around and monitor their behaviour. Are there some students who take time to settle down or start to talk about  things completely unrelated to math? Does one student ask to go the washroom? Or maybe complain about a stomachache or a headache? Is there a student who may start crying or become angry and indulge in negative self talk? "I am dumb." or "I can never get this right!" and so on and so forth. The more subtle symptoms : Is a student being being extra chatty, taking time to settle down, obsessing about the answer, refusing to answer questions, seldom asking for help, hurtling through work or showing a reluctance to work with others.  A broad categories these symptoms would look like this: cognitive difficulties emotional distress...