Eclectic Technology

Career and Technical Education programs (often called vocational schools) have their students learn by doing. Learning by doing is known as experiential learning. Why is experiential learning beneficial? Below are the three reasons described in this post.

Reason 1: Experiential education promotes positive attitudes towards learning.

Reason 2: Experiential education provides true-to-life experience that enhances career exploration.

Reason 3: Experiential education helps create more engaged members of the workforce.

Each of these reasons is discussed in the post. There is also an excellent infographic, Experiential Learning in the Classroom: Learn by Doing.

What is experiential learning? This post explores this concept, with a list of "principles as articulated by the Association for Experiential Education" and also eight images that compare experiential learning to a more traditional classroom.

Finding projects that help students understand key concepts is one way for us to include experiential education in our classroom. The images provided in this post may spark your imagination.

Are you interested in being known as an educator whom is also a maker educator? This post from Jackie Gerstein provides a great visual that looks as many of the roles you might play, including

* Process facilitator

* Resource suggestion provider

* Lead learner

* Relationship enabler

* Technology tutor

This visual is designed in ThingLink and if you click through from the post you will find additional resources in the visual

And you might also view a SlideShare where Gerstein provides  additional resources.

In this post Grant Wiggins discusses that experiential learning does not equal minds on learning. One can learn from their hands, but not engage their mind.

He notes (and this is quoted from the post):

Many projects, problems, situations, and field trips do not yield lasting and transferable learning because too little attention is given to the meta-cognitive and idea-building work that turns a single experience into insight and later application.

How can we help our students engage their minds? Wiggins provides three examples of a series of questions that may help you come up with questions that you could use with your students. Below is the set of questions that he asks students when he visits classrooms:

• What are you doing?
• Why are you doing it?
• What does this help you do that’s important?

For the back story on these questions (and to see the others) click through to the post.

It is rare that I curate two articles from the same author over two days. This post by Jackie Gerstein is an exception. Gerstein has been discussing Maker Education for quite some time and in this post she states:

"...recent discussions with other educators and administrators made me realize that the idea of maker education is often vague and seems unrealistic in terms of regular classroom instruction.  As such, in the future, I am going to associate and discuss Maker Education in the context S.T.E.A.M. – science, technology, engineering, arts (including language arts), math, hopefully, encouraging regular classroom teachers to integrate maker education projects into their classrooms."

What follows is a lengthy list of articles and other resources that may assist you in learning about Maker Education and moving you towards implementing it in your classroom. The image above is also a ThingLink image, and will provide you with links to the same articles.

Jackie Gerstein discusses how we can bring maker education activities into our schools beginning with a look at three current trends:

* The Play Deficit - for many children time to play is minimal as they lead very scheduled lives

* "Lack of creativity and play in children's lives and toys"

* The Maker Movement as in Maker Education

The first two trends are also apparent in our education system. In many schools playtime has decreased with the rollout of Common Core curriculum. Students in pre-school and Kindergarten have specific benchmarks that they need to hit to move on, and it often comes with a decrease in play time.

And many toys we find on the market today do not promote creativity. We often think of Legos as a toy to promote creativity. Gerstein shares her thoughts on this, noting buckets that contain freeform Legos that promote free play are often in the back of the store while the packages of Legos that come with directions on how to build a Star Wars character or a Harry Potter character are in the front.

At the end of this section Gerstein concludes that the literature shows that (quoting from the post):

• Making, creating, innovating, experimenting is needed now more than ever in this rapidly evolving world and our children are severely lacking in these skills
• If these skills are to be integrated into formal and informal learning settings, some direct instruction and scaffolding will need to occur.

The final section of the piece explores how the Maker Movement may impact the two issues noted above and provides a look at six areas that we as educators need to consider if we are going to become a part of the Maker Education.

If you are looking for a variety of information on Design Thinking this post is for you. Gestein share many resources including:

* An Introduction to Design Thinking, a Facilitator's Guide with a script, talking points, takeaways, and set-up considerations (available from Scribd)

* A slideshare presentation "Design is hacking how we learn (presented at AIGA Into the Woods 2012)

* links to a variety of articles, including "The d.school's Virtual Crash Course of Design Thinking"

She also discusses some of the problems with Design Thinking, once again providing links several articles. She shares views from people in business who have turned Design Thinking " into a linear, gated, by-the-book methodology that delivered, at best, incremental change and innovation." She expresses concerns that this may also happen in education.

The final section of her post looks at hacking, but with a different flavor than we often read. A number of definitions of hacking are provided and one is below:

"In developing hacking as a skill, an attitude, and/or as an approach to construct and de-construct the world, it is more than just hacking in terms of computer science.  In order to hack the world, we need to tear it apart, deconstruct it and analyze its components parts and how they operate in relation to one another within various systems.  This is a mental, social, emotional, and whenever possible, a physical process."

Challenge yourself to read this post. Chances are you will come away with some new ideas.