Technology and Gifted Students

1. Technology and Gifted Students Evelyn Wassel, Ed.D. Schuylkill IU29 July 2013

2. Curriculum and Instruction Planning • DI to • Equip students with 21st Century skills • Inquiry • Problem-solving skills • Critical thinking • Self-regulating skills • Scaffold learning • Periathiruvadi, S. & Rinn, A.N.,Technology I Gifted Education: A Review of Best Practices and Empirical Research. JRTE, 45:2, 153-169.

3. Math Curriculum • Facilitate open-ended problem-solving to think critically • Graphing calculators • Emulator programs • On-line plotting programs • Digital drawing tools

4. Science Curriculum • Digital cameras and palm-held computers to work through stations to learn about environment • Need prior training • Improve inquiry skills and scaffold

5. Social Studies Curriculum • e-Publishing for creating student-authored books in elementary • All students showed improvement in assessment • Gifted students showed most gains • Note-taking • Cut & paste from Internet sites • Students were selective

6. Hypermedia learning environment • PBL • Positive attitudes • Equal performance • Self-regulation strategies • Nonsequential manner to meet personal goals for learning • High levels of SRL strategies • Summarized • Coordinated info

7. Programming Options • Acceleration, enrichment, individualized learning • Independent study, mentoring, internships, OL courses • Fostered HOTS, social skills • Students looked for F-2-F • Individual  engagement and challenge • Textbooks and Internet

8. Effective Learning Environments • Learner centered • Independence • Innovation • Grouping options • Flexible

9. OnLine • Desire to learn more • Unavailability of F-2-F • Set own pace • Get ahead • AP credit • Extra coursework • Advanced, challenging, self-paced • Missed social aspects • Wanted textbooks • Increase in AP scores

10. How Can Technology Help the Gifted Student? • Meet academic needs • Serve social and emotional needs • Increase engagement • Experts • Research at achievement level • Multimedia options for presentation • Cooperative learning • Connect to others with same interests

11. Enrichment Clusters • Multigradeinvestigative groups based on constructivist learning methodology • Organized around major disciplines, interdisciplinary themes, or cross-disciplinary topics. • Grouped across grade levels by interests and focused toward the production of real-world products or services • Modeled after the ways in which knowledge utilization, thinking skills, and interpersonal relations took place in the real world

12. Enrichment 2.0 • Inquiry-based learning model where students select a topic, are grouped to work on the topic, and prepare an authentic product or service. • Allows students who are not physically in the same space to collaborate in an area of interest.

13. Tools of the 21st Century • Wikis • Social bookmarking • Aggregators • Podcasts • Collaborative documents • Blogs

14. Wikis • Wiki, the Hawaiian word for quick, is an easy-to-edit Web page that does not require programming knowledge • The “home” for Enrichment 2.0. • Teacher sets up a wiki for each enrichment cluster. Links to all other files, sources of information, and tools are placed on the main wiki page so that all students can access the information. • Most wiki sites keep a chronological history for every page, so nothing is lost forever and revisions can always be undone.

15. Social Bookmarking • Students use social bookmarking such as del.icio.us (http://del.icio.us) to keep track of Internet sites with relevant information and share it with their classmates. • When a student locates an Internet site with relevant information, he or she can create an online bookmark of the site that other students can then refer to.

16. Google Custom Search engine Custom Search Engines – a Good Fit for your Library • Vertical search – focus your users on what matters most • Choose exactly which Web sites or pages your CSE searches across • CSE tool makes it easy to create your own search engine • Embed your CSE in Web pages or simply link to them. http://www.google.com/coop/cse/

17. Google Custom Search Engine

18. Google Custom Search Engine

19. Google Custom Search Engine

20. Google Custom Search Engine

21. Motivate Them!!! • Motivation—Desire to learn • Demonstrates persistence in pursuing and completing self-selected tasks (school or non-school activities). • Expresses enthusiasm about learning. • Aspires to be somebody or something. 

22. What Interests Them? • Interest—Intentness, passion, concern, or curiosity about something. • Demonstrates unusual or advanced interest in a topic or activity. • Self-starts. • Pursues an activity unceasingly. 

23. Communication • Communication—Highly expressive and effective in use of words, numbers and/or symbols. • Demonstrates unusual ability to communicate in one or more ways (verbally, physically, artistically, symbolically). • Uses particularly apt examples, illustrations, or elaborations.

24. Problem Solving • Problem Solving—Effective, inventive strategies used to recognize and solve problems. • Demonstrates unusual ability to devise or adapt as systematic strategy for solving problems. • Changes strategies when the employed strategy is ineffective. • Creates new designs or inventions. 

25. Memory • Memory—Retains and retrieves information.  • Already knows something that is assumed to be new knowledge. • Needs few repetitions for mastery. • Has a wealth of information about school and/or non-school topics. • Pays attention to details. • Manipulates information. 

26. Inquiry • Inquiry—Questions, experiments, explores. • Asks unusual questions for age. • Plays around with ideas. • Demonstrates extensive exploratory behaviors directed at eliciting information.

27. Insight • Insight—Grasps new concepts, makes connections, senses deeper meanings. • Demonstrates exceptional ability to draw inferences. • Appears to be a good guesser. • Is keenly observant. • Sees unusual and diverse relationships. • Integrates ideas and disciplines. 

28. Reasoning • Reasoning—Uses controlled, active, intentional, goal-oriented thought. • Makes generalizations. • Uses metaphors and analogies. • Thinks things through in a logical manner. • Thinks critically. 

29. Creativity • Produces many and/or highly original ideas. • Shows exceptional ingenuity in using everyday materials. • Has wild, perhaps silly ideas. • Produces ideas fluently or flexibly. • Is highly curious. 

30. Humor • Humor—Brings heretofore unrelated ideas together in a recognizable relationship. • Uses a keen sense of humor – may be gentle or hostile. • Has a large accumulation of information about emotions. • Sees unusual relationships. • Demonstrates unusual emotional depth. • Demonstrates sensory awareness.

31. 21st Century Competencies •        Creativity and Innovation •        Critical thinking and problem solving •        Agility, adaptability and capacity for lifelong learning •        Teamwork and collaboration in virtual teams •        Initiative, self direction and entrepreneurialism •        Effective oral and written communication •        Proficiency in the mother tongue •        Multiple languages and cultural awareness •        Effectively accessing and analyzing information •        Digital competence