Today I am presenting a session at e-Dayz09 at Tea Tree Gully TAFE.
Just a bit of a “show and tell” really, called from Toy to Tool.
I have a few gadgets and gizmos to demo and talk about, and I rather hope participants will be able to chime in with gadgets and thoughts of their own. One of the things I want to talk about is the fact that there is often a lag time between the appearance of a new gadget in the marketplace and the utilisation of that in our own teaching and learning.
I know that when I have been conducting workshops for educators, many of the participants say they are grateful for the time to “play”. Most of us feel that first of all we need to get a good grasp of how to use the gadget, then we need to assess its educational potential, and then we need to have time to work out how to unleash that potential into our classroom pedagogy. That all takes time, and if we then add system wide implementation into the mix, what can be a matter of months may become years. Sometimes that time lag is just too great and by the time the tool makes it into our classroom, our students think it is “old hat”.
My other thought is that sometimes a new tool may not be for implementation in our classroom, but may be most useful for our own professional development or for our own professional learning. And not everything will be useful. Sometimes you put in a fair bit of effort learning to do something, and in the long run decide that you won’t add it to your repertoire. My learning trail is littered with those. But the learning process is always useful! In the end, you know how it works, and you’ve decoded the steps, and added the process to your strategies.
My Prezi isn’t very startling and can be found here. For me the jury is still out on whether some of these toys/tools would be useful to the educator in the classroom or lecture theatre.
Other posts you might like to look at:
Among my future posts will be ones relating to the Kindle.
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