I have been thinking a lot about the importance of choice lately. Recently, I ran into the parent of a child I previously taught, and it reminded me of a moment when I gave an answer to her child that I now regret.
Last spring, at the end of a unit of study about plants, I asked my students, as a culminating project, to make an artifact of some kind to show their learning. We wanted to put this artifact on our blog, so we talked about several tools that they could use to show their learning. I no longer remember all of the options, but I know they included writing an article for their blog, drawing a picture to post on their blog, making a book using Storybird and making a video using Sketchcast. I wanted them to have a choice of what was best for them to use.
One boy came up to me to ask if he could use Vocaroo, the voice recording tool we were using that year. To my shame, I said “no”. I think my reasoning was that I wanted him to have the opportunity to practice using text, and all of the other options could have included written words.
What you need to know about this child is that although he is verbally bright, he has a severe text disability, so severe that he could recognize only about 20 words by the end of grade one. Obviously, anything involving text brings him great frustration.
via It’s Your Choice…You Choose « Primary Preoccupation.
About Dr. Bob- Blog Curator
Bob’s has focused his expertise in technology integration in the K-12 community and teacher education. This expertise touches many different aspects of technology and learning. Areas of particular interest include: Learning, Computational Thinking and STEM, Mobile Learning, 1:1 technology initiatives, problem and project- based learning. Bob's experiences have been enhanced through collaborations with Bonnie Bracey-Sutton who formerly worked as President Clinton’s 21 Century Educator and Raymond Rose who formerly was part of the Concord Consortium, a non profit research and development corporation and the lead institution in developing one of the first virtual high schools in the nation. Other important influences include work at Learning Sciences Research Institute as Senior Research Associate at the University of Illinois Chicago where he was involved with studies of best practices of teacher education and technology. Additional experiences include, working with John Bransford at Vanderbilt University’s Learning Technology Center as Project Coordinator for the school’s Preparing Tomorrow’s Teachers to Use Technology Grant (PT3). The grant, national in scope, was responsible for disseminating and helping to implement research on learning and technology into grant activities and the activities of grant partners.
Bob now heads up the IRIS Connect project at the University of Mississippi and is part of the Mobile Learning Portal Project at the University of Texas - Austin. The Portal project involves Dr. Paul Resta, who holds the Ruth Knight Millikan Centennial Professorship in Instructional Technology and serves as Director of the Learning Technology Center at the University of Texas at Austin.
The Sharing Tree 