Wednesday, December 21, 2011

Authenticity in education...

I have been trying (with dubious success) to convince "leaders" in education that we must adopt more authentic projects than are allowed by those who are too narrowly focused on tests scores. My students have been creating apps for mobile devices recently, and their culminating project was to create an app for a business. We have a grant-funded position in the building this year to work on career-readiness and to help our students find internships and other alternative paths to graduation, so she contacted some businesses and got their approval for our students to create and publish apps for them.

One of our students received a phone call from the owner of one of the businesses yesterday to say that his company (a towing company) had actually gotten a client from the app! Someone whose car slid off an icy road found the app and had their car pulled out of the ditch because of it.

"That's cool," I said to the student. "Yeah it is," was his response-- and he had a gleaming smile!

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