Moving Beyond Paper

In his blog, Scott McLeod recently reported on a keynote address by Alan Novem­ber. Here are a few high­lights that are rel­e­vant to how we edu­cate gifted stu­dents in the 21^st cen­tury:

One of the goals of gifted edu­ca­tion is to help stu­dents with great poten­tial ful­fill it. I believe it would be irre­spon­si­ble not to con­sider the impact that these chil­dren can have on our soci­ety and our world as adults, and to pre­pare them to be global citizens.

Scott also notes later in his post that in order to have global com­mu­ni­ca­tion skills, stu­dents need a big voice. How do we give them that voice? Move beyond paper. “Paper gives you a lit­tle voice—paper stays in the class­room,” he says. Teach stu­dents how to develop their voice online. Cre­ate blogs, web sites, wikis, and shared documents.

A telling point was made by Alan Novem­ber in his keynote: “Too many ‘technology-​​enabled’ assign­ments involve using the com­puter as a $1,000 pen­cil.” Are we sim­ply mov­ing our paper to a file on the local hard drive or school net­work? We need to teach our stu­dents to use the real life tech­nol­ogy tools they will need in the work­place. We need to lever­age the tools they are going to use any­way in their free time (Face­book and YouTube) for aca­d­e­mic goals. How much more pow­er­ful will an assign­ment be when the world is the audi­ence instead of just the teacher?

A student’s port­fo­lio should not be a folder in a file cab­i­net some­where that will never be seen again after June. What if a student’s port­fo­lio began with the list gen­er­ated when her name is typed into Google? Will Richard­son calls this her dig­i­tal foot­print.

Here’s the thing: Our stu­dents are going to have these dig­i­tal foot­prints whether we embrace the idea or not. As an edu­ca­tor, I’d rather be help­ing them choose the path those foot­prints are going to fol­low, and to guide them away from the pot­holes and dead ends that lie ahead.