Group items tagged

Our kids are coming of age at a time that things like online shopping, Facetime, and texting are all normal everyday occurrences. Technology is enabling people to do some pretty amazing things, and even communicate in a whole new way using a new language. You may know this as texting.

The landscape is changing, said Cathy Higgins, state educational technology director. "There's still a very essential place for books, our traditional concepts of schooling, but there's also a really important place for using the tools that are available to us in the rest of our lives," she said.

To be effective in using technology in the classroom, teachers need to create a "hybrid" model," Middaugh said. "You can't just have the technology. You've got to mix it with hands-on, old-school if you will. The combination is what's going to be most effective because there are different learners."

Portsmouth elementary teachers, who are on the front-lines of integrating technology into their classrooms, said the advances don't take up their everyday lesson plans, but supplement and enhance them

In his post “I lost something very important to me” Will Richardson shares three important lessons that banning cells teaches kids. They are: 1-It teaches them that they don’t deserve to be empowered with technology the same way adults are.2-Tools that adults use all the time in their everyday lives to communicate are not relevant to their own communication needs.3-They can’t be trusted (or taught, for that matter) to use phones appropriately in school.I recently had a cell phone enriched lesson plan shared with me (stay tuned, will be posted shortly) by a secondary teacher who is empowering students to harness the power of cell phones in their learning. And guess what happened when he did? They came up with their own list of appropriate use.

“Imagine more science classrooms where kids learned about sound waves by playing the flute, or understood mathematical relationships by creating digital designs,” said Dennis Scholl, vice president of the arts at the Knight Foundation. “Integrating arts into our everyday lives and learning is essential.”