"As more schools open their networks and classrooms to student-owned devices, the need for instruction that makes the most of these tools becomes ever more pronounced. Transitioning to a truly 21st century learning environment is challenging, to be sure.
While helping districts through this process, I've noticed a pattern in the challenges they must - and do - overcome. Adapting effectively to a bring-your-own-device and digital learning environment is far easier for districts if they follow these strategies."
Where, perhaps, when considering how to best set up learning spaces for our students, we once thought it was a choice between a regular whiteboard and an interactive whiteboard, we now have a full array of options to choose from.
In our senior school, on the other hand, what a lesson looks like has been more radically shifting. Recently we have been able to flood our senior school with MacBooks and iPads.
Students have access to the tools and devices that can empower them to discover things for themselves. They can take charge of their learning, and personalise it in a way that never before has been possible.
I was able to get in 55” LCD TVs for around $1300 (ex GST). Adding a trolley for the TV was another $600. A grand total of $1900 meant we still had around $6000 in the bank compared to if we had purchased more IWBs with ultra short throw widescreen projectors.
"IT'S been over a year now since I removed an interactive whiteboard (IWB) from a classroom wall for the first time. Yes, you read that right: removed. And not to put another one up. In fact, what went in its place was a good old-fashioned non-interactive whiteboard - the same sort we tore down just two years earlier."
"Nowadays, I get the same feeling of dread when I open an email to see a Microsoft Word document attached. Time and effort are about to be wasted cleaning up someone's archaic habits. A Word file is the story-fax of the early 21st century: cumbersome, inefficient, and a relic of obsolete assumptions about technology. It's time to give up "
High school, middle school and even elementary school students in a growing number of districts are being encouraged to bring in the very electronic equipment they were once admonished to leave at home. "There was a certain inevitability, as these devices became more common and cheaper, that at some point kids would be bringing them to school," explains Tim Wilson, chief technology officer for the ISD 279-Osseo Area Schools in Minnesota. "If something's coming, we might as well invite it in and learn to manage it."
To hear Wilson and other tech directors tell it, these devices are more than welcome. Wilson's BYOD program is called Copernicus, after the astronomer who proved that the sun was at the center of the solar system. "This is our attempt to put students at the center of our technology integration," he says.
We tend to rewrite the histories of technological innovation, making myths about a guy who had a great idea that changed the world. In reality, though, innovation isn't the goal; it's everything that gets you there. It's bad financial decisions and blueprints for machines that weren't built until decades later. It's the important leaps forward that synthesize lots of ideas, and it's the belly-up failures that teach us what not to do.
When we ignore how innovation actually works, we make it hard to see what's happening right in front of us today. If you don't know that the incandescent light was a failure before it was a success, it's easy to write off some modern energy innovations - like solar panels - because they haven't hit the big time fast enough.
Worse, the fairy-tale view of history implies that innovation has an end. It doesn't. What we want and what we need keeps changing. The incandescent light was a 19th-century failure and a 20th- century success. Now it's a failure again, edged out by new technologies, like LEDs, that were, themselves, failures for many years.
That's what this issue is about: all the little failures, trivialities and not-quite-solved mysteries that make the successes possible. This is what innovation looks like. It's messy, and it's awesome.
"Social media companies have become the new heavyweights of the technology world, with markets giving massive premiums to companies such as LinkedIn and Facebook, while industry stalwarts like Apple and Microsoft struggle to keep up. But is the bubble about to burst?"
"Apple isn't just declaring its independence from Google Maps with its new in-house backend for Maps in iOS 6. It has developed a superior way to deliver map data that relies on resolution independent vectors rather than Google's multiple zoom levels of bit mapped images.
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The invention of the tablet PC has created a new medium for book publishing. Interactive books are everywhere, and have revolutionized the way people consume the printed word. With the recent software available to allow easy creation of interactive books and with the race to bring these products to market, there seems to be a more and more dilution of quality and a loss for the meaning of interactivity. When publishers create new eBook titles or convert a traditional printed book to a digital interactive eBook, they often miss the added value this new medium can provide.
"This visualization attempts to organize a series of emerging technologies that are likely to influence education in the upcoming decades. Despite its inherently speculative nature, the driving trends behind the technologies can already be observed, meaning it's a matter of time before these scenarios start panning out in learning environments around the world."
"In a sixth-grade classroom in Greensboro, N.C., a dozen middle-school social-studies teachers were getting their second of three days of training on tablets that had been presented to them as a transformative educational tool. Every student and teacher in 18 of Guilford County's 24 middle schools would receive one, 15,450 in all, to be used for class work, homework, educational games - just about everything, eventually." This article from the New York TImes looks at the Amplify Tablet
"How Technology Has Transformed the Classroom [#Infographic]
Infographic compares educational technologies of yesteryear to the classroom resources of today."