david puttnam, writing in educationguardian on May 8th, has issued a challenge: he wants to start a serious public debate about how and whether we can bridge the gap between childrens’ experiences [of ICT] inside and outside school. This is welcome and is the same point highlighted by John Naughton in the Observer, back in January. he rightly says that this is not new, that thousands of words have been written about this over the last decade.
perhaps one solution would be to enable kids to do what many of us do day-in, day-out – to work collaboratively with others to achieve something specific: to develop and use our technical competence to compliment our social skills in order to achieve a specific outcome.
2 responses so far ↓
1
LindaH
// May 22, 2007 at 4:36 pm
I agree, collaborative skills focussed on defined goals are key in this. I’ve used this argument to defend pairing children in the ICT suite even when there were enough computers to go round. Another thing that works in this way is the “Ask 3 before you ask me” rule. There’s usually someone in class who knows how to achieve the desired outcome, giving them the chance to share that knowledge can often shift the class dynamics in very positive ways.
2
dickwillis
// May 22, 2007 at 6:21 pm
‘Ask 3′ sounds a great idea. When I was working on the Web for Schools programme, back at the end of the 90’s we frequently found that the pupils ICT expertise overtook the teachers. The trick was finding teachers who were not threatened by this!
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