The Prensky Challenge

Prensky has found a way to reach even the most oppositional of students and to help them to reach their maximized potential. If we were to offer students what, quite literally, could be the chance of a lifetime to learn a wide array of useful technological skills, we may be able to reach out to every potential demographic and give them the needed enthusiam that it would require to learn a year's curriculum in a 5 month term. However, there are a few issues that I think would need addressing.

1.) First and foremost, the class that would serve as guinea pigs for this experiment would have to include a group of highly motivated students to begin with. It would probably be best to work with a GT group of students or, at least, a group without mainstreamed Learning Disabled or ESL students who may struggle with the doubly fast-paced curriculum.

2.) It may be wise to teach this class in the manner of a college course. If you have students break up into teams to prepare work on different curricular units, they will be able to prepare lessons for themselves and share them with their classmates. This will take some of the time restraints off of the classroom teacher. Keeping all of the material, including student produced lessons, accounted for by standardized testing and other formal classroom assessments will ensure a strong accountability of your students.

3.) Finally, I think Prensky should also encouarge his students, as a further carrot, to showcase their particular talents in the second half of the course. If a student has a great deal of capability in the robotics field, that students should be able to serve as a sort of guest lecturer in that field to help the other students feel that these grandiose technological projects are attainable even at their young ages.