EDTECH at Boise State University

Next for education: Teacher avatarsTechnology creates lifelike images of educators, complete with knowledge base for student interaction

n recent years, there has been explosive growth in students creating, manipulating, and sharing content online (National School Boards Association, 2007). Recognizing the educational value of encouraging such behaviors, many school leaders have shifted their energies from limiting the use of these technologies to limiting their abuse. As with any other behavior, when schools teach and set expectations for appropriate technology use, students rise to meet the expectations. Such conditions allow educators to focus on, in the words of social technology guru Howard Rheingold (n.d.), educating “children about the necessity for critical thinking and [encouraging] them to exercise their own knowledge of how to make moral choices." One process for creating the necessary conditions is reported in From Fear to Facebook, the first-person account of one California principal who endured a series of false starts to finally arrive at a place where students in his school were maximizing their use of laptops and participatory technologies without the constant distractions of misuse (Levinson, 2010). Other similar processes and programs are emerging, and they all share a common theme: an education that fails to account for the use of social media tools prepares students well for the past, but not for their future.

A new reading curriculum based on augmented reality technology grabs student attention and shows them difficult concepts in a visual form. "Letters alive" uses 26 animals to help pre-kindergartners and kindergartners learn to read.

A study by a Nobel Prize-winning physicist — now a science adviser to President Barack Obama — suggests that how you teach is more important than who does the teaching. He found that in nearly identical classes, Canadian college students learned more from teaching assistants using interactive tools than from a veteran professor giving a traditional lecture. The students who had to engage interactively using the TV remote-like devices scored about twice as high on a test compared with those who heard the normal lecture, according to a study published Thursday in the journal Science.