Thursday, March 19, 2009

Alan November at MACUL

This will be an on the fly blogging of Alan's keynote at MACUL.

Most interesting question posed so far is when will your school transition from traditional closed book tests to open sourced tests using questions designed to apply information with no limitations on source of info (computers, cell phones, groups).

Now he's discussing how we can put students to work finding the assignments that will address our most difficult concepts. Shifting control to the students.

All children will become curriculum researchers. It's important to assign roles and tasks to students. The importance of researching other viewpoints. Google search "site: ac.uk "General Gage" to refine search results.

Custom Search in Google. Design a custom search engine for your class. This would be useful for our current renewable energy unit. Must have a Google account to customize. Student designed search engines are "more fun". Collaborative: the work of one students contributes to the benefit of all students.

Screencasting tools for student demonstration. The public context of web publishing makes student work important. A different voice explaining a concept may have a greater impact on learning amongst peer groups than the single voice of the teacher according to research.

Student Jobs: Research design team, search engine design team, tutorial design team.

Adding technology to schools is not enough. Real jobs are what make learning important.

Information and global communication planning versus technology planning. Assume we need equipment and move on to the bigger picture of what information and communication we going to generate.

Apologies for any typos.