Technology and Play in the Classroom

If you’re an educator, and you haven’t heard of Sir Ken Robinson, stop what you’re doing right now and go watch his TED talk on Creativity in Education. Click here. Seriously, go now. If you have seen it, then you know that he is an impressive speaker who is an expert on fostering creativity in the school system. Recently, thanks to his twitter account, I watched another of his videos. This one is only about two minutes long, and well worth your time.

Perspective is not easy as a teacher. We can become bogged down in the day-to-day details of the classroom, and forget the generational differences between our students and ourselves. His point about technology is impressive. Why would our students be any more impressed with the internet than we were with electricity? It’s not technology to them, it’s just part of their world.

Tapping into technology can be daunting in the classroom; I myself have a SMART board in the class that I don’t use enough. Recently, I gave my students a project where they had to write a story, and use www.prezi.com to tell it. Prezi is a free website that functions much like PowerPoint, except there is much more control over the aesthetics of the presentation. I set up my kids with computers, walked them step by step towards creating a new account, and once they had opened one of the basic formats, I gave them their instructions. Before starting on their stories, though, I told them to play with it for 15 minutes.

Within 5 minutes, one of my shier students had discovered how to incorporate pictures and videos into his presentation, and was teaching the other students how to do it too. He had suddenly become a leader in the class, and by the end of our session, each student had tailored their presentation to their own personalities before even beginning to write.

One of the greatest difficulties in using technology is setting up safe parameters for our students to use. They need to be able to play around with it, but it’s so easy to not understand or get distracted on the Internet. If we set it up properly, and let them have free reign, it won’t take long until they’re better at it than we are. After all, it’s not technology to them.

I wonder, though, at how they’ll react to playing around with other websites? Twitter? Or even facebook? What are your experiences with technology in the classroom?

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