What+changes+can+we+make?


 * What changes can we make in our classroom teaching to incorporate emerging technologies such as Wikis/Wikipedia; Podcasting; Instant Messaging; Mobile Phone Cameras - as identified by Prensky?**

Many teachers complain about students bringing and using mobile phones in class. Instead of this being a constant negative, is there anyway we can turn this into a positive and have the students using mobile phones for positive purposes - such as accessing information from elsewhere? Using their cameras for positive purposes such as recording school excursions? How can we incorporate these activities? Can we use podcasting to develop "lectures" that students listen to prior to class, which then allows for richer and deeper discussion to take place during the classtime? Sometimes teachers fear the use of [|Wikipedia] as a resource because information isn't written by a so-called "expert". Does it have to be? Instead of banning the use of Wikipedia as a resource, can Wikipedia be used as a resource by students, if they have researched 3 other sources to validate the information? Same with podcasts which may have incorrect information because they haven't been produced by an expert. Can we teach our students to become critics of the resources available to them and for them to work out what resources are valid and why? [|Stephen Heppell] talks about letting your students use the information (even copy and paste the information) from a website for their work - and then they have to re-write the information to "make it even better" than what they copied and pasted. In order for them to do this, they need to then research websites from experts, and select "quality" information to make their version of the information even better. This can encourage much deeper levels of thinking and therfore learning. These are some of many ways in which these emerging technologies can be incorporated. It would be great to read of some more.

We need to as teachers, focus on the skills and the learning and then consider how technology can be used to achieve this. We should not be focusing on the technology itself-we will lose our educative role. The issue with using mobile phones at the moment is that our desktop computers, are not able to accept images using bluetooth so transfer of information can be difficult-however, that should not stop students sharing information with each other and the teacher using text. We need to be providing options for students. Give them a task and then brainstorm the range of ways that the task could be performed. Ask students to be the experts-establish classroom experts for different types of technologies so students can consult each other. I really like the idea of students in combination with teachers, developing rubrics to determine quality of projects using technology. The article talks about students not being content using technology to search, but they want to make a contribution. We should be providing opportunities for them to make a contribution-I particularly like the suggestion about making contributions to wikipaedia. All our students could do that after they have researched a topic or produced some kind of assignment. Let's not be contrained by our lack of ability to podcast and let the students play with podcasting-do a PMI on podcasting and explore when and where they might use them. We are all teachers of literacy and numeracy and technology can be used to effectively build multi literacies. We need to take the plunge.