After watching the TED talk with Logan LaPlante and “Hackschooling Makes Me Happy” it kind of makes you think, “how can we make education more fun so the kids want to learn, and are able to apply the information given to them?” I do not know that you can totally hack every course in every grade. Think about it though, if your kids came to school ready to learn because they knew they were going to have fun doing so. I really agree with a lot of what Logan had to say, who wants to do test after test, worksheet after worksheet. I know as a new teacher I am not going to want to grade all of those when we could be doing hands on activities and having fun. I mean as a teacher I want to have fun at my job too.
When I start teaching I want to incorporate hacking into my lessons. I want to do different creative things to encourage the students to use their creative side whenever they can.
According to Bud Hunt’s blog “Centering on Essential Lenses: Make/Hack/Play” we need to go back to the original meaning of hacking. Hacking actually means to fix something to make it better. In education then we need to have the students make things. It doesn’t matter what it is or what it is for but just make it. Then we need to hack it. Teachers need to have the students hack what they made or fix it to make it better. Then finally they can play with it. But we have to help them make it better first. I liked how Bud Hunt uses lenses as a reference. You can use any lens you want to fix certain things but you can not use just one lens to fix multiple things. Everyone has their own lens in all the time. We as teachers should try and get kids to change that lens every once in a while to see something a different way .
I would like to know more about how you get to start hacking your education system. Is there a lot of work put into it? I feel that you would have to be careful to just not bring arts and crafts into the classroom all day. I feel that would be a lot of work for the teacher. So I guess I am wondering what else there would be out there to hack the classroom.
Digital Lit 
Exactly! Making learning fun is truly the only way we can get kids there physically and mentally, and WANT to learn and do more! While, it might require more work, hacking your classes that you teach can potentially really benefit your students. Plus, there are all sorts of resources out there that you can use to help assist you in your pursuit.
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It really does amaze me how many resources are out there for teachers to use.
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I, too, am curious about how hard or easy it could be to incorporate hacking into the traditional classroom. It’s a great idea, and it would be nice to learn how to do so. If we could mix traditional and nontraditional classrooms, we could be unstoppable! I think it would also help to encourage kids to be creative and actually enjoy learning.
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kids like to be free and have the ability to show their creative side. giving them a chance to do this and incorporate it in your lessons would help them tremendously.
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J,
I agree that we should hack the education system in the future. I too don’t want to grade paper after paper nor do students want homework all the time. I think it is a good idea to do hands on projects often. That way students can look forward to the projects and school as a whole. Lenses are a great way to inspire students to look at and think differently. I also think that teachers would enjoy their time teaching the more projects and experiments that they teach about. We get to have a good time while teaching, the students get to have fun while learning valuable lessons. Great post!
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This is so so so true: “I mean as a teacher I want to have fun at my job too.” If teachers are bored out of their minds grading papers, reports, and other student work, it’s probably time to re-think how we’re going about teaching and assigning work. 🙂
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I am sure everyone has had at least one teacher that you just knew they didn’t enjoy being there anymore and they weren’t having fun. so you know the students were not enjoying the lessons either.
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