Doing Things Differently vs Doing Different Things

I attended Edcamp Harrisburg a while back but haven’t had a chance to share my reflections, so here-goes. One of my favorite sessions was run by my friend, Chris Champion and was entitled Doing Things Differently vs Doing Different Things. It was an important conversation about how and why we use technology in our classrooms.

Chris did a great job moderating the conversation, too. It was conversational and while Chris led the discussion, he also laid back (in true edcamp style!) and let the participants discuss and share ideas.

Here is a gist of the conversation. Basically, we proposed how technology allows us to do things differently and then challenged each other to come up with ways that we could do different things with the same technology.

It is vital that those educators who are passionate about brining technology into our classrooms evaluate whether that technology is actually helping us do different things in our classrooms rather than just making what we’ve always done easier or just a bit different.

These are the notes from the session discussion, though I would argue that there is a lot here to examine further. What would you add?