Why do people think learning has to take place in an actual school building?  I read a book to my kindergartners today…………it was a silly book about a little boy that planted 3 pennies in the soil, he watered them every day, and waited for them to grow.  Of course, they did not.  Only one child caught on to the humor in the book………….the other children just stared of me with blank faces while he laughed out loud.  When I finished reading I asked this little boy how he knew so much about growing things and his response was that he lives on a farm and helps his parents work in the garden.  So, this child has a ton of knowledge about agriculture that none of my other children possess.  He didn’t learn this information at school, instead he learned it at home………..proving that learning can happen anywhere, anytime. 

It would take me weeks to teach my students what this child already has learned about nature and agriculture.  Assuming that I had this much time available, would it be fair to make this child suffer through countless lessons filled with information he had already mastered about this topic?  NO!!!  But we do to our students all the time……..we force this to sit through lessons on things they already know about.  This is a need that I think the technologies we have been working with could address.  Rather than teach every child the same lesson, we can allow children to explore their interests and sign up for RSS feeds related to subjects they are interested in or don’t know about already.  They can then have online discussions with other students that are interested in the same topics and later blog about what they have learned.  I think much more learning would take place this way.