This is an especially misleading headline, but it is what it is: Podcasts replace textbook for GATE students, from the Mohave Daily News. Happily, looking at the first couple of paragraphs proves that they aren’t throwing away the textbooks exactly:
Instead of pouring over textbooks and completing worksheets, students at Diamondback Elementary School are making podcasts, creating virtual tours of fictional museums and putting together their autobiographies with digital cameras.
The Gifted And Talented Enrichment (GATE) program – offered year-round for kindergarten through eighth grade in the Bullhead City School District – launched a four-week summer program this year that has students working on MacBooks.
The MacBook runs both Apple and Windows systems, compared to the Windows-only computers the district currently uses, and has a built-in system that can take still photos and record audio and video.
Oh yeah– it’s kind of an ad for Apple, too.
This is an article that I hope is around in terms of a link next year when I teach English 516 again because it’s another one of those examples to me of the difference between just dumping laptops in the schools (and then being shocked– SHOCKED, I tell you!– when that doesn’t work) and actually integrating technology into pedagogy in a way that makes sense.