
Empowering students is our goal as teachers. Today's presentation (Just under this post!!) is titled "Autonomous Mastery Learning". That's a lot of big words and a ton of big ideas, so let's break it down....
The point of all of this is to put your head before your hands. The idea of changing teaching and learning at a philosophical level is imperative to everything done in the classroom through technology. What Garth and I are doing with the thoughtful integration of technology is empowering our students to own their learning. The WebQuest presented today is constantly under re-development based on the constant feedback of our students using GoogleForms. This is the 3rd year using the WebQuest and each year we change and rearrange elements based on student surveys. We want to provide students with the digital resources necessary to dig deeper into our curriculum, learn at their own pace and create a digital footprint that shows mastery, passion and an intrinsic desire to learn.
This presentation is not about a specific tool, or even a handful of tools. We have chosen the tools we use based on the philosophical principal that students that DO the most, LEARN the most. What you will not see in this presentation is the months of culture building that goes into our world history class. Our students are the same as students all around this country, with one exception. Our students are making the transition away from grades and points. They are beginning to see that their learning legacies can influence how other kids around the world learn. They have developed a sense of themselves in the world. They have created videos with over 30,000 hits on YouTube, they have worked over seven years to create a digital textbook used regularly by schools in three countries and they continue to reflect/collaborate/re-imagine their work in our seventh grade class well into their high school careers.
Please feel free to explore this site and any of the links in the presentation as we talk and thank you for attending!
-Mike & Garth
| | |