William Chamberlain, an educator from Missouri and founder of the #comments4kids hashtag that encourage people to comment on student posts, wrote a post on the notion of the “connected classroom”, and this quote resonated:
“Posting information does not make your students connected.”
That distinction is important as I have seen where educators have mixed up their perspectives on their sharing, being the same as their students sharing. Although it is important to model this type of learning, we do need to create opportunities where students can create those connections from themselves.
Think of this…Perhaps the best person to teach students about space is not necessarily a teacher, but an astronaut. How do we connect our students to those experts, but more importantly, how do we teach kids to create those connections themselves?
Yet this notions of teaching students how to connect seems to fall to the select few in a school as opposed to everyone. To me, it would be the same as having a “manners” teacher; this is all of our responsibility in schools if we are truly helping our students in the world in which we all live.
They (kids) might understand technology, but not necessarily the impact it can have long term on their learning and their life. We need to be a part of this, not simply stand on the side and hope it all works out for the best.
