From June 26-28, they walked the talk by swapping success stories with their peers, showing off student multimedia projects and ferreting out everything new and exciting in the exhibit hall. While most educators would agree that the intent of technology standards is to stimulate positive change in education, some seemed concerned about the metrics cited in the report. Learning, they explained, can't be measured by evaluating which pieces of hardware and software students know how to use. Instead, learning should be measured by how well students use critical thinking to solve problems.
Technology can help students find the answers and it's unquestionably an important tool.
But it's only part of a bigger educational picture that must include sound instructional theory. Coming to America To teach the subject of immigration, Torres recently challenged his students to create stories about how their own families emigrated to the United States. He encouraged the kids to approach the subject as documentary filmmakers would, so they wrote scripts and storyboards and conducted interviews with their parents, grandparents and great-grandparents. The class became so enthusiastic that Torres found kids coming to school early and staying late to work on their projects. Using iMovie , iMacs and digital cameras, the students shot and edited their own footage and added finishing touches of music, narration, titles and transitions.