Room With A View

I attended Gary Stager’s session entitled Papert Matters: Thinking About Children, Computers, and Powerful Ideas. If you’re not familiar with the work of Seymour Papert I can’t do it justice in a blog post. He’s worked with Piaget, was instrumental in the creation of Logo, LEGO Mindstorms, and was a founding member of the MIT Media Lab. His thoughts on learning and teaching go well beyond math or technology education.

Gary’s session was delivered in his usual entertaining and at times acerbic style. As usual, he was spot on in what he said. Below are some of my take aways from the session.

The Differences between Constructivism and Constructionism

• constructivism describes the process of constructing knowledge inside the head of the learner.
• constructionism is through active creation of something tangible/shareable outside of your head

Eight Big Ideas Behind Constructionism

1. we learn by doing
2. use technology as a building material
3. hard is fun –fun and enjoying doesn’t mean “easy”
4. learning to learn –you have to take charge of your own learning “Many students get the idea that the only way to learn is by being taught”
5. taking time “To do anything important you have to learn to manage time for yourself”
6. “you can’t get it right without getting it wrong. Nothing important works the first time. The only way to get it right is to look carefully at what happened when it went wrong. To succeed you need the freedom to goof on the way”
7. teachers must be models. We need to let kids see us struggle to learn.
8. learn how to learn with computers

Mary Cullinane is the chief technology architect of the Philadelphia School of the Future Project–a school Microsoft was/is very involved with. She took part in a panel discussion on Tuesday. Three key things I took away from her comments were:

1. Accept failure. It’s part of the process.
2. When designing a school, learning is the first priority. Technology isn’t even second. It’s further down the list.
3. As teachers we need to get used to not knowing.

It seems that my blog is blocked again in China. I guess I’ll have to find a new home for it.

I’m off to The National Education Computer Conference (NECC) in a couple of days. I realize there are only a couple of us going from ISS but don’t despair. Many of the sessions are being podcast via The Conference Connections podcast. Just follow the link to the site or use this link to subscribe via iTunes.

With all the craziness of the last couple of weeks of school it’s been hard to find time to post. This will be brief.

I’ve been playing around a bit more with Google Earth and the grade seven trip to Chengde–China. I’ve now combined the waypoints from my GPS with the photos I took and posted to Flickr. I haven’t done it with all the waypoints as I’m hoping to get some kids to do it but I’ve done a few. [Link]

Here are some quick thoughts on how this might be used at school:

• Fieldtrips: kids combine waypoints, photos, and their writing to do trip summaries
• Fieldguides: students write guidebooks to historical sites (i.e. The Forbidden City). Use GPS so the user can go to the exact spot/artifact to read the information. The next step would be to podcast the information so users can listen to the guide on their iPods/mp3 players.
• Habitat For Humanity: Have kids take GPS units with them when they go out to build houses. They can mark the sites so they can check up on their projects later–perhaps years later.

Back to work!