21st Century Learners Need More Soul Part 1: We Need Piaget More Than Ever



21st Century Learners Need More Soul:

“The most stunning change for adolescents today is their aloneness. The adolescents of [today] are more isolated and more unsupervised than other generations ... not because they come from parents who don't care, schools that don't care, or a community that doesn't value them, but rather because there hasn't been time for adults to lead them through the process of growing up.”

Patricia Hersch

The focus of The Fresh Classroom is more about good teaching, wherever it takes place, not solely 'place-based'. Real Learning advocate Marc Prensky reminds us "we can increase our students' learning most if we think of technology as a way to vastly improve the teacher-student interactions that go on inside our classrooms".
Something is in the air that has lead me to this accusation that 21st century learners to ‘need more soul’. The gap of healthy student to teacher relationships has widened and we are failing to authentically personalize learning.
                               Now how do we genuinely do it?
I have begun to imagine a group of lessons based on our friend of schemata: Mr.Piaget. The learning theory of constructivism directly correlates with students using the tools they hold close, the cell phone.
After embracing the research articles and strategies integrating mobile phones with 'classic' tools. The timeless local history scavenger hunt is a great start. With a main goal of deepening relationships between students and genuine learning, students also transcend in relations with teachers and their local world. A majority of resources used are derived from the pilot program resource that 'Generation Text' author Lisa Nielsen posted on her wonderful blog.
The Main Goal?
This attempt at a genuine response to student teacher relationships is so we can speed though this purgatory of digital protocol in schools. In doing so we can focus on the pertinent fact in all of this: Students leading a life of balance, most importantly digital relations with natural ones.


This will be reflected upon in Part 2 of 21st Century Students Need More Soul: The Technology Balance.
More on this: What’s Stopping Educators from Using Mobile Devices Even Though They Know They Should?  if this resonates. 
Concerning New Teachers: Prensky argues how 'Digital Native Teachers': "do not automatically know how to best use these pedagogies" and we must model this for them. (Curious if others find a sense of entitlement with the latest group of student teachers, the first wave of digital native teachers, or is that just youth?)
Please note
*I have encountered success with this familiar bend on activities due to the fact they not seen as an attempt to ‘rattle the chains’ or operate covertly behind administration or parents. With them as an informed partner (ask for advice from principal even if you don’t think you need it) burn out is farther away; if not, activity entropy accelerates and teachers become susceptible of the most dreadful consequence of modelling ‘unremarkable’ practices in class (takes one to know one)*

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