Weekly Tech Tip - Metacognition

Weekly Tech Tip:

Please share your story or example of a non-school learning experience you have had and what made that experience so powerful for you. You can share your responses by adding a comment on this blog post.



Recommended tools for constructing your response:

• - If you can type, you can make movies. Text-to-Movie
• - make still pictures talk with comical moving mouths.
• - Add your own subtitles to clips from Chinese movies.
• Add subtitles to foreign language films (like Chinese Movie Creator).
• - Generates videos of your Google Searches to tell a story.
• - Free online audio recorder and audio publishing
• - convert text to speech (spoken by a cartoon avatar)
• - upload your photo, record your voice, share with friends
  - Innovative online presentation program that nicely integrates multimedia from other sources.
• - Prezi.com - The zooming presentation editor
• - Turn your document files into an online books & magazines
• - Collaborative storytelling for families and friends (perfect for creative writing)

Alan Kay & Seymour Papert on teachers as learners vs curriculum implementation #edchat #lrnchat

This, I think is a key point that Alan Kay brings up and Seymour Papert builds upon, in their testimony before the 1995 House Committee Hearing on Technology in Education, that teachers and schools need to be more humble about what they teach and focus more on how to model learning. I will come back to this clip in a later reflective post (I promise). They both agree here that what is important in a teacher is that they are good learners, not so much that they have extensive knowledge of their subjects. This concept flies in the face of what I believed when I started teaching eleven years ago but have come now to embrace as absolute truth about teaching, learning, and education. Curriculum, after all, is nothing more than a political weapon designed to elevate and highlight some while repressing others (see Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States) but metacognition and knowledge acquisition skills empower all who are taught them.