Critics counter that, absent clear proof, schools are being motivated by a blind faith in technology and an overemphasis on digital skills — like using PowerPoint and multimedia tools — at the expense of math, reading and writing fundamentals. They say the technology advocates have it backward when they press to upgrade first and ask questions later.
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Technology in Schools Faces Questions on Value - NYTimes.com - 9 views
www.nytimes.com/...-faces-questions-on-value.html
technology schools change critique measurement effectiveness integration
shared by Steve Ransom on 04 Sep 11
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Steve Ransom on 04 Sep 11A valid criticism when technology implementation is decoupled from meaningful and effective pedagogy. You can't buy measurable change/improvement.
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how the district was innovating.
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there is no good way to quantify those achievements — putting them in a tough spot with voters deciding whether to bankroll this approach again
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“We’ve jumped on bandwagons for different eras without knowing fully what we’re doing. This might just be the new bandwagon,” he said. “I hope not.”
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$46.3 million for laptops, classroom projectors, networking gear and other technology for teachers and administrators.
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If we know something works
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The high-level analyses that sum up these various studies, not surprisingly, give researchers pause about whether big investments in technology make sense.
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Good teachers, he said, can make good use of computers, while bad teachers won’t, and they and their students could wind up becoming distracted by the technology.
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“Test scores are the same, but look at all the other things students are doing: learning to use the Internet to research, learning to organize their work, learning to use professional writing tools, learning to collaborate with others.”
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“There is a connection between the physical hand on the paper and the words on the page,” she said. “It’s intimate.”
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“They’re inundated with 24/7 media, so they expect it,”
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The 30 students in the classroom held wireless clickers into which they punched their answers. Seconds later, a pie chart appeared on the screen: 23 percent answered “True,” 70 percent “False,” and 6 percent didn’t know.
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engagement is a “fluffy
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rofessor Cuban at Stanford argues that keeping children engaged requires an environment of constant novelty, which cannot be sustained.
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that computers can distract and not instruct.
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guide on the side.
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Professor Cuban at Stanford
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But she loves the fact that her two children, a fourth-grader and first-grader, are learning technology, including PowerPoint
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Mr. Share bases his buying decisions on two main factors: what his teachers tell him they need, and his experience. For instance, he said he resisted getting the interactive whiteboards sold as Smart Boards until, one day in 2008, he saw a teacher trying to mimic the product with a jury-rigged projector setup. “It was an ‘Aha!’ moment,” he said, leading him to buy Smart Boards, made by a company called Smart Technologies.
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This is big business.
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“Do we really need technology to learn?” she said. “It’s a very valid time to ask the question, right before this goes on the ballot.”
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Google Plus, Chrome Apps and Tools gateway to knowledge in #education20: #googleplus is... - 0 views
googlepluschrometoolappsineducation20.blogspot.com/...blog-post.html
#edtech20 project social media google plus education semanticweb knowledge
shared by LUCIAN DUMA on 16 Jul 11
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Google Wave Use Cases: Education - 0 views
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The things I particularly like here are real-time, how Google Wave makes collaborate note-taking much more effective for learners and how collaborators/students can be tracked (play-back ability).
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Real-time collaboration in Google Wave, play-back ability (teacher/instructor can see who did what) and students have actually said that their collaboratge note-taking was "more complete".
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100 Great Google Docs Tips for Students & Educators - 66 views
www.accreditedonlinecolleges.com/...cs-tips-for-students-educators
GoogleApps google docs google education docs tips resources web2.0
shared by Jim Farmer on 11 Apr 10
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For students and teachers, the Google Docs collection provides a streamlined, collaborative solution to writing papers, organizing presentations and putting together spreadsheets and reports. But besides the basic features, there are lots of little tricks and hacks you can use to make your Google Docs experience even more productive. Here are 100 great tips for using the documents, presentations and spreadsheets in Google Docs.
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Digital Citizenship | the human network - 0 views
blog.futurestreetconsulting.com/?p=132
Britannica Facebook Internet Obama SMS Twitter Wikipedia blog co-presence education google earth hierarchy hyperconnectivity hyperempowerment hyperpeople mobile network peer production sharing social networks wiki
shared by Tero Toivanen on 07 Jun 09
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The change is already well underway, but this change is not being led by teachers, administrators, parents or politicians. Coming from the ground up, the true agents of change are the students within the educational system.
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While some may be content to sit on the sidelines and wait until this cultural reorganization plays itself out, as educators you have no such luxury. Everything hits you first, and with full force. You are embedded within this change, as much so as this generation of students.
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We make much of the difference between “digital immigrants”, such as ourselves, and “digital natives”, such as these children. These kids are entirely comfortable within the digital world, having never known anything else. We casually assume that this difference is merely a quantitative facility. In fact, the difference is almost entirely qualitative. The schema upon which their world-views are based, the literal ‘rules of their world’, are completely different.
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The Earth becomes a chalkboard, a spreadsheet, a presentation medium, where the thorny problems of global civilization and its discontents can be explored out in exquisite detail. In this sense, no problem, no matter how vast, no matter how global, will be seen as being beyond the reach of these children. They’ll learn this – not because of what teacher says, or what homework assignments they complete – through interaction with the technology itself.
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We and our technological-materialist culture have fostered an environment of such tremendous novelty and variety that we have changed the equations of childhood.
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As it turns out (and there are numerous examples to support this) a mobile handset is probably the most important tool someone can employ to improve their economic well-being. A farmer can call ahead to markets to find out which is paying the best price for his crop; the same goes for fishermen. Tradesmen can close deals without the hassle and lost time involved in travel; craftswomen can coordinate their creative resources with a few text messages. Each of these examples can be found in any Bangladeshi city or Africa village.
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The sharing of information is an innate human behavior: since we learned to speak we’ve been talking to each other, warning each other of dangers, informing each other of opportunities, positing possibilities, and just generally reassuring each other with the sound of our voices. We’ve now extended that four-billion-fold, so that half of humanity is directly connected, one to another.
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Everything we do, both within and outside the classroom, must be seen through this prism of sharing. Teenagers log onto video chat services such as Skype, and do their homework together, at a distance, sharing and comparing their results. Parents offer up their kindergartener’s presentations to other parents through Twitter – and those parents respond to the offer. All of this both amplifies and undermines the classroom. The classroom has not dealt with the phenomenal transformation in the connectivity of the broader culture, and is in danger of becoming obsolesced by it.
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We already live in a time of disconnect, where the classroom has stopped reflecting the world outside its walls. The classroom is born of an industrial mode of thinking, where hierarchy and reproducibility were the order of the day. The world outside those walls is networked and highly heterogeneous. And where the classroom touches the world outside, sparks fly; the classroom can’t handle the currents generated by the culture of connectivity and sharing. This can not go on.
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We must accept the reality of the 21st century, that, more than anything else, this is the networked era, and that this network has gifted us with new capabilities even as it presents us with new dangers. Both gifts and dangers are issues of potency; the network has made us incredibly powerful. The network is smarter, faster and more agile than the hierarchy; when the two collide – as they’re bound to, with increasing frequency – the network always wins.
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A text message can unleash revolution, or land a teenager in jail on charges of peddling child pornography, or spark a riot on a Sydney beach; Wikipedia can drive Britannica, a quarter millennium-old reference text out of business; a outsider candidate can get himself elected president of the United States because his team masters the logic of the network. In truth, we already live in the age of digital citizenship, but so many of us don’t know the rules, and hence, are poor citizens.
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before a child is given a computer – either at home or in school – it must be accompanied by instruction in the power of the network. A child may have a natural facility with the network without having any sense of the power of the network as an amplifier of capability. It’s that disconnect which digital citizenship must bridge.
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Let us instead focus on how we will use technology in fifty years’ time. We can already see the shape of the future in one outstanding example – a website known as RateMyProfessors.com. Here, in a database of nine million reviews of one million teachers, lecturers and professors, students can learn which instructors bore, which grade easily, which excite the mind, and so forth. This simple site – which grew out of the power of sharing – has radically changed the balance of power on university campuses throughout the US and the UK.
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Alongside the rise of RateMyProfessors.com, there has been an exponential increase in the amount of lecture material you can find online, whether on YouTube, or iTunes University, or any number of dedicated websites. Those lectures also have ratings, so it is already possible for a student to get to the best and most popular lectures on any subject, be it calculus or Mandarin or the medieval history of Europe.
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As the university dissolves in the universal solvent of the network, the capacity to use the network for education increases geometrically; education will be available everywhere the network reaches. It already reaches half of humanity; in a few years it will cover three-quarters of the population of the planet. Certainly by 2060 network access will be thought of as a human right, much like food and clean water.
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Educators will continue to collaborate, but without much of the physical infrastructure we currently associate with educational institutions. Classrooms will self-organize and disperse organically, driven by need, proximity, or interest, and the best instructors will find themselves constantly in demand. Life-long learning will no longer be a catch-phrase, but a reality for the billions of individuals all focusing on improving their effectiveness within an ever-more-competitive global market for talent.
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Google Plus: Is This the Social Tool Schools Have Been Waiting For? - 31 views
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it may well be the granular level of privacy afforded by Google+ that is the key to making this a successful tool for schools
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it's also about sharing with the right people. Circles will allow what educational consultant Tom Barnett calls "targeted sharing," something that will be great for specific classes and topics
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teachers are already talking about the possibility of not just face-to-face video conversation but the potential for integration of whiteboards, screen-sharing, Google Docs, and other collaborative tools
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Google + seems like the solution for someone like me who wants to use the web to have conversations about school topics with students and parents and yet not have students and parents have access to my personal posts.
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Ipadschools - home - 0 views
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clearinghouse of applications, lessons ideas and experiences using the iPad in the classroom. The intention is that all apps listed have been tested and recommended by teachers using them.
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"This wiki is intended to be a clearinghouse of applications, lessons and experiences using the iPad in the classroom. The intention is that all apps listed have been tested and recommended by teachers using them. The Apps pages are generally created using google docs spreadsheets, feel free to update the wiki or the spreadsheets. (A link is provided on each page for the spreadsheets... at least the ones I've started working on...) At this point, as a high school science teacher, most of the apps I've recommended and investigated are geared to this level. Some can be used at any level. I invite you to add pages dedicated to your areas of interest and expertise if they are not already listed here. I would love to see a section on Literature and Language and Elementary Skills added to the wiki along with additions to any of the currently developed spreadsheets. It would also be sweet to share specific lessons or ideas for applications and activities. "
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Free Technology for Teachers: Page-level Permissions and Digital Portfolios in Google S... - 24 views
www.freetech4teachers.com/...l-permissions-and-digital.html
blogs collaboration digital portfolios education free Google Google Sites online teachers teaching tools
shared by Paul Beaufait on 28 Aug 12
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Educators as Collaborators: 25+ Resources | Teacher Reboot Camp - 33 views
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How One Classroom Actually Used iPads To Go Paperless (Part 1: Research) | Edudemic - 53 views
edudemic.com/...o-go-paperless-part-1-research
ipads paperless research education iPad app apps tools collaboration teaching
shared by Tero Toivanen on 16 Sep 12
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“The technology used really help to enhance the writing and research process. Diigo and the iPads proved to be particularly helpful during the process of researching and annotating. Some minor challenges were presented with the use of this technology (writing with the IPads was a bit more difficult than typing on a computer), but nothing interfered with the process in a negative way. Some of the technology could prove very useful in the future.”
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Dropbox - This app allows students to work offline in the Pages app and upload their document to their Dropbox account with each new draft. Pages does not support direct upload to Dropbox. As a solution, students linked their Dropbox accounts with SendtoDropbox.
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One of the earliest steps in the process was to have the students share a folder in their Dropbox account with their teacher in order to allow the teacher to check in on their progress along the way.
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Pages - While there are less expensive alternatives for word procession on an iPad, Pages is the most stable option that will consistently be supported and updated for the life of the iPads.
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Diigo Web Highlighter for Safari - As one of our goals was to take advantage of the web connectivity and social bookmarking, Diigo was a perfect solution. Once the Diigo app is installed, there is a three step process to install the Safari web highlighter.
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To access and refer to each other’s research, students had to access Diigo through Safari, not the Diigo app. The purpose of the collective research group was to have students examine each other’s research and use the resources their classmates found in their final research paper.
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Notability - Because students would still be conducting traditional paper based research, we needed a solution that would allow them to digitize and share their research. When students found traditional paper content that was part of their research, they could snap a picture of the document and pull it into Notability. They could then digitally highlight, underline and insert notes on the document. Notability will also export directly to Dropbox from within the app.
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Explain Everything - This step was a late addition to the process and allowed students to create video screencasting feedback of each other’s papers.
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Students exported a PDF version of their paper from Pages and email it to a classmates SendtoDropbox email address. This would place the PDF version of the paper into the classmates Dropbox account. The receiving student could then open ExplainEverything, link to their Dropbox account and use the PDF of their classmates paper as the back drop to the screencast. To share the video files, we had students publish directly to the teacher’s YouTube channel from ExplainEverything.
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the recent update to the Google Drive app that allows for in-app creation, editing and sharing of a Google document absolutely changes the landscape of going completely paperless with iPads. The clunky workaround of combining Pages, SendtoDropbox and Dropbox in order to get student work shared with the teacher would be much streamlined by conducting the entire process through Google Drive.
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As an alternative to the process of writing in Pages, collecting research in Diigo and storing documents in Dropbox, I would consider jumping to Evernote to house the entire process. Writing, researching and sharing could all be conducted within Evernote.
Google Docs - 0 views
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Teachers: Embrace Technology or Students Will Leave You Behind - 0 views
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If you think about how we use technology in our adult lives, it’s primarily a communication experience — email, WebEx, text messages and collaboration tools. It’s social, but we’re not letting these collaborative tools into the classroom.
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leverage all the tools available to foster creativity, inspire curiosity, and provide the knowledge our children need for success.
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Reading: Making across the country feel like across the classroom - 0 views
googledocs.blogspot.com/...-country-feel-like-across.html
school2.0 googledocs google classroomcollaborations
shared by Maggie Verster on 09 Mar 09
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The Harris Burdick Collaborative Writing Project began because the teachers and educational professionals involved have become part of a network through their blogs, Twitter, Skype and other web applications. Brian Crosby in Nevada and Lisa Parisi in New York initially connected through their fifth grade students' blogs, which are hosted on ClassBlogmeister.
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