I recently read a great quote shared by @chrislehmann on Twitter that made me think about “virtual birdhouses”.

“If you assign a project and get back 30 of the exact same thing, that’s not a project, that’s a recipe.”
– Chris Lehmann

I remember taking a woodworking class when I was in high school and every single student had to make a birdhouse.  Same steps, same procedures, same products.  I don’t recall much about how to put a birdhouse together (which is a telling sign), but I do know for sure that I didn’t use any of my creative or critical thinking skills and I certainly didn’t use an authentic design thinking process to come up with my final product.

When it comes to using technology in our classrooms, we need to be wary of the virtual birdhouses (i.e. when we assign students a project that involves creating something using technology and we get back 30 of the exact same thing).  30 identical iMovies, 30 identical slide decks, 30 identical blog posts… these are all just virtual versions of creating identical birdhouses in a woodworking class.

Unfortunately, I believe that it can at times be easier to fall into this trap when the learning involves technology. Sometimes our limited confidence and experience with technology can lead us to providing students less options and more of a recipe approach to projects (ex. having every student create a PowerPoint presentation with the same number of slides and same information on each slide).

With or without technology in the mix, we need to be sure to…

• Differentiate and offer lots of voice & choice (ex. allow students to choose which web tool they’d like to use to synthesize, analyze, summarize, and communicate their learning).
• Encourage students to be creative (ex. support your students in taking risks and advocate for them to put their own spin on things).
• Rely on your students to help you and the rest of the class learn more about web tools. It never ceases to amaze me how much students know and how quickly they can figure out how to use new technology.  This is also a wonderful way to empower students and put them in leadership roles.

In the end, if we don’t get caught up in having each student take the same approach in their learning, then we can avoid getting back a class set of virtual birdhouses.