Modernizing Montessori: Using Digital Technology to Engage
Modernizing Montessori:
Using Digital Technology to Engage Learners in 21st Century Montessori Classrooms
by Mark Powell
LePort Schools, Emeryville CA
Is Montessori Technophobic?
?In recent years a great number of discoveries have been made to fully exploit almost all the energies that exist in this world. Whatever material wealth there is in our surroundings is being made use of. Man has explored and made use of not only the things that are on the surface of the earth, but has dug into the bowels of the earth to derive from it gold, silver, coal and all other minerals. Man has gone and knocked on the doors of the rocks in order to call forth from it precious metals. Man has gone down to the greatest depths of the ocean in order to see what sort of life exists there. I need not say that, with the discoveries of these energies and with their harnessing, man has worked the miracles that we enjoy in our times. Man indeed has acquired faculties and powers that in olden times were considered to be inherent only to the gods. He can speak from one continent to another. He can fly through the air. He has arrived at powers which are no longer natural, but supranatural? Maria Montessori, 1948.
Maria Tecla Artemisia Montessori was the child of an era of explosive technological and social change throughout the world. Her life choices as much as her own words portray a revolutionary thinker who not only challenged the social conventions of her day but who embraced innovation and understood the importance of technological progress in the evolution of humankind. Most famously, in the 1890s she defied intense public and professional antipathy (including that of her own father) to become one of only about 24 women in Italy to graduate in medicine by the turn of the twentieth century. But even as a teen she revealed herself as a young woman not easily intimidated either by technology or traditional Italian views on her place in society by enrolling in the Leonardo Da Vinci Technical School with the intention of becoming an engineer.
Among those who first welcomed the famous Dottoressa to the United States were Alexander Graham Bell and Thomas Edison, leaders in technological innovation at the time. Several of her method?s most famous graduates a century later are again transforming society through our use of information technology. Even while it was still an emerging technology, Montessori had produced a ?moving picture? about her method, and much of S. S. McClure?s motivation in sponsoring her visit here was in the profits he would realize from gaining exclusive rights to her film. Especially while in India Dr. Montessori was fascinated by 16mm films that showed news, cities, natural phenomena, mechanical or scientific apparatus or attempted to portray history. She supposedly imagined a day when elementary children could load and view film themselves from a library of images and sound. All in all it?s a fairly safe bet that if Montessori were alive today she would want a smartphone. The more interesting question is whether she would prefer the centralized quality control of the Apple ecosystem, or the more open invitation to uninhibited (and sometimes less reliable) innovation allowed Android developers. If she were to act privately with the same scientific mind that she exhibited publicly, she would surely have tried out both to see which platform best suited her needs.
Modüller-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
lise
üniversite
Master / Doctorate
ortaokul
Anaokulu
Primary
ILKOKUL
Ä°LKOKUL
Junior College
Kindergarden