Teaching with Technology

We began our exploration into the integration of technology into education with Did You Know 3.0?, a video that explores the ways in which the world is changing:



From there we listened to Dr. Willard Daggett, speaking to the need for adaptation in the face of technological innovation:



We then listened to an excerpt from a keynote address by Marc Prensky, the man who coined the term "Digital Natives" to describe the modern internet enabled generation.  He alludes to a speech that I attended at York University in 2006, where TDSB students (some of them from Thomson), participated in a technology workshop that paralleled the workshops teachers were attending.  The end results of their work impressed the teachers, and helped Prensky make his point about the need to integrate technology into learning to reach kids where their experiences are.


We also explored Ben Stone's address to a business crowd, speaking to the ways that ideas like Prensky's "Digital Natives" are reshaping not just K-12 education, but corporate training as well.  He suggests that he's not quite ready to get fully on-board with Prensky's message of game-based learning.


This exploration prompted the second blog post: Innovation in Education: A Case Study

We moved further into this line of inquiry with Gabe Zichermann's TED talk on Gamification.  Zichermann gives several good examples of ways that game concepts can be applied to real-life situations to produce the right motivations in people.  (Like the speed ticket lottery idea)


We looked at how this concept of Gamification could be applied to teaching in schools.  Students had homework over the weekend to play a game and consider how it could be used in an educational context, for educational goals.