The New Reality and the Disconnect

The more time I spend online the more I am amazed at the creative power of people, and the Web in its ability to deliver the products of raw creative talent worldwide to your desktop. Check out The Human Clock which is a site that displays the time of day as a photo that an individual or group uploads to the site. The image changes when the time changes and there are also additional photographs from around the world that people have upload. What is interesting here is that this kind of creativity exists in our schools and how are we tapping in to it? I would say not very well. In most instances at the secondary level, kids are confronted with content purveyors who teach the same way they’ve always taught. In fact, they’re teaching they way they were taught. Too much “learning” is too passive. This is certainly not a new argument or a new thought. But today, with all the new tools at our disposal, with the ability to bring learning alive within the context of how today’s students want to learn, and can learn, and with the power to connect and bring incredible authenticity into the classroom, the disconnect between what is taking place in the classroom and what is occurring outside of school is growing.

Here's an example of what works, from Edugadget, and how to use Google Maps in a Geography class. The post in Edugadget describes how a geography teacher could have students do tours and "walks through time, " or 21st Century map reports using Google Maps. There is a Flash movie presented in the blog article that presents a walking tour using Google Maps. A creative teacher with the right software could have students create these types of tours. Camtasia Studio could be used here to capture movements on the screen, permit voice annotation, and then the project could be exported as a flash file. How engaging would that be for students...