Yes I know and thank you for saying it. Making posters (or a PowerPoint) can be a waste of time, unless you are learning about poster design (or using PowerPoint). Any decent teacher can tell you this. As it is about matching the learning and activity to ensure learning happens.
What happens in a classroom should about learning the correct content. For me the key part of planning learning is efficiently matching the task to the learning. Hence why we have learning intentions, learning outcomes, I can statements or success criteria, which we plan by.
There are some great tasks that involve cutting and sticking on to sugar paper in maths (The standards unit (The blue box in the corner), maths4life, tarsia). These used well can develop great understanding, the output can look like posters but are not posters. See Malcolm Swans excellent book on Collaborative learning in the classroom for an understanding of the learning that should happen.
I have found the use of these activities to be very effective in developing students thinking ability to link and make logical arguments. I would hate for someone to stop me using these as they make a “poster”, it’s actually maths done on sugar paper. So please let’s be very careful with the arguments in this educational debate. Make sure you know what needs to be learn and find the best way of ensuring the learning takes place for the group of students you are working with.
I hold a very similar believe when using tablets and or devices in the classroom. They can suffer a very similar problem to posters, unfocused learning. They can be used for quality focused learning however great care has to be taken with them. The danger becomes that the students learn how to use the software and thus do no the learning content if the learning is not planned properly.
If you attend and apple session on using a tablet to learn, the focus is actually on learning to use a suite of application not on learning curriculum content. I have observed a lesson where an ipad was used to teach students some content in 40 minutes which could have been taught in less 5 minutes, with no actually bonus to the learning like better retention etc, However the student has learnt to use the ipad.
However ipad scan be used very effective for differentiated instruction, so please be very careful that all planning is around effective learning in your classroom with your students
So my as always garbled message is plan well and plan to cover the correct content for your learners as efficiently and well as possible to ensure they learn.
meteachmath 