I agree with you that students should not be the end all when it comes to how classes should be taught. However, I do see the advantage in asking students their opinions. It is the teacher’s job to connect with the students and get them engaged. I believe that it would be easier to do that with information from students. Now, some students will suggest uses for technology that won’t make sense or be practical, but I think that teachers can learn a lot about teaching from their students.

I definately think class websites and blogs should be used in classrooms if at all possible. There are websites that allow a teacher to do this for free and change the layout and design it to be as he/she wishes. I think having the information available for students to access at any given time is helpful. I think class blogs could be used as young as upper elementary school. I think a class blog would also be beneficial for parents to see what their student is working on week to week and it may help avoid any lost papers that get mixed up in a kids backpack.

All in all, I think incorporating technology into the classroom is very beneficial and can help improve the learning process.

In fact I recently read a study suggesting that the kids that only used paper and pencil did as well as those that used all of the computer resources, but disregard this post if u want, i dont care that much its just my opinion and I’m a student.

Having long worked with technology for giving access to education in some form or another, I am aware that methods too far removed from what many might call ‘traditional pedagogy’ are fraught with more variables than the teacher can sensibly cope with in trying to figure out which variable did the trick.

Often in Science, as in other disciplines, students learning to gather information and write reports from these are not able to hone their report-writing skills because of some other deficiency – either lack of available and suitable resources, or lack of ability to find these resources for themselves or some other impediment. To overcome the barriers, and facilitate the teaching of report writing skills, a teacher may provide students with an array of articles and clippings, from which the students have to select and choose what is appropriate or no, to write a report on a selected topic.

Letting students loose on the Internet, especially if they are young distance learners working from home, is a scary business unless they are well supervised. Since this supervision is not necessarily always available, the young student can be provided with a selection of related, but not necessarily relevant sites from the Internet, made available to them from a single link sent by the teacher.

Using a suitable kids safe search engine, such as OneKey, can provide some measure of safety, but most students are more likely to use standard Google.

Here is a method, using OneKey to provide a pre-programmed selection of sites of suitable nature for distance learners, providing a much higher degree of cybersafety than simply letting them loose on the Internet to do their thing.

Catchya later

Leaving aside the issue of what does or does not constitute “pedagogical advice,” why not ask kids their opinions/ideas? A lack of training does not preclude a person from having good ideas. Many “experts” have a commendable familiarity with how to structure a lesson/run a classroom, but are utterly clueless when it comes to the range of options available.

And, given that there has been 25-30 years of inaction (and I’d say it’e been more than just inaction. At times, it has been poorly conceived action paired with heightened rhetoric) I’d say that listening to any and all interested parties isn’t a bad thing.

Cheers,

Bill

I wrote about him here:

http://www.welearnathome.com/blog/labels/TED.html