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Edtech Priorities for Educators: No Shiny Toys! In addition to the above issues, educators clearly stated that the purpose of edtech should never be to replace a teacher. Instead, edtech products should: Relieve administrative burdens; Increase the efficacy of teachers; Deepen the relation among students and teachers; Embed assessment directly into daily learning experience; Amplify the reach of effective teachers; Empower students to become creators; And ultimately, keep the humanity in education and create more equality of opportunities.

Here’s a combined list from all 18 groups: The best interests of students must always be first and foremost. Tools should fill a REAL need for teaching/learning (not solutions in search of a problem). Ask teachers and talk to administrators at every stage of the design process. Have open, balanced conversations among all stakeholders. The introduction of edtech should include ongoing targeted meaningful staff development that is preferably teacher led. Student data must be secure: edtech companies should be open and clear about their use of data and information. Education technology should continually be tested in classrooms. The larger community should be included in the selection and implementation of edtech. If solutions claim to be research-based, they need to be truly research based. We need to know more about what works based on real data. Access should be reasonable and appropriate for all stakeholders. Compensate teachers who are product developers for their works. Similarly, compensate educators for providing extensive feedback and help with product development. Structure the ways teachers can provide feedback and interact with new tools as forms for professional development. Research should include recommendations that address the socio-emotional implications of using technology products. Districts should provide thought leadership on their theory of learning to help drive appropriate product development that aligns with district priorities.

Everything should revolve around the learner.

Education should not be about teaching to the next level

True learning is intrinsically motivated and the reward is knowledge.

Our teachers are stuck within the confines of a system that no longer serves our children.

The study found few examples of compulsory classroom-style training. Instead, professional learning “is incentivized through recognition and sometimes tangible rewards, usually within a culture of high expectations.”

Learning is immersive

Connected Educator Month 2014 Calendar Use the search box and filters at right to help you find events & activities of interest. To find events/activities just for you, roll over “primary audience” at right. To find events/activities on a specific topic of interest, roll over each of the event types at right. By default, events are displayed in Eastern Daylight (New York) time. Learn how to view events in your local time here. Register as an attendee or organization to create a profile, make your customized calendar, interact with other attendees, and more. Click here for tutorial videos. Add your customized calendar to Google Calendar, iCal, and more here. Or add an event to the calendar by clicking here.

If we did that to exams, the curriculum would have to be different. We would not need to emphasise facts or figures or dates. The curriculum would have to become questions that have strange and interesting answers. "Where did language come from?", "Why were the pyramids built?", "Is life on Earth sustainable?", "What is the purpose of theatre?" Questions that engage learners in a world of unknowns. Questions that will occupy their minds through their waking hours and sometimes their dreams.

We don't need to improve schools. We need to reinvent them for our times, our requirements and our future. We don't need efficient clerks to fuel an administrative machine that is no longer needed. Machines will do that for us. We need people who can think divergently, across outdated "disciplines", connecting ideas across the entire mass of humanity. We need people who can think like children.

Sam Levin, an alum of Monument who is currently a sophomore at the University of Oxford in England studying biological sciences, started the program in 2010. Frustrated with his public-high-school schedule and realizing that his friends weren’t inspired to learn, Levin complained to his mother about how unhappy he and his classmates were, to which she responded: “Why don’t you just make your own school?” And so he did — albeit in small steps. In ninth grade, Levin started a school-wide garden that was solely cared for by students; some woke up early on Saturdays to work with the plants. The garden is still functioning and serves at-need families in the community. After witnessing the commitment that his classmates had to nurturing something they had created themselves, Levin was convinced that they were capable of putting more time and energy into their studies — as long as it was something they cared about. “I was seeing the exact opposite in school. Kids weren’t even doing the things they needed to do to get credit. There was something at odds with students getting up to work for no credit or money [on the garden] at 7 in the morning, but not wanting to wake up to read or do a science experiment,” says Levin. “I saw the really amazing and powerful things that happened when high school students stepped it up and were excited about something.”

The semester is split in half, with the first nine weeks focused on natural and social sciences. Each Monday morning, the students formulate a question with the help of their classmates. For example, “How are plants from different parts of a mountain different from each other?” or “What causes innovation?” The students spend the rest of the week researching the answer and creating a presentation to summarize their findings to share with their classmates at the end of the week for feedback and critique. The students are in charge of keeping themselves on task, creating their research plans and meeting their deadlines.

By taking ownership of their learning, the students at Monument are forced to think creatively and capitalize on their own talents in order to excel. The class framework is similar to what will be expected of them in college and in the workforce, when they have to make their own educated and independent decisions.

Initially in many institutions the move will be crude pedagogically, with an emphasis on video recording of lectures and flipped classes, or merely increasing the amount of online learning supporting regular classes. Over time, though, as instructors get more experience in hybrid learning, get more instructional design support, and greater pressure from the administration, full course re-design will increase, but major redesigns around hybrid learning may take as long as five years in many institutions. One reason for this slow adoption of re-design is the current lack of appropriate models for hybrid learning that have been tested and evaluated; this will change though as experience grows. Best practice for hybrid learning will emerge, as it did for fully online learning.

10. Expect the unexpected: One year: 100%; Three years: 100%; Five years: 100% These are the monsters lurking in the shadows. In online learning, the only thing you can really be certain of is the uncertainty. These are Donald Rumsfeld’s unknown unknowns, so by definition they are unpredictable or non-forecastable. However, there are also some known unknowns that perhaps we should discuss. (MOOCs are good examples – they were known in 2011, but the likelihood that they would take off in 2012 in the way they did was not known, at least by most pundits.) Here are some possible bogeymen to lie awake worrying about:

the privatization of post-secondary education in the USA. Many states are in dire financial trouble. Will this result in some states privatizing their public post-secondary education systems? What price would Alabama State University fetch from a commercial buyer and how would that affect the state’s finances? If some states do decide on privatization, expect online learning to increase – indeed, online learning will likely increase in financially challenged states without privatization, because, rightly or wrongly, it will be seen as cheaper; also expect federal student financial aid to take a hit in the USA as Congress grapples with the deficit. a major Internet player (Apple, Google, Facebook or Amazon) jumps into the online learning market, perhaps in partnership with some elite universities, and takes a major share of the for-credit online market, because of lower costs, quality content, and accreditation from elite universities (but with a different category of degree from their on-campus programs) The US Congress backs publishers and shuts down all publicly funded open educational resources; copyright legislation is tightened on US-based Internet companies making it all but impossible to use educational resources over the Internet for free major power shortages/outages, due to bad weather/a surge in energy prices/political activists (pick your reason) makes online delivery increasingly unreliable during winter quantum computing arrives at a reasonable cost and completely changes the game.

One of the few classes that effectively taught me how to take information from the classroom to the real world was instructed by Doug Wightman at Queen’s University. The course covered concepts from how to start a start-up, build business models and prototypes, to venture deals, stock options and term sheets. But it didn’t end there. Toward the end of the course, many students had working prototypes, and a few managed to execute and launch their ideas. This course taught me something important: We can’t allow learning to become passive. We need to teach students to learn how to learn – to become independent, innovative thinkers capable of changing the world.

Culture is a problem, and we need to fix it – from the ground up. There’s a psychosocial dynamic of not questioning current practices of education. But we can’t let this get in the way. Embrace education with all your heart, and remember that schooling is only a small part of the puzzle. The remainder is what you’ll have to discover and solve through your own journey.

The SAMR model provides a perfect lens for looking at the implementation of technology. After spending some time with the model and reflecting on the current raft of technologies – I have to say we have barely moved past the enhancement stage.

You’re all probably familiar with the Gartner hype cycle - “the graphic representation of the maturity, adoption and social application of specific technologies”. If I was to put EdTech on the graph somewhere right now in February 2013 it would be at the very pit of the “trough of disillusionment”. In the diagram above I’ve tried to to illustrate the my view of the current state by combining the SAMR and Hype Cycle. The technological solutions that we put our faith in have failed to meet expectations and have quickly become unfashionable. The LMS has dropped off the page despite it underwriting most institutions online presense and being the foundation of technological progress so far. While we can wallow in the downturn the fact is that the next phase – the Slope of Enlightenment – is just around the corner. The climate is right to move forward, beyond the hype and beyond simple enhancement. Its time for transformation.

The big issue with EdTech at the moment is the lack of real solutions. The vendors and the products they are peddling are carry overs and do little more that enhance and keep the status quo. They don’t move very far down the SAMR line, and they barely get close to the real transformation that is possible (and needed). The fact is that there is no solution on the market that can provide the technical transformation required in the education sector. And it’s a shared problem across sectors and industries – from news, to broadcast and publishing. So lets work this out together rather than paying someone else to silo off yet another years content.

Don't feel the need to know everything.

Don't need someone to plan, organize, and lead their professional development.

Don't fear making mistakes.

ll children are born to drive their education. The problem is that prior to the digital age there were no child-friendly pedagogic vehicles. Now that the military-industrial complex has created them, parents and teachers should give the keys to the kids as soon as possible and let them head off on their own down the beautifully linear highway of knowledge.

One of the empires is the empire of fear. Surely we are not free if our lives are dominated by fear. Although Mitra’s minimal model blithely assumes that children greet everything new with a calm curiosity, Rousseau recognises that children can just as easily respond to the new with fear. To avoid this requires early training. A snippet of his advice on this subject:

At another junction on the same road is the empire of habit. We are not free if we are too firmly set in our ways. Hence Rousseau’s advice: “the only habit that a child should be allowed to contract is none. Do not carry him on one arm more than the other; do not accustom him to give one hand rather than the other, to use one more than the other, to want to eat, sleep, or be active at the same hours…Prepare from afar the reign of his freedom…” (63) (Sir Ken Robinson’s critique of the school bell is but a footnote to this.)