Hacking Digital Learning Strategies #Bookreview

Photo by Steve Wheeler

When Shelly Terrell speaks or writes, people take notice. She has done the hard miles as an educator and has innovated along the way, continuing to share her knowledge and her ideas freely among the global education community. It is a delight to see her new book has been published, and it was a joy to receive a copy for review recently.

Hacking Digital Learning Strategies sounds quite a daunting title for a book of practical ideas, but with the cartoon spaceman on the cover, readers will know they are in for a fun ride with plenty of happiness along the way. Its also one in a series of 'Hacking' titles published by the Hack Learning Organisation. With phrases such as 'I don't have to do all the teaching or know all the answers' and 'we need to find ways to tap into students' passions', you just know that Shelly's book will be completely student centred from start to finish. And it is.

This book is not about technology. In 183 pages it focuses on teaching strategies that have a proven track record of success. It highlights the need to engage students in their thinking and the importance of scaffolding their behaviour as they learn. The book calls for better understanding of the affordances of technology, not as means to an end, but as catalysts that provoke, excite and motivate children to go the extra mile, as they learn about the world around them, and discover exactly how they might fit into it. 40 pages at the back of the book present 'mission tool kits' for teachers - lesson plan resources that any educator would find easy to adapt and apply in their classroom.

Shelly does not shy away from weighty issues such as motivation, creativity, honesty and truth, but meets them head on, offering teachers a useful practical guide about how to infuse these into every lesson. She is bent on achieving global action around the use of technologies in education. From citizen journalism to crowdfunded innovation projects, from producing videos to creating digital text books, this volume is replete with relevant, contemporary ideas that leverage the power and potential of technology to help children to learn. The end result, as Shelly expresses in her final section, is that children will 'innovate with technology to improve their communities around the world'.


Hacking Digital Learning Strategies #Bookreview by Steve Wheeler was written in Plymouth, England and is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.