Sunday, October 20, 2013

Transforming the learning experience, without technology

Jessica King


Davis, J. (2013, October 15). How a radical new teaching method could unleash a generation of geniuses. Wired. Retrieved from http://www.wired.com/business/2013/10/free-thinkers/

     Davis recounts the experiences Sergio Juarez Correa, a teacher in Matamoros, Mexico, had in 2011 when he reinvented the way in which he taught. He drew his inspiration from the “emerging educational philosophies... that [apply] the logic of the digital age to classroom” and the ideas that Sugata Mitra developed after his experiments with supplying disadvantaged children with technology.  A majority of the article is spent on supplying the background information on those new ways of teaching and engaging students with technology. The focus of Correa’s teaching was very much in line with the ideas of inquiry-based teaching; he would engage the students with open-ended questions and let them work through the concepts until they supplied an answer. Although Correa drew inspiration from Sugata Mitra, he was not able to grant his students access to technology in the way he would have hoped. The school he worked in was very disadvantaged and technology classes occurred once a week and usually involved pictures of technology instead of actual technology. This article, though, speaks of the accomplishments that teachers and students are able to make even without the technology present. It reinstates the idea that bringing the technology to the students is not enough, we have to alter the way in which students are ‘taught’ by bringing them to the forefront of the process.

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