ללא נייר … אבל עם למידה

Three years ago, the school at which I teach made the move to one-to-one computing. Initially there was hesitancy on behalf of much of the faculty with regard to the use of the new machines and confusion about how to best implement the new technology in the classroom in an effective and authentic way. For many, the technology of wireless tablet-PCs and LCD projectors amounted to not much more than a word-processor hooked up to a glorified overhead projector. Not that they were wrong… it’s just that, for all of us and myself included, our thinking was trapped in the static paradigm we’d always lived with. A paradigm of strict schedules, top-down decisions, and analog television. But the world was growing more dynamic by the hour.

Over the last two years, I have seen a real change in relations to technology in the classroom. And that change has been student-driven.

I don’t.

While I encourage reading online, in no way do I ever discourage reading real paper books. As I’ve written before, it’s not paper I’m against — it’s a paper-knowledge mentality I’m in opposition to.

I post online all of the sorts of assignments that I used to have kids turn in on paper, not because I want them to use technology or because I don’t want them to use paper. I do this because online assignments are naturally dynamic.

In terms of actually using a novel in class, however, I always post the sections we are doing a close-reading of up on the wall via an LCD projector. It’s then easy for me to mark it up via my tablet-PC. Often I will then post the day’s notes to my blog as jpgs. In addition, my students mark up their own digital copies of the text and save their notes on their blogs.

Over the course of the year, the students unwittingly develop a wonderful digital portfolio that demonstrates their progress. And — and this is something else cool about the dynamism of Web 2.0 — is that the students can go back, revisit their notes, and link their notes to digital sources and scholarship online.

… rather than predicting what classrooms will look like and how they will work in the future, it’s more exciting to think about what people will ‘think’ like in the future. Because what history tells us over and over again is that more than anything else, technology — whether papyrus or the printing press or the Internet — allows for the distribution of fresh ideas and new ways of thinking about ideas.