Edutopia and technology in curriculum design

Video

George Lucas and Robert Thurman

www.edutopia.org

They documented ideal learning environments.

Project learning

Cooperative learning

Integrated studies

Comprehensive assessment – multiple measures

Teachers – the human touch – the most valuable element

Higher ed gives more self control over what they are learning.

Learning is a fun thing to do if you are interested in the material

Students don’t always know what their passion is, and like George, can stumble on it by chance.

Using stories in film in learning.

Tell the story of how to integrate technology into schools.

Don’t put computers in a classroom and teach students how to use them once a week. Use computers as a tool, like a pencil, to learn other subjects, and cooperate.

Lots of great theory, but there are holes.

Kids want to be adults – so give them adult tasks. Don’t teach them maths, tell them to design a plane, and they will want to learn the maths and science to do so.

Using the knowledge to do something.

Website shows you how to organise the classroom around the technologies.

Edutopia

Looking through the website it seems that there is a lot of information on integrating technology, but pretty much only in person. Cameras, probes, photogates, video, heart rate monitors… How would we get students to use that sort of equipment when studying at a distance?

One thing that I did love about it was the encouragement of integrated learning. They took the data from the cheerleaders heart rates etc and graphed that in Maths and then talked about velocity and acceleration in Physics using videos. Since all we can work with is that the students have computers, it would need to be carefully considered exactly what we asked of them. Yes, we can put up the videos, but of course that won’t be as meaningful as if they were in the videos. We can get them to graph data, but that’s not the same as if they had generated the data to start with.