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Steve Ransom

Technology in Schools Faces Questions on Value - NYTimes.com - 9 views

  • 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.
    • Steve Ransom
       
      A valid criticism when technology implementation is decoupled from meaningful and effective pedagogy. You can't buy measurable change/improvement.
  • district was innovating
  • how the district was innovating.
    • Steve Ransom
       
      Again, this is very different than how TEACHERS are innovating their PRACTICES. It's much more challenging than making a slick brochure that communicates how much technology your district has.
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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
  • “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.”
    • Steve Ransom
       
      There's a confidence building statement for you....
  • $46.3 million for laptops, classroom projectors, networking gear and other technology for teachers and administrators.
    • Steve Ransom
       
      Exactly... and how much was spent on equipping teachers to change their practices to effectively leverage this new infrastructure?
  • If we know something works
    • Steve Ransom
       
      And what is that "something"? New technology? If so, you missed the boat.
  • it is hard to separate the effect of the laptops from the effect of the teacher training
  • The high-level analyses that sum up these various studies, not surprisingly, give researchers pause about whether big investments in technology make sense.
    • Steve Ransom
       
      Why does the argument for making schools relevant and using current cultural tools need to be backed with performance data? Give politicians and superintendents horses instead of cars and see how long that lasts.
  • 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.
    • Steve Ransom
       
      Finally, a valid point.
  • “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.”
    • Steve Ransom
       
      Exactly. But somehow, "value" has been equated with test scores alone. Do we have a strong body of research on pencil effectiveness or clay effectiveness or chair effectiveness?
  • “It’s not the stuff that counts — it’s what you do with it that matters.”
  • “There is a connection between the physical hand on the paper and the words on the page,” she said. “It’s intimate.”
  • “They’re inundated with 24/7 media, so they expect it,”
    • Steve Ransom
       
      And you expect them to always engage enthusiastically with tools that are no longer relevant in their culture?
  • 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.
    • Steve Ransom
       
      Okay... and you follow up with a totally trivial example of the power of technology in learning.
  • term” that can slide past critical analysis.
  • engagement is a “fluffy
    • Steve Ransom
       
      Very true
  • rofessor Cuban at Stanford argues that keeping children engaged requires an environment of constant novelty, which cannot be sustained.
    • Steve Ransom
       
      If that is so, why not back up your claim by linking to the source here. I have a feeling he has been misquoted and taken out of context here.
  • that computers can distract and not instruct.
    • Steve Ransom
       
      Computers don't really "instruct". That's why we have teachers who are supposed to know what they are doing and why they are doing it... and monitoring kids while keeping learning meaningful.
  • guide on the side.
    • Steve Ransom
       
      But many teachers are simply not prepared for how to do this effectively. To ignore this fact is just naive.
  • Professor Cuban at Stanford
    • Steve Ransom
       
      Are they in love with Cuban or something? Perhaps they should actually look at the research... or interview other authorities. Isn't that what reporting is all about? I think this reporter must be a product of too much Google, right?
  • But she loves the fact that her two children, a fourth-grader and first-grader, are learning technology, including PowerPoint
    • Steve Ransom
       
      Again, the fact that any supporter is happy that their kids are learning PowerPoint illustrates the degree of naiveté in their understanding of technology's role in learning.
  • creating an impetus to rethink education entirely
  • 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.
    • Steve Ransom
       
      Herein lies another huge problem. Mr. Director of Technology seems to base no decisions on what the learning and technology literature have to say... nor does he consult those who would be considered authorities on technology infused learning (emphasis on learning here)
  • This is big business.
    • Steve Ransom
       
      No kidding.
  • “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.”
    • Steve Ransom
       
      Anyone who asks that should volunteer to have their home and work computer confiscated. After all, it's just a distraction, right?
Nigel Coutts

Teaching in the 21st Century - The Learner's Way - 11 views

  •  
    The consistent message is that we are preparing our students for success in a world very different to that which was the norm only a short time ago. The implications of this change are immense and require a shift in our thinking about what matters most in our classrooms. Such is the pace of change that within any school there will be multiple generations who normalise different perspective on technology and its place in their lives. What becomes clear that the skills we most need within our schools at every level are those which are critical for individuals to be empowered, self-navigating learners. But what does this mean in practical terms?
Martin Burrett

Day for Change 2012 | Schools - 0 views

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    A yearly event for schools to raise funds for worthly causes in the developing world. The Day for Change 2012 is Friday 3rd February and has a sporty theme. http://ictmagic.wikispaces.com/Competitions+%26+Events
Nigel Coutts

The Trouble with Change Management in Schools - The Learner's Way - 4 views

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    Taken simplistically there could be a feeling that due to the complexity of large systems change becomes an uncontrollable beast with a mind of its own. 
Nigel Coutts

Professional Learning Communities for School Transformation - The Learner's Way - 11 views

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    The role of the teacher is slowly but surely changing and with this come new challenges. Change becomes inevitable and processes for managing this and capitalising on the opportunities it brings becomes paramount within organisations. It is perhaps not surprising that educational institutions may evolve to become what are termed 'Learning Organisations' or 'Professional Learning Communities' within which there is a focus on the application of the principles of learning to manage change and explore new opportunities. 
Roland Gesthuizen

Do iPads Have the Capacity to Change Education? - iPads in Education - 0 views

  • In the Automating stage, new tools are used to reinforce existing practices and processes. We see this stamped all over the educational space. Smartboard use that reinforces existing frontal teaching methods. Digital content replacing paper distribution. Technology that speeds the efficiency of existing standardized testing. The essence and character of traditional educational practices however hasn't changed. It's still "business as usual" in most American schools. 
  • "Informating" as Professor Zuboff calls it - involves the re-imagination of processes using the new technologies. Instead of focusing on making existing processes more efficient, we start to look at entirely new methods and goals. We are in the infancy of that stage in education. In the Informating phase, educators reevaluate goals, visions and processes: 
  • Professional development becomes far more valuable when it searches beyond the simple nuts and bolts of technical use and instead encourages teachers to disrupt the traditional flow of education - to dabble, experiment and re-imagine how that technology can be used to create new educational horizons.
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  • A skilled teacher knows that technology implementations won't have any impact as long as you try and retrofit them on to outdated teaching methods. That teacher will instead try to utilize the technology to forge creative new educational paths for his/her students.
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    You hear it repeatedly. You can't throw technology into schools without training and support for teachers. If you purchased a truckload of iPads for your school then you better have a plan for developing teachers that are skilled in using them ... but what does it really mean to be "skilled .. What constitutes effective professional development
Nigel Coutts

The Eight Cultural Forces - The lens & the lever - The Learner's Way - 1 views

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    This unavoidable and irreducible complexity means that schools are challenging place to study, to understand and to manage change within. Even for the teacher who spends everyday inside the school there is so much going on that unguided observations and the plans based upon them come with no guarantee of success. - We need a lens and a lever to manage this complexity. -  Such a lens is offered by the 'cultural forces'.
anonymous

Shift Happens - Now What? at Change Agency - 0 views

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    While it is nice to have administrative support for new technology purchases, a "technology purchasing frenzy" is simply NOT the correct response to the realization that our schools are not doing enough to prepare students for their futures. This is really about changing adult perspectives and adult behaviors to create student-centered classrooms that exemplify research-based best practices around learning. It's not about buying the latest, greatest, and most expensive tech toys on the market. Expensive tech in the hands of educators who haven't made changes to their behaviors and instructional practice are no better than the good old chalk board, pencil, and paper. Even worse, expensive tech that the teachers see no use for will end up just collecting dust in a storage room.
Nigel Coutts

A stable foundation makes change possible - The Learner's Way - 2 views

  •  
    The foundational stability of schools might be our greatest strength.Getting the fundamentals right and protecting them during change efforts is essential. 
Nigel Coutts

Change and why we all see it differently - The Learner's Way - 3 views

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     If the young people of today are to thrive beyond the walls of the classroom they will need to be able to cope with a world characterised by volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity. The children of todays Kindergarten will enter the workplace in the fourth-decade of the 21st Century. We debate the merits of teaching 21st Century Skills and what they might be while teaching children who have lived their entire lives in that very century. The challenge is how will schools and individual teachers respond to this drive for urgent change.
Tero Toivanen

Digital Citizenship | the human network - 0 views

  • 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.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • We and our technological-materialist culture have fostered an environment of such tremendous novelty and variety that we have changed the equations of childhood.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  •  
    Mark Pesce: Digital Citizenship and the future of Education.
School Report Writer .com

School Report Writing Software for Teachers - FREE & ONLINE - 0 views

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    This site allows you to save sentences and lists of activities and projects to easily customise your school reports. Build your own comment back to avoid careless errors and save it until next year. Easily change between he/she him/her and more by using hashtags. It not a comment bank, it's just a smarter way to use your own words in an organised way. http://ictmagic.wikispaces.com/Planning+%26+Assessment
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    New teachers' report writing app - 600 sign-ups in last month! FREE & ONLINE school report writing software for teachers, easy-to-use, with great features including an OOOPS! DETECTIVE that spots embarrassing mistakes and SPELLCHECK AS YOU TYPE. LATEST TEACHER REVIEWS From TES (Times Educational Supplement) http://www.tes.co.uk/teaching-resource/NEW-6204573/ "So grateful for this - took me a while to get the hang of it but the time investment was worth it. Thank you." "The software is great, really excellent. I love it already!" "Well worth investing the time to set this up with specific subject related comments. Has made the actual report writing process much faster! Really helpful spelling/grammar checker included. When I had a query, the online support was very useful and prompt. Thanks for this!"
Sheri Edwards

The Answer Sheet - Goodlad on school reform: Are we ignoring lessons of last 50 years? - 28 views

  • By John I. Goodlad
  • We need to be aware that recent decades of research on cognition reveal hardly any correlation of standardized test scores with a wide range of desired behavioral characteristics such as dependability, ability to work alone and with others, and planning, or with an array of virtues such as honesty, decency, compassion, etc. Employers dissatisfied with employees who studied mathematics and the physical sciences in first-rate universities often call for higher test scores. Is academic development the totality of the purpose of schooling?
  • The consequence, of course, was the substantial narrowing of pedagogy to simply drilling for tests. We do not need schools for this. It is training, not education, and access to it can be obtained almost anywhere at any time in this increasingly technological age. That would leave the opportunity to turn schools, whose prime function has long been child care, into centers of pedagogy with the mission of guiding what education is: the process of becoming a unique human being whose responsibility it is to make the most of oneself.
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  • Ralph Ty
  • what schools are for.
  • they are to provide whatever educational is not being taken care of in the rest of our society.
  • What we must do now nationwide is begin the 20-or-more-year process of creating a new tomorrow.
  • They will vary widely in their agendas of change, just as they vary in their cultural settings.
Tero Toivanen

How the Flipped Classroom Turned Me into a Better Student - Getting Smart - 38 views

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    "The flipped classroom made a huge impact on my education - and life. Without the change in my class structure, I don't think I would be applying to colleges and thinking about continuing my education beyond high school. Not only did my grades and scores improve, but I began enjoying school and learning, and it taught me how to learn and think on my own. The flipped class turned me into a better student."
Nigel Coutts

Educating for the Unknown - The Learner's Way - 6 views

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    What will tomorrow bring? What will life be like in 2028 as our youngest students of today exit school? What occupations will they enter and what challenges will they face? These are not new questions but with the rate of change in society and the pace at which technology evolves they are questions without clear answers. How then do schools prepare students for this uncertain tomorrow? What shall we teach our children today such that are well prepared for the challenges and opportunities of their tomorrow?
Tero Toivanen

The Special Agents of Change - playDUcation - 25 views

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    "Here are insights from the team of educational innovators at one of the most transformational schools I have visited: SCIL, the Sydney Centre for Innovation in Learning at NBCS, the Northern Beaches Christian School." (via Pekka Ihanainen)
GoEd Online

Kelsey's Tuesday Tech Treasures 8-7-12 - 0 views

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    With the abundance of learning tools and technology out there, it can become mind-boggling to begin your list of likes, dislikes, to-tries and skips before the upcoming school year. Many things in the school system are changing at a rapid rate-from teaching practices to teacher-student relationships to students' behavior to students' social interactions with one another.
Dwayne Abrahams

Google Changes Its Tune on Interviews - Vault: Blog - 12 views

  • Thus, the old pre-reqs are out: GPAs, transcripts, SATS.  In fact, Google is beginning to disregard academic educations altogether: they're just not a good predictor of success at the company. Says Bock, "After two or three years, your ability to perform at Google is completely unrelated to how you performed when you were in school, because the skills you required in college are very different. You’re also fundamentally a different person. You learn and grow, you think about things differently." According to the Times, Google is putting its money where its mouth is: they've actually increased their hires with no college education—14% of some of its teams have never been to school, according to Bock. Instead, the emphasis is on hiring candidates who are leaders, and work well in teams. The only way to discover this, says Bock, is through "structured" behavior interviews that assess how a person makes decisions. The winning interviewees will be able to demonstrate that they are "consistent and fair in how [they] think about making decisions and that there’s an element of predictability." This is key to building trust among team members once hired, he explains. "If a leader is consistent, people on their teams experience tremendous freedom, because then they know that within certain parameters, they can do whatever they want. If your manager is all over the place, you’re never going to know what you can do, and you’re going to experience it as very restrictive."
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    Google is beginning to disregard academic educations altogether: they're just not a good predictor of success at the company.  According to the Times, Google is putting its money where its mouth is: they've actually increased their hires with no college education-14% of some of its teams have never been to school, according to Bock. Instead, the emphasis is on hiring candidates who are leaders, and work well in teams.
terry freedman

Derek's Blog » Challenges, changes and trends 2011 - 0 views

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    Interesting post from Derek Wenmouth, who asks: * Who are our learners? * What are we preparing them for? * How are we preparing them for this? * What are the implications of connectivity for learning and schooling? This is good, and all very well, but... A few weeks ago I met a young lad, still at school, smartly dressed in a business suit, making a reasonable job of selling himself. Except that for reasons best known to himself he deemed it acceptable to not only chew gum the entire time, but to do so in a way that allowed me to see the contents of his mouth throughout. I realiuse this is off-message, as it were, but surely one of the most basic skills we should be teaching young people, by example as much as anything, is how to present yourself?
theummedschool

The Ummed School - Best School in Jodhpur - 0 views

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    Our holistic learning approach continues in different forms, so, today lemonade making activity organized in The Ummed School in which students learned how 2-3 substances are mixed and a totally new substance is formed. This type of practical learning approach helps a lot in developing creativity and forming a thought process. Lemonade is the drink of choice for countless people-and now you can use it to teach your little ones the scientific method! This fun science activity for kids allows children to make their own lemonade while following directions, making a hypothesis, and collecting data through observation. Activity Instructions Cut a lemon into four pieces and throw away all of the seeds. Put a piece of lemon in a Ziploc bag, one for each child and one for yourself. Help your children measure and add a half a cup of water and a teaspoon of sugar to their bags. When all of the ingredients are added, zip the bags. Help your child squeeze the lemon into the bag and shake it up to mix the contents. As you are shaking it ask your kids to predict what will happen to the ingredients. Have them talk about the changes they are seeing within the bag and how they think the lemonade will taste. After 30 seconds, stop mixing and add a couple of ice cubes to each bag. Hand your little ones a straw and enjoy! The outcome of Activity This fun science activity for kids will teach your little ones how to follow the scientific method. They will listen to your instructions, predict the outcome of the activity, and make observations throughout. Additionally, they will create a delicious drink that they can enjoy!
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