The K12 Geek

BLC08 – Had the extreme pleasure of attending John Davitt’s keynote this morning. Currently I’m sitting in his ‘after keynote’ session. He has a ‘Learning Event Generator’ that with one click, it creates assignments that make students think, design and create an end product. (Email him and he’ll share it with you.) Our group was assigned to:

Do: “How Hitler was defeated” As: “a three-frame storyboard”

Here’s our go at it:

I’m quite proud of my Photoshop work, and Shelley Paul introduced our group to Pikistrips which is a neat way to create comic strips. Once challenged with our assignment, you could see our group come together and start to flesh things out. Each person contributed to the fray – some with knowledge of events, some with web researching skills, some with skills to create the parts, and some to finish off the design and deliver the content. It was learning… and it was fun!

Why is it that more teachers don’t equate fun with learning? Why does learning have to be so passive and dry?

John’s message: Make learning active. He talked about how the media would like us to be passive consumers, but in reality the fun and learning comes from active participation. He also talked about struggleware – software that challenges students to think. What a concept?! He uses Flash quite a bit in his quest for creative and active learning. I’m hoping to sit in on a small get-together later with his leadership on Flash.

So – why not get John to send you the Learning Event Generator? (Or just run it from his site.) You can customize it with your own ideas to make it fit to your curriculum. You’ll engage your students and make learning fun! And if you ever get the chance to see John talk – run, don’t walk, to see/hear him.

John makes learning fun.

Tags: active learning, BLC08, John Davitt, Learning Event Generator, Shelley Paul, struggleware, talking sheep

This entry was posted on Thursday, July 17th, 2008 at 9:43 am and is filed under Speekin' Geek. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.