Dive Brief:
- Homer Elementary School in Oklahmoa won Ed Tech Magazine’s Collaboration Nation contest and $50,000 in prize money for a project that paired pre-K and first grade students with East Central University educational technology instructors, according to the magazine.
- Homer Elementary students coded robots at the university becoming creative problem solvers while learning more math and science skills.
- Meanwhile, Ed Tech reports English teachers have figured out how to incorporate robots into their lessons, asking students to develop technology prototypes as character analysis exercises and program bots to navigate mazes, which helped students learning about early explorers empathize with what they went through.
Dive Insight:
Just as students get practice reading and writing in virtually all subject areas, English instruction can get a boost from incorporating projects that would more likely be found in science or engineering classes. One goal of the Next Generation Science Standards is to help students recognize cross-disciplinary connections, and the standards themselves include appendices tying the NGSS to the Common Core State Standards in math and literacy.
Tech trends in classrooms might one day make robots a completely standard element in all subjects. But administrators and other tech leaders should keep in mind that the path toward that future should be a methodical one. Teachers should only incorporate technology when it truly engages students. Otherwise, they might have better outcomes without the digital tools.
