I had the good fortune to be invited to a Lions meeting tonight. And even better luck to be sat next to a teacher who is the IT lead at her school. I’ll call her Anne as she doesn’t know I’m writing about her.

Anne uses the computers in her year 6 class to great effect. She told me about a recent project the kids had done on “leaders”. After exploring what a leader is – the kids thought rich, good looking, well educated, good – they were given a list of names of well known leaders. These included the likes of Helen Clark, Barak Obama, Adolf Hitler and so on. The students who chose Adolf Hitler didn’t know who he was, but thought his name was “cool”. They couldn’t believe what they found on the web about him and kept coming to Anne saying “Is this right, did this happen?” So they talked about how to find other sources and also about how just because it’s on the web doesn’t make it true. Anne showed them for example how Wikipedia can be changed, they didn’t believe it was possible until Anne showed them!

Now what’s great about this is that Anne is helping her class to find answers for themselves, make judgements about sources, and gain computer skills which will prove essential in their adult lives. They use the computer as a natural part of learning, not as a separate activity. I love it.

If you read this in the morning “Anne”, thanks for a great evening’s conversation Oh and Twitter can be found at twitter.com my twitter name is kiwicarol

Image: Student by pmorgan
Don’t you just love the look on this student’s face?