Group items tagged

Discovery’s Techbook series is cloud-based, meaning students can access the materials from wherever they have an internet connection; the company says that’s because not all school districts have the funds to give every student his or her own device. The Techbooks are also platform-agnostic to work with whatever hardware a district or student might have—iPads, tablets, mobile devices, laptops, or desktops.

poll results today that found that the majority of parents and teachers of K-12 students support greater use of technology in education

the poll found that these audiences increasingly believe that school systems should be doing more to improve access to technology in education.

89 percent of teachers and 76 percent of parents would choose to spend $200 per student for an Internet-connected device over $200 per student for new science textbooks

The iPad is a consumption device. Sure, you can use it for Web browsing, video-watching, or note-taking, but the laptop affords a much greater range of expressive possibilities. Apple’s embrace of digital textbooks reinforces a quaint view of education that transfers agency from learners to publishers. The tools for creating e-books, such as iBooks Author, require Macs, but the laptop cannot read the books it creates, forcing schools to choose between textbooks and computing. Apple has made it clear that education is about content delivery and testing, no longer about the power to be your best.

Tablets could have all the functionality of a laptop, but they don’t. Until they do, I recommend that schools invest in laptops for student use.

No new technology is so novel we can't subject it to the question, "How does it change the relationship between student and teacher, student and discipline, one student to another?"

What I'm saying, basically, is that I'd have to modify, adapt, and extend the McGraw-Hill iBook in all the same ways that I modified, adapted, and extended the McGraw-Hill print textbook. We'd pull out the iBook just as infrequently as its printed sibling.

pedagogical practices and the curriculum may need to change in order to prepare students to participate meaningfully in the knowledge-based and globally interconnected world of the 21st century.

focus less on teaching and more on learning

transformative strategies include teaching less and encouraging students to learn by undertaking projects, doing away with textbooks, and replacing the entire curriculum (math, science, social studies and language arts) for a particular grade wtih a set of technology-based activities designed to ensure the same learning outcomes.

Project-based learning: Games are interactive, "lean-forward," and participatory. They enable players to step into different roles (e.g. scientist, explorer, inventor, political leader), confront a problem, make meaningful choices and explore the consequences of these choices. Games can help make learning more engaging, relevant and give students real agency in ways that static textbooks simply cannot.

Personalized learning: Games are designed to enable players to advance at their own pace, fail in a safe and supportive environment, acquire critical knowledge just-in-time (vs. just-in-case), iterate based on feedback and use this knowledge to develop mastery. Games can help teachers manage large classes with widely divergent student capabilities and learning styles through embedded assessment and individualized, adaptive feedback.

24/7 learning: Games offer a delicate mix of challenges, rewards and goals that drive motivation, time-on-task and a level of engagement that can seamlessly cross from formal to informal learning environments. Given that kids spend more time engaged with digital media than any other activity (other than sleep), games can enable an increasing portion of this out-of-school digital media time to effectively reinforce in-school learning (and vice-versa).