I viewed the conference by Jackie Gerstein called “Web 2.0 Tools to Amplify Elementary Students’ Creativity and Initiative. Gerstein starts her 20 minute segment with a fast paced mini video set to rock music posting questions on what students need to know to be successful in the 21st century. Her point is basically that we are the Jetsons living like the Flinstones- in other words, we are in a world that is driven by technology yet we are not preparing our students how to use this technology to their advantage. She then begins her peice with an introduction of the many websites she uses with her studenst in order to have them learn at their pace and what they find interesting. She has many great ideas. One was having students trace their geneology using the different websites she provides them. She provides the websites- thus insuring their safety, but has the students explore the sites and then evaluate them. It is especially good for allowing students with different learning abilities to work at their pace. She describes one student who has just taken off with this stuff and even created her own computer game and webpage. She has another student who was struggling with figuring out how to navigate the web page but once she did, she enjoyed it so much that the teacher had a hard time getting her to leave it to view other websites.
I found this video conferentce to be very useful and inspiring. It is a great introduction to the many things that we can do in the classroom using web 2.0 tools. It also is an excellent example of how to let the students have more freedom to learn at their pace. We just need to give them the tools and get them started and then step back and let them fly!
Jetsons living like the Flinstone! That is such a great way of putting how we are living.
The conference sounds very informative. I agree her ideas are a great way to of giving students the tools they need and letting them discover and learn. Sounds like a good model for differentiation to me.