LEARNING, CONTINUED FROM 3
uses Twitter in his classroom. “Some students are shy about using their voice in class, while others are really vocal and interrupt. So, I have them text to a Twitter feed and project it … That’s something I appropriated from university classes with 100 or 200 people, but it can be used for as few as four,” he said. Students taking Goldman’s courses engage in projects that are “authentic, which means close to real world,” he said. His students recently placed third in an international competition for development of a virtual appliance that makes the installation and configuration of Mahara, opensource software that allows users to build an electronic portfolio, easier. “I want our students to have a line on their vita saying they contributed substantively to a project.” There are challenges for schools that choose to embrace the use of technology at such a large scale. The biggest, according to Fedalen, “is the need to have a long-range financial, professional-support and -development commitment. A second challenge is keeping pace with the technology natives that our students are. As a community we discuss the reality of digital footprints and the necessity for mature and appropriate use of technology. While we value the access our students now have to all types of information, we must work to balance enhancing access to stimulating content with developmentally safe content and ultimately that our students can independently distinguish between the two.”
COURTESY OF CHELSEA SCHOOL
A Chelsea School student uses an Epson BrightLink board to demonstrate Scratch, an education-centered programming language from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
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