Wednesday, March 24, 2010

Empowered Students Do Amazing Things

Having witnessed a pretty awesome thing in my classroom today, I wanted to celebrate it by way of a blog post.  If you've read my previous posts, you would have seen that I've been focused on making my classroom much less teacher centered.  Well, to do this, students need to step up and become the center of the class.

We were working on test review, students had laptops in front of them for online discussion purpose, and many of them used a discussion board quite well, all of their own accord.  The Promethean board was also available for student use. 

The most amazing thing I saw was a group of 3 turn into a group of 6 standing around the Promethean board, as one student went through a review exercise explaining it to others that were at the board.  Finally, student interaction with the Promethean board instead of teacher interaction.  Props go out to that group of students that really got something out of class, and moved class in the positive direction. 

With that being said, it felt kind of cheap and very minimal use of class tech by just having/letting kids "do problems" (as goes the phrase in the Math Ed world).  I'm now in search of ideas that let kids interact with the board on a much higher level.  Today was just the beginning.  We can't get to having students do amazing things with the Promethean board without the help of some student pioneers stepping up to change their classroom. 

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