What is an Infused Classroom?
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In an Infused Classroom, the teaching and learning outcomes are the most important aspect, and technology simply enhances an already purposeful learning environment. In this classroom or school, we seek to better understand our students as learners and empower their learning journey. Infused Classrooms, and thus Infused Teachers, combine both great pedagogy and technology, but only when it will make the learning stronger.
With students and learning at the center of an Infused Classroom, teachers will modify their own practices and routines. They might spend less time lecturing and more time facilitating as students uncover their own thinking and understanding by piecing things together themselves. This classroom seeks to allow students to construct their knowledge, but it never eliminates small doses of necessary direct instruction. Technology assists to make student learning more meaningful and powerful.
An Infused Teacher does not ‘start over’ to infuse technology into their practice. Instead, they think about the lessons they already have that might be enhanced with a new tool or two. Think of an Infused Teacher like a modern chef with a library of great recipes, but maybe after visiting India decides to add some cumin or turmeric to a traditional sauce. Boom! The flavors come alive. In your classroom, you are simply adding an additional component to make an experience richer, more relevant, and more accessible. You focus on the pedagogy we know works, and then infuse some “flavors” of today, like technology, to make that lesson more profound, more powerful and more modern. Boom! The learning comes alive.
Let’s take a closer look at these three concepts:
The Infused Classroom:
The Infused Classroom is about student-centered learning and student thinking. It honors the student, the experience and the times. We cannot ignore that we are teaching smack dab in the middle of an information revolution, and the Infused Classroom honors this change by giving students new ways to construct and show their learning.
This learning environment takes already great pedagogy like checks for understanding, differentiation, demonstrations of learning, and reflection, and offers ways technology can enrich those tasks.
Technology figures prominently, but comes second to great pedagogy focused on learning goals. The classroom is infused with all the things that bring a great learning experience to our students and gives them greater autonomy over their learning.
For more info on this see infused.link/infusedclassroom12
Infused Classroom Teachers:
Like the components of a Chromebook Infused Classroom, no single quality of an Infused Teacher is more important than another; instead, together they provide the whole that is needed to be a teacher in this age of information and monumental change. To learn more about this, visit infused.link/infusedteacher
Infused Classroom Students:
As educators have access to more and more technology in the classroom, we need to rethink the student role in learning. In a technology-rich classroom, the role of the student as strictly a memorizer and regurgitator of content MUST change. Students need to see themselves as people in control of their own learning, and not just passive receivers of information. See this blog post for more information. infused.link/infusedstudent
Why INFUSED?
Teachers need ideas for enriching great pedagogy with meaningful technology. In this book, we offer a plan for taking great pedagogical goals and infusing them with the technology to enhance or make them better, more purposeful and more modern.
For this Infused Classroom application, we will be sharing with you how to have a Microsoft Infused Classroom by using the Microsoft tools to make learning more powerful. We have also included a few other tools that you can use within the Microsoft ecosystem to enhance learning and that play well with Microsoft apps.
Ultimately, the Infused Classroom model brings technology and pedagogy together to place students at the center of their own learning. This book is intended to get you started by looking at the pedagogy first, and then offers up the tools that will help you reach your intended results in engaging and highly effective ways.
We wish you good luck on your journey to becoming an Infused Teacher! We hope you will share your journey by becoming part of the community.
- Contact Holly to present at your event or school? Send an email
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- Check out The Google Infused Classroom on Amazon.