Group items tagged

Finally, he came to the conclusion that the only way to do it was to create an individualized learning experience for each teacher, to take them where they are and mentor them, individually, to a different place. He’s in the process of surveying each teacher to determine what technologies they currently use, what their comfort levels are, and what they are most passionate about. Then, using those results, he and one other tech educator at the school are going to start going one by one, talking about change, looking at tools, making connections, and shifting the pedagogy.

Great teachers have always understood that their real role is not to teach subjects but to teach students (249).

Teachers are learners. If they’re not, they shouldn’t be teachers.

Twitter is the opposite of segmentation, forcing all communication through a single, flexible channel.  This creates the impression of activity, again stimulating discussion.

“overfunctioning” leads to a segmentation of communication,

or example, a class must have an email list, a forum, website/CMS, each with its own space and identity.

move from being simply knowledgeable to being knowledge-able

“information revolution”

new ways of relating

discourse,

social revolution, not a technological one

new forms of

Wikis, blogs, tagging, social networking

nspired by a spirit of interactivity, participation, and collaboration.

new ways of interacting, new kinds of groups, and new ways of sharing, trading, and collaborating.

“spirit” of Web 2.0

important

technology is secondary.

empowers us to rethink education and the teacher-student relationship

dea of learning as acquiring information is no longer a message we can afford to send to our students, and that we need to start redesigning our learning environments to address, leverage, and harness the new media environment now permeating our classrooms.

first address why, facilitate how, and let the what generate naturally from there.

mportance of the form of learning over the content of learning

teaching subjects but subjectivities: ways of approaching, understanding, and interacting with the world.

We can't “teach” them. We can only create environments in which the practices and perspectives are nourished, encouraged, or inspired (and therefore continually practiced).

love and respect your students and they will love and respect you back. With the underlying feeling of trust and respect this provides, students quickly realize the importance of their role as co-creators of the learning environment and they begin to take responsibility for their own education.

The new media environment provides new opportunities for us to create a community of learners with our students seeking important and meaningful questions. Questions of the very best kind abound, and we become students again, pursuing questions we might have never imagined, joyfully learning right along with the others. In the best case scenario the students will leave the course, not with answers, but with more questions, and even more importantly, the capacity to ask still more questions generated from their continual pursuit and practice of the subjectivities we hope to inspire. This is what I have called elsewhere, “anti-teaching,” in which the focus is not on providing answers to be memorized, but on creating a learning environment more conducive to producing the types of questions that ask students to challenge their taken-for-granted assumptions and see their own underlying biases. The beauty of the current moment is that new media has thrown all of us as educators into just this kind of question-asking, bias-busting, assumption-exposing environment. There are no easy answers, but we can at least be thankful for the questions that drive us on.