I agree...While I don't want technology to overtake my classroom, I do want to engage students as much as possible, and I'll use technolgy when it's easy to manage/use and effective.
I feel that our plan right now is to throw a bunch of software applications and hardware at us and let us figure it all out. Not working for me. I need to take one thing at a time and really learn it before I can use it in my classroom.
Diigo is a social network, Gary. The types of discussions you have on here, the learning that you do, that's why we need to be involved in the personalized professional development social networking can give us.
laptop, projector, and internet access.
I recommend investing in low cost laptop carts so students also have devices
If you click on the link just 2 lines below this highlight ('over here') there are clues on how to use wikis in teaching. In Chemical Education, we have been investigating using these both to teach and to build an online living text. See Laura Pence's talk at http://www.softconference.com/llc/player.asp?PVQ=GEDM&fVQ=EKKJFJ&hVQ= (may require ACS membership). Contact me if you are interested in how other chemists are using them.
When it comes to showing results, he said, “We better put up or shut up.”
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.
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.”
$46.3 million for laptops, classroom projectors, networking gear and other technology for teachers and administrators.
If we know something works
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.
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.
“It’s not the stuff that counts — it’s what you do with it that matters.”
“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.”
that computers can distract and not instruct.
“They’re inundated with 24/7 media, so they expect it,”
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.
rofessor Cuban at Stanford argues that keeping children engaged requires an environment of constant novelty, which cannot be sustained.
Like teaching powerpoint is "rethinking education". Right.
guide on the side.
Professor Cuban at Stanford
But she loves the fact that her two children, a fourth-grader and first-grader, are learning technology, including PowerPoint
“There is a connection between the physical hand on the paper and the words on the page,” she said. “It’s intimate.”
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.
This is big business.
“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.”
Brand new portal for teachers in Australia and New Zealand. It has a comprehensive Professional Learning events calendar that can be filtered so teachers can find their topic easily.
"Before the advent of Twitter, most educators I know had limited opportunities to collaborate with colleagues outside their building. Some subscribed to listservs or participated in online forums, but these outlets lacked critical mass; teachers also networked at in-person conferences and training sessions, but these isolated events didn't provide ongoing support.
Enter Twitter. I've heard many educators say that Twitter is the most effective way to collaborate and that they've learned more with Twitter than they have from years of formal professional development."
While K-12 district administrators are "overwhelmingly positive" about the value of Web 2.0 in schools, the use of Web 2.0 tools in actual learning environments is "quite limited," according to the results of a new study from the Consortium for School Networking (CoSN), a professional association for district technology leaders.
This is a K-12 education community with a target audience of teachers, tech integration specialists, coaches, educational technology leaders, and lovers of learning from around the world. It is in recognition of the growing global inter-connectedness of educators in independent and municipal K-12 schools, and offers an opportunity for all to grow their craft through this professional network.
Google+ community hoping to build a global cohort of people passionate about EdTech.
This is a K-12 education community with a target audience of teachers, tech integration specialists, coaches, educational technology leaders, and lovers of learning from around the world. It is in recognition of the growing global inter-connectedness of educators in independent and municipal K-12 schools, and offers an opportunity for all to grow their craft through this professional network.
as
there are many creative ways to cut costs, as well as to free resources that
can be used with existing infrastructures.
Schools can utilize cost-effective lease purchase programs for
computers, investigate the implementation of a Bring Your Own Technology (BYOT)
program, or promote the use of a plethora of free Web 2.0 tools.
Schools and classrooms do not, and will not,
spiral out of control when we allow teachers the flexibility to take calculated
risks to innovate with technology or permit students to learn using social
media or their own devices.
One of the most powerful means of
professional development is through the use of social media where educators can
create their own Personal Learning Network (PLN) based entirely on their unique
needs and passions.
"Even as we are seeing more schools and educators transform the way they teach and learn with technology, many more are not. .. Opinions vary on the merits of educational technology, but common themes seem to have emerged. Some of the reasons for not embracing technology have to do with several misconceptions revolving around fear."
use technology, including the Internet, to produce and publish writing as well as to interact and collaborate with others; demonstrate sufficient command of keyboarding skills to type a minimum of one page in a single sitting.
Evaluate the advantages and disadvantages of using different mediums
Integrate multiple sources of information presented in diverse formats and media (e.g., visually, quantitatively, orally) in order to make informed decisions and solve problems, evaluating the credibility and accuracy of each source and noting any discrepancies among the data.
Integration is a matter of design, and produces considerable cognitive load on a learner.
Social media professional learning networks (PLN) from linkedin to twitter, facebook to even pinterest, can be dominated by education technology discussion rather than broader concerns of how people learn , likely because those educators tending towards technology are on these digital networks to begin with.
rather requires learners to make complex decisions about how, when, and why to use technology–something educators must do as well.
Students selected from self-produced 2 minute YouTube audition clips. George Lucas Foundation then put professional production into telling their stories.
Today's kids are born digital -- born into a media-rich, networked world of infinite possibilities. But their digital lifestyle is about more than just cool gadgets; it's about engagement, self-directed learning, creativity, and empowerment.
A parent of two middle school-aged children, Will Richardson has been blogging about the intersection of social online learning networks and education for the past 10 years at Weblogg-ed.com. He is a former public school educator for 22 years, and is a co-founder of Powerful Learning Practice, a unique long-term, job-embedded professional development program that has mentored over 3,500 teachers worldwide in the last four years.
A Tedx video describing the state of education today and giving several examples of teaching for learning instead of teaching to the exam. A powerful 14 minute presentation.