I still haven’t found what I am looking for (with apologies to U2)
I have attended 5 EdTech conferences in the past year. How and why will be explained in a separate post. I am searching for specific ideas and as the title of this post suggests I typically cannot find what I am looking for. I am assuming most attendees have different needs and thus come away satisfied. What I am searching for involves the logic behind the activities teachers describe. My interest is in what I describe as “multimedia authoring to learn” and “teaching to learn”. These are phrases of my own creation, but related to familiar concepts such as writing across the curriculum or writing to learn. These terms alone do not explain why author to learn or teaching to learn are beneficial, but I can provide the details if necessary. I want to understand what the presenters argue is the rationale for any learning tasks they describe.
Most of the presentations I watch fall into two categories. The first is a “tips, tricks or new stuff” kind of presentation focused on the new and the novel. While I continually hear “it is not about the technology”, the popularity of these sessions would argue for a different conclusions. It seems most of us want to be in the know when it comes to new things. The other category is a derivative of the first – it includes a description of a tool or several tools and then a couple of examples of here is what my students did with these tools. It might seem that these examples would meet my expectations but this is not the case. Here is a “Glogster” with some pictures from our unit on xys. Here are students from my class describing their drawings. etc.
I might offer a potential mechanism by which these “external activities” require productive “internal or cognitive activities”. The presenter does not and probably does not think this way. I think it matters. The context, the details, and the expectations make a big difference in the processing of the learner. A common phrase that captures this concern might be “hands on is not necessarily minds on”. I want to consider the context, the details, and the teacher expectations to evaluate whether I think the students have minds on. Maybe this is assumed, but I do not think such assumptions are always justified.
You know your students and the situations you describe. Just tell me what thinking you think has occurred as the result of the activity and why you think this,
