Five Card Flickr.” Each drive contains a folder with five photographs downloaded from the photo-sharing website’s royalty-free photo bank. The students pop in the thumb drives and open the folders, and the images blossom on their screens: a pair of dice, a pale and lanky teenage boy, a flower, a parrot, drums, a toddler wearing huge glasses, a tropical island. In pairs, the students get to work, arranging the images in various sequences to tell a story in the form of a play.
“I just want them to think of themselves as creators,” Vail says. “And I didn’t want them writing just another paper. I want them to use technology to actualize their ideas. To dramatize their creativity.”
images to use as the cover page of their adaptations—like a playbill for a Broadway show
sometimes you have to catch your bees with honey.”
the most successful teachers are like Emily Vail: the ones who don’t revolutionize their pedagogical methods overnight, but take a “slow and steady approach.”
learning is often more about process and problem solving than accessing or memorizing static information.
“when there’s stress, you just do what works instead of trying something new and different.
The fallacy,” Hogan explains, “is that technology makes teaching easier. But it actually allows you to do things you couldn’t do before, which is much, much harder.”
n order for the program to be successful, Hogan says, the student needs to have a sense of ownership and accountability.
provide lessons of what she calls “digital citizenship,” teaching kids not to text in public, or answer their phones in the middle of conversations. “That’s on the parent,” Gordon says.