When the learners lead

When the leaders learn, the teacher stands back and watches in amazement and with great respect!

Very early on when the children had only had the iPods for a few days, we were working at our humanities project on China. I had made a folder of Apps about China and the pupils were using them to make a mind map using SimpleMind. The China Apps were a strange assortment and I wasn't especially proud of the quality of the material. The App on the Teracotta Army (Art Gallery of NSW) was of especially high quality but other Apps, mainly those designed for tourists were mixed.

I think what happened represented the kind of shift in learning that I had hoped for. I noticed all across the classroom pupils were plugging into their head sets and murmmerings in a new language were filling the room. The pupils had stumbled across Chinese language teaching Apps and they were teaching themselves to say 'hello' and count to ten in Chinese. It represented a small step in learning with huge potential for how we can use the iPods to transform learning from passive to active, for how the teacher can become less and the pupils can become more. I had become the facilitator and they became lead learners and I hadn't had to try that hard.

Towards the end of the lesson, one pupil brought her mind map to show me. It looked really good and represented a lot of hard work on her part. She had also saved several pictures to her camera roll and she wanted to know how she could add them to the mind map. This pupil wanted to develop her learning, she had her own ideas about how she wanted to represent her research. Her enquiry makes me even more convinced of the potential available to us using iPods to transform learning.

Sadly Simplemind does not let you add pictures. Anyone out there know of a mind mapping App that will let you add pictures? Let me know !