Worried About Students Being Off-task? Watch This

I've seen Alfie Kohn vs. Dwight Schrute floating around the edu-blog-o-sphere for the last few weeks, but I finally took a few minutes to watch it today after Tara Weegar posted it on Facebook.



Almost every time I talk at schools or conferences about 1:1 computing environments, I'm asked questions along the lines of "how do you make sure the students are staying on task when you can't see their screens?" For the last few years my response to this has been, "I try to make sure that the assignments I give are engaging." If I design lessons and give students assignments that are engaging, the instances of students going off to a website or task that isn't productive is low. I'm not perfect and sometimes my lessons and assignments aren't as engaging as I hoped they'd be. Those are the times when students get off task.