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"Published on 2 Apr 2014 Introduction to the Australian Curriculum: Digital Technologies. Members of the Digital Technologies Advisory Group discuss the features of the curriculum."

"Introduction to the Australian Curriculum: Digital Technologies. Members of the Digital Technologies Advisory Group discuss the features of the curriculum."

"With support from the Governor 's Productivity Investment Fund and the Virginia Department of Education, Radford University and participating schools in southwestern Virginia are exploring how the iPod Touch can be used to enhance effective teaching and learning. The last several years have seen an explosion in the amount of young people playing video games as well as the number of children and adolescents using mobile handheld technologies, such as portable music players, gaming platforms, and smart phones. As school systems struggle with how best to deal with this cultural and technological shift, it is highly likely that the technology will continue to progress towards more powerful, wireless handheld computers that can deliver high quality, multimedia, computer processing power. Viewing this phenomenon as neither a panacea nor a plague, the iLearn team is exploring if and how these technologies can be leveraged for enhanced learning. "

"The journey to digital business is the key theme of Gartner, Inc.'s "Hype Cycle for Emerging Technologies, 2014." As the Gartner Hype Cycle celebrates its 20th year, Gartner said that as enterprises set out on the journey to becoming digital businesses, identifying and employing the right technologies at the right time will be critical.  Gartner's 2014 Hype Cycle Special Report provides strategists and planners with an assessment of the maturity, business benefit and future direction of more than 2,000 technologies, grouped into 119 areas. New Hype Cycles this year include Digital Workplace, Connected Homes, Enterprise Mobile Security, 3D Printing and Smart Machines. "

In honor of Twitter's #pencilchat, I put together some of the more memorable tweets to create this video. I plan to use it for upcoming professional development workshops about technology integration in the classroom. It's a light-hearted look at the spectrum of where we sit regarding technology in the classroom and meeting our students' needs. Enjoy!

One of the perplexing things that teachers and educators encounter when trying to understand educational technology and leverage it to their classrooms is the abundance of those baffling techy terms. Blended Learning is different from Differentiated Learning, Educational Technology might not be necessarily Instructional Technology, a Virtual Classroom is different from an Electronic Classroom or Flipped Classroom; There is also asynchronous, synchronous, and personalized learning, these and many more are but some examples of the growing terminology in this field.

"Can speculation about the future of technology serve as a measuring stick for what we create today? That's the idea behind Envisioning Technology's massive infographic (PDF), which maps the future of emerging technologies on a loose timeline between now and 2040."

"If you go by the headlines, the iPhone 5S and Google Glass were the big technology stories of 2013, and Twitter's IPO was the event of the year. The coverage of Glass focused mostly on its privacy implications - not its ability to change the world. And iPhone and Twitter were just more of the same. So we could end the year really disappointed because nothing dramatic seems to have happened on the technology front. But look again, at the stories we missed. So much happened, in fact, that I believe we have set the stage for the transformation of entire industries"

"2010 was the year the cloud's impact became clear, permanent and more far-reaching than this slow-thinker had previously realized. Few things we did in my school district have not been in some way cloud-related - and those projects on the horizon look to be as well. My own personal technology use for both work and leisure has changed significantly this year due to ubiquitous cloud access and the devices meant to take advantage of it."

Interesting to consider some of the 2011 trends identified in this blog entry.

"There are few similarities: it appears that the Coalition's plans for Fixed Wireless technology and Satellite technology in rural areas may be similar (there's an near-total lack of detail in the Coalition's plans and much information is gathered through 'reading between the lines') but there are big questions regarding the differences in funding. Ultimately, the only obvious similarity is that people should be able to download web pages and videos a bit faster. Here follows each facet listed in detail. In the spirit of crowdsourcing, and with the phenomenal success of it in terms of NBN research, if you can add any more information one way or the other, please contact us or leave the details in the comments."

"Generation YES is a non-profit 501 (c)(3) with a mission to empower students and teachers to use technology to improve education in their own school. Our school-friendly online tools and innovative project-based curriculum build a learning community where students work alongside their teachers as technology leaders, collaborators and mentors. 15 years of research experience and proven scientific results show that when schools trust and collaborate with their students to integrate technology, academic success follows."

Another amazing Google Project. From the archaeological areas of Pompeii to the Hiroshima Peace Memorial, Google's World Wonders Project aims to bring to life the wonders of the modern and ancient world. By using our Street View technology, Google has a unique opportunity to make world heritage sites available to users across the globe. Street View is a hugely popular feature of Google Maps which is already available in dozens of countries. It allows users to virtually explore and navigate a neighborhood through panoramic street-level images. With advancements in our camera technologies we can now go off the beaten track to photograph some of the most significant places in the world so that anyone, anywhere can explore them.

By using our Street View technology, Google has a unique opportunity to make world heritage sites available to users across the globe. Street View is a hugely popular feature of Google Maps which is already available in dozens of countries. It allows users to virtually explore and navigate a neighborhood through panoramic street-level images. With advancements in our camera technologies we can now go off the beaten track to photograph some of the most significant places in the world so that anyone, anywhere can explore them. Street View has already proved a real hit for tourists and avid virtual explorers. The World Wonders Project also presents a valuable resource for students and scholars who can now virtually discover some of the most famous sites on earth. The project offers an innovative way to teach history and geography to students all over the world.

Technology and 21st Century Learning These films look specifically at the ways that the latest digital and mobile technologies can potentially transform the ways that young people communicate, collaborate, and learn.  

"According to Andreas Schleicher, there is no evidence from the PISA data yet of a consistent relationship between the use of education technology and superior student performance.  That, however, certainly does not mean that no such relationship will exist in the future, just that it hasn't happened yet, at least not at the scale required to show up in the PISA surveys. "

"Vannevar Bush foreshadowed the impact that such technology would have on our contemporary lives. By doing so, Bush inspired critical aspects of current online tools, including the hyperlink and the World Wide Web. Bush's vision directly influenced researchers to create digital technology we nowadays consider commonplace. Today's equivalent of Bush's breakthrough is just as radical, except it's far beyond the conceptual stage and is already in extensive development. This technology is termed "Augmented Reality" (AR). AR has the potential to act as a harbinger of future hi-tech transformations whilst irrevocably altering the basic nature of everyday life."

"Technological Pedagogical Content Knowledge (TPACK) attempts to identify the nature of knowledge required by teachers for technology integration in their teaching, while addressing the complex, multifaceted and situated nature of teacher knowledge."

Schools are needing increasing amounts of expensive educational technology at a time when budgets are shrinking. Many have started to explore BYOD policies - Bring Your Own Device - as a practical solution to integrate cost effective technology into their educational programs. With the convergence of widespread broadband and the growth of powerful, platform independent web based tools BYOD has finally arrived as an effective educational alternative to other plans that require expensive purchasing and maintenance. Viewed within a realistic perspective of both its benefits and limitations BYOD can provide a workable solution for the many schools seeking to upgrade their educational technology.

Some reflections from Vivienne Ming and Norma Ming in regards to designing educational technology.

"What excited me about the Digital Technologies curriculum in particular is the way that it has embraced the Digital Technologies as a way of thinking and a tool for creativity. The problem I've always had with the teaching of ICT in schools is that it has largely been seen as a tool that should be integrated to assist the teaching of other subjects - that's fine, but that's captured in the ICT General Capability in the Australian Curriculum and is very different to the study of ICT as a discipline, sometimes branded as Computer Science, Informatics, Computing or similar. Given the ubiquitous nature of ICT in our world today, it has always struck me as odd that we've relegated the understanding of ICT to being all about its use, rather than how it manages to achieve the "magic" that many people mistake it to be."

"The digital age has presented many and diverse challenges for copyright law. The rapid uptake of digital, networked technologies led to widespread online distribution of content, as well as the emergence of new practices and technologies that enabled digital content to be shared, reused and remixed on an unprecedented scale. But while technology provided the capacity for sharing and reuse of content to occur on a vast scale, legal restrictions on the use of copyright material hampered its negotiability in the digital environment."