Technology-Leadership+Book+Summary

Type **// Empowering Students with Technology by Alan November //** The book I chose to read and report on is “Empowering Students with Technology” by Alan November. The entire book helped me to understand how we need to use technology to help motivate students to learn. Many students are bored with the traditional textbook, lecture and worksheet classroom, and need to feel empowered and become a partner in how they learn and where that learning comes from. Alan November started off with a story about a student named Zack who was trying to research information for a report on the Holocaust. “A fourteen-year old named Zack was asked what he was learning in school by his retired neighbor. Zack answered, “I’m working on a history paper about how the Holocaust never happened.” (November, 2010, p. 12). By using the traditional search engine that lead him to a website on the Holocaust, Zack came up with information that was not true. Students think that because it is on the internet, it must be true and finding the false information on the internet made Zack rethink how he should do his research. This is the danger of the internet from a student who is not yet trained to be a critical thinker. The author also went on to say that once something is on the internet, it is on there forever. Using archives, anything that was once published online can be found. Because of the archives, Zack was able to trace his false information and research back to the original author. This is something that we also never think about. Prospective employers can find out anything they need to about a person they are about to hire for a company. Archives are easy to access, if the person is trained properly. The author also spoke about the need to see what information is linked to a website in order to find out where the website originated. We can learn about a website from looking at the links embedded in the website. The author gives several “E-Venture” activities that can be used in a classroom to learn more about URL addresses and website information to expand the student’s critical thinking skills and help them learn how to decipher information from the internet so that the material they retrieve is valid. In Chapter 2, the author discusses collaborative relationships and how using this type of learning will increase connections not only with the community, but also with parents. A program known as Skype can be used in the classroom to allow several people to be online and chat together to collaborate learning experiences with each other. Videoconferencing can be an excellent tool to use in the classroom to include parents, grandparents and the community. How valuable would it be to actually see what your child is doing at school instead of only being able to ask them what they did in school? The author also gives several rules to follow for a videoconference to be effective. Making connections using email that globally connects students with classrooms from other countries is a tool that would allow students to learn cross-culturally. Student projects can be posted globally to receive feedback from others and would allow them to improve their work. These collaborative learning relationships will make the classroom a place of interactive learning with global and cultural educational opportunities. Chapter 3 discusses the concept of reverse mentoring which is very similar to describing teachers as immigrants and students as natives. Many times students can teach us and allow us to give up control of the traditional classroom and let students navigate their way to learning. As teachers, we need to become global learners and collaborators as well. Being in a traditional classroom environment can sometimes be a lonely place. If teachers collaborate globally, and use discussion communities to learn from each other, we can improve our technological skills and teaching tools by learning from colleagues that are not just down the hall, but possibly in another country. By shifting control and allowing the students to research what they want to learn, we can put them on the path to solving real world problems. The students still will need the guidance of a teacher, but they can work together to make the learning experiences more exciting and possibly solve some problems that are occurring in today’s society. In Chapter 4, the author discusses how to take real world problems and allow students to research archive and find information to help solve the problems. “One of the most important skills that students should learn is to understand the language and perspective of the organization or the people who provide primary source material.” (November, 2010, p.73). Students need to know where the primary source of information is coming from and how to recognize it. Again the author gives several “E-Venture” activities to try in the classroom. Several websites and questions are given that allow the teacher to facilitate the learning needed to find primary sources. The final chapter is all about online learning and how important it is to our new learning communities. There are several virtual high schools that exist today and many more are coming. While the virtual online learning community may lack personal contact, many times it allows the more reserved student to speak up because he/she doesn’t feel threatened or embarrassed as they might feel in the traditional classroom environment. On student said, “I like being anonymous.” “Students have time to respond, so they can be more thoughtful in their answers and they cannot see other students rolling their eyes or laughing at something they said.” (November, 2010, p. 88). In the book “Empowering Students with Technology,” Alan November discusses the importance of technology and student learning. Improved learning using technology and allowing students to navigate their way in a less traditional classroom setting is the direction we need to go as educators. Students are the natives and we are the immigrants when it comes to technology. We need to be facilitators and guides for classroom learning, but students should be able to access information using the internet and know what to do with this information once found and students need to know where the information originated. By empowering them to become critical thinkers, they can navigate their learning to become successful in this digital world. There were so many innovative ideas and websites noted in this book that I couldn’t wait to put the book down and try them out for myself. I spend hours looking up all the websites and suggestions and brainstormed ways that I could use these ventures in my classroom.

November, Alan (2010), //Empowering students with technology//. Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin.