Teacher Appreciation Week: Who Do You Appreciate?
It’s National Teacher Appreciation Week this week – a time to tell your favorite teacher just how he or she has made an impact on your life, or your kid’s. Whether it be having your child make a craft for his or her favorite teacher, or give a hug, even the smallest token of appreciation can mean the world to a teacher.
Being a teacher in this day and age can be particularly challenging, given all of the technological distractions at kids’ fingertips. Figuring out how to use technology to their advantage is a task many teachers are trying to take on.
“The real problem with education is kids are bored,” John Seely Brown, author of A New Culture of Learning: Cultivating the Imagination for a World of Constant Change, told genConnect.
John Seely Brown
“And kids that are digital are sick and tired of having stuff delivered to them. They want to actually do things with it. And they want to do things, not only with reading artifacts, but creating contexts.
WATCH: Learning A-Z Provides Innovative Ways to Educate
“So the old education system focused on content, left context very stable. And today, as you know in your own world, I can remix the content, changing the context and completely change the meaning. Well, kids start to become very attuned to reading meaning from context. This turns out to be an incredibly important skill for the 21st century because, basically, we now have powerful tools to manipulate or to create contexts as much as content. And so we now have much more powerful ways to create meaning.”
Related: Free Khan Academy’s Free Online Videos Transform Education
More schools are also using mobile technologies as primary learning tools to engage and educate students. Literacy company Learning A-Z, for example, offers easy-to-use teacher resources include learning apps, interactive worksheets and online textbooks that fill the gaps left by many reading, writing, and science education programs.
“Technology has made education more mobile, more flexible and more adaptable,” Learning A-Z‘s Vice President of Development Katherine Page Burdick told genConnect. “Mobile learning provides accessibility — anytime, anywhere, 24-7 learning.”
Join PTA’s Thank-A-Teacher Facebook page and the PTA Great Idea Bank to share Teacher Appreciation Week ideas.
Tell us: Which teacher had the biggest impact on your life, and why?
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Category: Lifestyle, Technology, Views on the News
