Today's students are an alien species connected by invisible tentacles but a former educator and blogger says teachers should harness this hyper-connectedness, not discourage it.
David Warlick, the creator of Citation Machine, an attribution website that makes writing bibliographies a snap, took his pro-technology message to teachers during last Friday's Computer Using Educators of BC conference at Terry Fox secondary school in Port Coquitlam.
Warlick used the alien imagery to describe today's wired students but was speaking to a converted crowd of teachers who took notes, linked to his website and tweeted his message on laptops and smart phones during the keynote address.
A picture of alien teenagers tethered to their smart phones and online games generated laughs but Warlick's message to teachers was for them to "hack" into students' online experience and use some of the same strategies to inspire learning.
Teachers should encourage students to answer self-generated questions and make classroom tasks more responsive, just as a text message provides immediate feedback. Warlick contended that various technologies in use today are not just "distractions" but tools for generating ideas and inspiring creativity.
"Be a master learner," Warlick urged, advocating that teachers model questioning behaviour by admitting "I don't know the answer to that question but I will find out."
He said there are intrinsic qualities to kids' online experiences that could be incorporated into education. Video and online games, for example, provide immediate feedback, put up challenges that must be overcome through collaboration and critical thinking, and reward players for the time they invest in the game. To illustrate his point, Warlick offered several examples where students were rewarded for their work, not by marks, but by peer responses - and even cash, in the case of a class that wrote a science lab manual and sold it online for $20.
"The point is, they put time into it because there was value," Warlick said.
He also suggested educators find ways to incorporate fun and whimsy into their teaching and encourage students to make mistakes because that's how they learn.
Describing his own learning and teaching experience as "information poor" because of the limits placed by textbooks and classroom walls, Warlick said today's students have "no ceiling" because information is abundant and teachers should do everything in their power to foster curiosity rather than discourage it.
