April Exeter Ed Tech Newsletter

Today's Learner - TEC-950

The set-up, educators play a vital role ensuring that students are prepared to be productive in the 21st Century. What are the challenges educators will have...

Let's start with a little look at who it is we are currently teaching.

Springbank Middle School Alberta, Canada

It is more important today than every before that we become the guide to learning. It is time to get outside the box and let the walls come down. Teachers and students collaborating to bring about a rich learning environment. We need risk takers. With any new challenges, we will have success and we will failure. We need to learn from the failure and not give up but push on for the betterment of our students. Teachers need administrators that are willing to let them branch out and explore trying new ideas. 

We are in a fast-moving society today. I like the image about because it shows how all the cogs move and work together. It will be working together science and math, language arts and social studies, etc through educational processes such as Project Based Learning that will move students forward for the next phase. 

For education to work at it's best it is constantly changing evolving and moving. Yes 2+2 is still 4 but were we go from there is only limited by how we inspire the young mind. 

Greater collaboration among teachers will be needed. This will mean everything from teachers team teaching to needed more time to prep together to prep for lessons. In the US we could learn a few lessons from our friends in Finland about giving educators time to plan. We have more contact time with students than the Finnish do yet perform worse on the PISA. 

Educators will have to look outside their own school district for collaborators if the district is not providing what they need for support. Thousands of educators are already flocking to twitter and G+ to form PLN's. Most of the innovating lessons I have done with students the last few years have been inspired by my twitter PLN or a CUE Rockstar Camp and not by anything from a training in my district. It is the few lone nuts who have gone out and found the other lone nuts and started a revolution for student success! 

Web 2.0 Cool Tool - TEC-950

Cool Tool

While there are many cool web 2.0 tools available to used in the educational setting these days one I would love to explore the use of more is Augmented Reality (AR) with Aurasma. We are using this technology with our HS yearbook, which is great. While that is a cool way to add an extra component to a student's yearbook, so much more can be done with Aurasma. 

One possible classroom/school use of AR would be to have students create book reviews of books read from the school library. These books could then be tagged for other students to use Aurasma to view these reviews. Tagging of books could be done in several ways, either a sticker on the book or a card in the book would notify other students of the AR review. 

How about making a history lesson on the Declaration of Indepence come alive with the reading of the opening in English or Spanish. In fact, it could be read in any language needed for your class setting as a way to differentiate for EL's. 

For a more extensive list of ways to use AR in schools check out Drew Minock and Brad Wald's blog Two Guys and Some iPads.