Tonight at the UR Jepson Center, we’ll be partnering with our friends from Henrico County to present to Region 1 school administrators, teachers, and school board members what it’s like to teach with technology to target twenty-first century skills. Specifically, we’re focusing on two skills: problem solving and critical thinking.
We’ll be showcasing Scratch, the program from MIT that introduces students as young as 9-10 years old to programming. The constructionist ideas behind this program go back far, to Seymour Papert (think LOGO), and before him, Jean Piaget. You’ll also learn about changes we need to accommodate to our pedagogy, like giving students open-ended questions.
Henrico will be sharing an example using Google Earth (find some materials here for using Google Earth for problem solving) and another example from math teacher and blogger extraordinaire, Dan Meyer.
Learning in the twenty-first century can be fun, and I’m glad we’ll have folks from Goochland to join us tonight!