Group items tagged

"How Technology Wires the Learning Brain February 23, 2011 | 9:45 AM | By Tina Barseghian FILED UNDER: Learning Methods, Research, Neuroscience, text, video games * 9 Comments * * Share447 * Email Post * Link to this post Getty Kids between the ages of 8 and 18 spend 11.5 hours a day using technology - whether that's computers, television, mobile phones, or video games - and usually more than one at a time. That's a big chunk of their 15 or 16 waking hours. But does that spell doom for the next generation? Not necessarily, according to Dr. Gary Small, a neuroscientist and professor at UCLA, who spoke at the Learning & the Brain Conference last week."

Which technology tools can help improve teaching and learning? Which can boost productivity? Which are just plain useful for keeping organized? At the FETC 2010 conference last week, education technology veterans shared their lists of apps intended to make life in and out of the classroom faster, easier, and, well, better.

Technology alone does not guarantee successful online learning or collaboration among faculty and students. However, when you leverage it properly, technology can offer huge possibilities for improving communication and learning. This document identifies a collection of best practices for using Adobe Acrobat Connect Pro. You'll see some innovative ways to use Connect Pro in education and explore a process for successful online teaching and collaboration.

The Encyclopedia of Educational Technology (EET) is a collection of short multimedia articles on a variety of topics related to the fields of instructional design and education and training. The primary audiences for the EET are students and novice to intermediate practitioners in these fields, who need a brief overview as a starting point to further research on specific topics. Authors are graduate students, professors, and others who contribute voluntarily. Articles are short and use multimedia to enrich learning rather than merely decorate the pages.

A wealth of professional articles dealing with educational technology. You can view and download the articles as PDF's.

"NEW forms of media have always caused moral panics: the printing press, newspapers, paperbacks and television were all once denounced as threats to their consumers' brainpower and moral fiber. So too with electronic technologies. PowerPoint, we're told, is reducing discourse to bullet points. Search engines lower our intelligence, encouraging us to skim on the surface of knowledge rather than dive to its depths. Twitter is shrinking our attention spans. But such panics often fail basic reality checks. When comic books were accused of turning juveniles into delinquents in the 1950s, crime was falling to record lows, just as the denunciations of video games in the 1990s coincided with the great American crime decline. The decades of television, transistor radios and rock videos were also decades in which I.Q. scores rose continuously."

Nice site with several articles and links on technology in education

From the description: "Dr. Curtis Bonk's TravelinEdman distance education videos. Curt Bonk is Professor at Indiana University and President of CourseShare. Drawing on his background as a corporate controller, CPA, educational psychologist, and instructional technologist, Bonk offers unique insights into the intersection of business, education, psychology, and technology. A well-known authority on emerging technologies for learning, Bonk reflects on his speaking experiences around the world in his popular blog, TravelinEdMan."

"New York University plans to join the growing movement to publish academic material online as free, open courseware. But in addition to giving away content-something other colleges have done-NYU plans a more ambitious experiment. The university wants to explore ways to reprogram the roles of professors in large undergraduate classes, using technology to free them up for more personal instruction."

From Texas Tech University's Teaching, Learning and Technology Center. Targeted for WebCT, but has some good overall tips.

Technology and Education Box of Tricks

Instructional technology tools... features and functions, categorized.

The main portal which contains numerous research publications tied to technology, pedagogy, learning, and other aspects associated with the CTL and higher education

The article intends to simplify the different aspects of podcasting. The article covers types of podcasts; the pedagogical benefits of podcasting; the connection between theory and podcasting; answers to questions, queries, and apprehensions. Before trying out a new tool, it is important to understand why we do things the way we do. A crucial part of using any tool or technology is to understand, test, and determine the pedagogical appropriateness of it for specific context. Through the article, the author has tried to suggest some of the uses of podcasting along with the pedagogical appropriateness in different scenarios. At the end, the author has tried to (through pictorial representation) describe the podcasting community and the tasks performed by the community members. Also, through a pictorial representation, the author has provided a gist of the podcasting creation process as a producer and as a consumer.

"A growing chorus of voices argue that the internet is making us dumber. Web-connected laptops, smartphones and videogame consoles have all been cast as distracting brain mushers. But there's reason to believe some of the newest devices might not erode our minds. In fact, some scientists think they could even make us smarter."