The Central District Project

PART THREE:  Use a Project that made use of technology to make sense of the following three claims that Mishra & Koehler make.    How do these claims inform your thinking about how to develop an educative experience?

  • While technology can make it easy to do things, it’s important to understand the affordances and constraints of a particular technology.  Technology solves problems and creates new problems.
  • Every technology has a zone of possibility around it.  It’s the ZONE that invites creative classroom uses.    It can be used in a mechanical way.  It can be integrated in a meaningful way.   And it can be used in an innovative and generative way .

Your task:   Take 15 minutes to examine The Central Area Project:

  1. Read the introduction.
  2. Examine the photos & read 3-4 of the captions that students wrote about their photographs.  What might students have been learning by creating this product?
  3. Read the “tell us about your experience” and “tell us about your experience teaching and learning”  parts of the report that the two teachers wrote once they had completed the project for Q-west (the organization that funded the project.)   What were the learning objectives?  What were the affordances and constraints of the photo project? How did that effect their teaching and possibly student learning?
  4. How does this project make you think about Mishra & Koehler’s claims listed above?
  5. Add/modify your list of what a educative experience entails when it involves technology .