Group items tagged

Secretary of Education Arne Duncan leads a team to State Educational Technology Directors Association (SETDA) Leadership Summit, "Leveraging Technology for Learning." Th panels focus on making shift to digital textbook, increasing broadband access, STEM, assessment, and improving teacher effectiveness - many of these we discussed in our T561 class.

insights from Project RED about effective technology implementation

"Gillispie: At one of our instructional team meetings, I said, "I have an idea. This is what I want to do. I want to target at-risk students at the middle school level, focus on leadership, language arts, digital citizenship and lots of other things that tend to get less emphasis in our everyday classroom. And I want to use this game, WoW." At the conclusion of my spiel, they said, "We really don't understand all this stuff that you are talking about, but we know it's a good idea. Go for it." The principal said, "Yes, please come do this at my school."

Lots of pomp and circumstance about new initiatives -- but how much funding and political clout is really behind them.

Are you speaking of Digital Promise? It reminds me of whatworks.ed.gov but it looks like it might be designed better. I don't believe whatworks.ed.gov ever got much traction.

An interesting article on how resistant to change different types of organizations are. Educational institutions rank pretty highly resistant. Though it is interesting to note that businesses rank the most adaptive (non resistant)--so the education technology and startup trend may be a good sign!

Interesting. from where I am from (=Japan), business organizations with long history with the majority of employees committed until retirement age of 60 (slowly this is changing though), maybe NPO and even government (with so much shuffling going on) would rank higher...

The author makes a good point that heightened market competition seems to contribute to reduced resistance. I noticed that the more-resistant organizations operate in more highly regulated markets, which would seem to create internal cultures more oriented to compliance and, thus, resistance.

not sure students 'should' run PD but teachers need to be more comfortable with the idea of giving up power to some extend and be more willing to learn from students at times

I think it does make sense to include students, too. Also re-enforces the idea that you don't truly understand a topic until you teach it, so I think empowering students somewhat works towards that goal.

Georgetown University has been accepted by the leadership of EdX : "The addition of Georgetown to edX, which officials plan to announce Monday, marks the latest development in a fast-growing movement that aspires to connect the ivory tower to the world."

An important perspective on how leadership is needed to connect the worlds of art, technology and design.

I just found a current MOOC, highly relevant to the conversation in class today. --free and accepting new participants now. "Weekly Topics: Change pressures: What is influencing higher education? (Oct 8-14) Net pedagogies: New models of teaching and learning (Oct 15-21) Entrepreneurship and commercial activity in education (Oct 22-28) Big data and Analytics (Oct 29-Nov 4) Leadership in Education (Nov 4-11) Distributed Research: new models of inquiry (Nov 12- 18)"

Alas, NASA has almost no funding for the multiplayer game, and there is substantial opposition from internal leadership

The article highlighted the different agendas of the administrator (who brings the budget), educator (who is concerned with lesson objectives), and game designer (who wants to create an engaging game). I think that if students are not sufficiently engaged by the game, the educational objectives would probably not be delivered successfully either. If budget cuts ended up taking the fun out of an educational game, perhaps it might be worth rethinking if it should still be a game?

Matthew, you raise a good point. Users should be seen as stakeholders who can help improve the game in terms of both engagement and learning.

Chris Lehmann is the founding principle of an innovative science and technical high school in Philadelphia (Science Leadership Academy) and will be the keynote speaker at the next ISTE conference. This is an interview where he discusses where he thinks technology and education are headed.

this article snapshots how I think institutional leadership should lead (given the money)

Words of wisdom from a leader in education.

I like this guy; he's wise and practical -- a great combination

I agree, great and rare combination. I like what he says about learning from others and setting yourself a benchmark based on a high performance. That is a good thing for anybody to learn and practice.

An interesting read about Technology Reform in Education as presented by an official from the US Department of Education.

Is engagement in learning the most important characteristic you look for in a technology-rich school, then? Do you think that learning that occurs online is different from learning that happens in traditional classrooms? Access to rural areas?....

Kind of interesting...but two schools (HS and University?) in Canada are sponsoring a MOOC for school leaders on how to push your school / organization forward.

HopeLab's way of cultivating curiosity at its workplace --- good concepts to integrate into the classroom

Very useful reflective questions in the Leadership for Curiosity section and some useful tools for check in as well

Thought the list provided is interesting in terms of how they relate to 21st century learning: The new school models in the article "suggests 10 elements most common to all of the models: * Student-centered environments * Personalized learning * Competency-based progressions * Adaptive & engaging components * Deeper learning & character development * Rapid & flexible deployments * Dynamic models evolving with new tools * Platform-centric scaling * Leveraging teacher Leadership * Best Practices & Innovation "

Founded in 1943, ASCD (formerly the Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development) is an educational leadership organization dedicated to advancing best practices and policies for the success of each learner. ''Mobile devices are cheaper, more portable and less obtrusive than other technologies. Yet the challenges of how training students to use sophisticated technology tools is an economic imperative.''

This is a review of Clay Shirky's book, "Here Comes Everybody" in which he describes the dramatic impact the internet has, and will continue to have on how we learn and communicate. This book (and review) will give you some insight into how your children may be using these technologies. But it should also raise questions about how we, as practitioners, can use the affordances of the new tech to improve our efficiency, effectiveness, and efficacy.