How kids teach themselves

Sugata Mitra shows how kids teach themselves

In this video, the speaker discusses why there should be a push to provide educational technology tools to struggling schools and students, not in schools that already have exceptional teachers and resources. He conducted a study to find out if children were able to teach themselves how to use a computer and found that they were able to in a matter of minutes. He also found that they were able to teach each other very quickly and that they were able to "self-organize and obtain an educational objective". The children seemed to learn just as much from observing as from doing which led him to the conclusion that if they were provided with these technological resources in school, they would be able to take full advantage of them and would get a lot more out of their education.

I thought this was such a cool study because he just put a computer in, for example, a wall in the middle of a city and waited to see who would come up and try to use it. Children came and started playing with the touchpad and thought it was an interactive TV. In one case, the children taught themselves how to browse on the internet and in the other, they didn't have internet access but had games on CDs that they taught themselves how to play. The really interesting part to me was that with the games, they were all in English and the children had never learned English. By the time Mitra came back 3 months later, he found that the children had learned the English words related to the games and were able to appropriately apply them in their day-to-day language. Cool!

I really like giving my students the chance to teach themselves and each other and I think they learn certain things much better in that way. My level 3 Spanish students do a lot of self-teaching/learning - they do Jigsaw activities, research projects/presentations, and demonstrations where they have to teach the class how to do something (in Spanish, of course). I've found that they learn vocabulary and concepts much better if I'm only there to clear up confusion, not to completely guide their learning. I give them a suggested path and they generally follow it at first and then discover new routes along the way which makes what they're learning more interesting and relevant to them. I also find that they learn really well when technology is implemented in one way or another (like Mitra talked about).