This article was refreshing to read! It amazed me that there are young kids out there who are so advanced when it comes to technology and integrating into their everyday lives and education. Adora Svitak, the youngest person to ever receive National Education Association (NEA) Foundation Award for Outstanding Service to Public Education, is an advocate of technology education for her peers, teachers and adults.
According to the article, " Adora was reading at age 2½ and wrote short stories at age 4. She published her first book at age 7. That book, Flying Fingers: Master the Tools of Learning through the Joy of Writing, is a collection of adventure stories that includes tips on teaching kids to write. Her second book, Dancing Fingers, is a book of poetry and writing inspiration that she cowrote with her older sister Adrianna." This is amazing to me!!! Impressive, I am speechless!! This just shows me how advanced our students are when it comes to technology and web 2.0 tools. This article shows me where the future of education is heading. This kid is more advanced then most adults I know!
I again was taken away by Adora's comment, " “Kids who have access to the Internet have access to learning and 24/7 education. They are not restricted to an hour of class time per subject,” she said. “Like education, technology has the potential to become a great democratizer, not a divider.”
Adora uses videoconferencing to teach to over 400 classrooms on literacy, writing, and making a difference. She is very well known for her talk on TED 2010 What You Can Learn From Kids. I watched her video and was again impressed! Here is the link I watched. http://reachsudbury.edublogs.org/2010/05/04/ted-talk-what-adults-can-learn-from-kids/
At the end of the video she states, “The way progress happens is that new generations and new eras grow and develop and become better than the previous ones,” she said. “It’s the reason we’re not in the Dark Ages anymore. No matter your position in life, it is imperative to create opportunities for children so we can grow up and blow you away!”
Again, very impressive, interesting and informative!!!
I also like her comment, "Students and Teachers should learn from each other, learning between grown ups and kids should be reciprocal." I could not agree more!!!! My students help me all the time with my smart board :0)and other technologies I use in my classroom!
ReplyDeleteGood for you and your kids. Learning is not a one-way street any more... teachers need to figure out what value they can add to the knowledge kids pick up from all the sources available to them. Maybe the job of a teacher is to help learners organize, evaluate, and categorize knowledge instead of pushing knowledge. Knowledge is cheap and available today... what you do with it is the important stuff.
ReplyDelete