Joe Bower - The teacher, parent and student teacher / digital natives

Many of us who are involved in education either as teachers, students or parents are grateful to Joe Bower for sharing his teaching and his insights on education on his site. He is inspired by the likes of Alfie Kohn and Deborah Meier and is showing us how  constructivist ideas are put into practice in the field. He has been sharing his experiences of  ' abolishing grades' and instead  , having student collaboration to achieve a more authentic and relevant assessment. He has recently being discussing introducing and using technology in school to promote learning. In my previous blog I spoke of the need for kids to see internet , cell phones and other technologies as more of an educational and learning tool and not simply a social tool. He describes this not so easy transformation. Kids  are known today as Digital Natives , a phrase coined by Marc Prensky. They are more at home with this technology and ' mediate ' the world with it. But it seems that our digital natives are very unsophisticated users of the technology and need teachers to help them use it in a responsible way ',  constructing modern knowlege ' in a project led learning  environment'.

Here are 3 blogs by Joe Bower on technology in the classroom.

http://www.joebower.org/2010/09/digital-natives-they-are-not.html

http://www.joebower.org/2010/09/instant-chat-in-classroom.html

http://www.joebower.org/2010/04/teaching-social-networking-finger.html

Allan