Yesterday I was honored to be invited to speak to Ms B’s 8th grade Advanced Technology class at a middle school in rural Texas. The class has a space in TappedIn which permitted 15 of us to gather and have a conversation about my post on the evils of PowerPoint. The students were very interested in the source of the rules and wanted to know if I had rules for other tools. After discussing PowerPoint and some alternatives, I asked them if they knew what Phaedrus was and challenged them to find out about it as a kind of in-class project. We had a good conversation on the definition of technology. The session was much like our bi-weekly chats except that they were all together in the same room down in Texas and I was the only one at a distance of more than a few meters.

The students all met in a computer lab and Ms B projected the discussion on the big screen while each student logged into the space on his/her own computer. According to Ms B there was a lot of talking going on in the room as the students organized themselves and struggled with the issues that I was putting up for them. Just to add a little dramatic tension, the class had a visitor from administration during this period. The visitor was intrigued to see that the class had a “guest lecturer” from another state and that the students were interacting directly with me from their own desktops.

We used the internet and some simple, low bandwidth connections to link me into an 8th grade class room and we typed back and forth. There was a lot of discussion about the value of the way technology is used and what kinds of tools we could use instead. More valuable, I think, was that I was able to share with them some of the reasoning that I use to make my rules and choose my tools.

My question is, “Was this a valuable experience?”

And by that I mean, what kinds of instructional goals were served by that hour? With all of the demands to “cover the curriculum” and to “meet the standards” and to “pass the test” can we really justify taking an hour and letting the students lead the discussion?

This entry was posted on Saturday, September 23rd, 2006 at 9:26 am and is filed under Education, Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.