Chapter 2 – Students and Learning
Digital natives, our young people are learning in such a technological changed world that the design of our educational system is no longer effective. Students are coming into school with different expectations, skills, and access to different resources. They are the customization generation and the classroom needs to be customized as well. Teachers must promote other teaching methods than what has been used in the past for learning to be effective.
Essentials to learning include immersing students in complex interactive experiences, provide personally meaningful challenges, and use analysis of different ways to approach the content. I really liked the quote “Traditional testing- not measuring what really matters even if it will matter more in the future”! Traditional testing really narrows the instruction to the exclusion of what is not on the test.\
Now and in the future, students need to have skills that are less job specific and more to think, adapt, and continue learning for whatever job they may have.
Chapter 3 – New Tools
New tools are creating an avenue for collaboration and communication. Given that trend, doesn’t it seem like we tend to take everything on the web to be accurate and reliable? We need to be more analytical and questioning when it comes to researching on the web.
Since most of the source software is free, schools and companies have less of an investment as far as cost is concerned which is a positive thing.
There are tools readily available to use so many different functions on the web and sharing the resources in a collaborative way makes them even more valuable.
10:58 am - 9-13-2010
C3 – I agree with you that since open source software is free it is a positive thing for schools and companies. I do want to note that from my own experience in launching a business and attempting to use open source software (specifically Magento, which is a shopping cart/e-commerce platform), sometimes open source software will require considerable investment in customization, installation, and launching – unless you have the expertise to do this. Even still, for a company or business, they will be paying for labor from employees to do so. Therefore, it should be no surprise when a company or school doesn’t instantly jump at what appears to be the greatest (and free) new gadget available online.