Group items tagged

By Justin Reich on Educational Technology Debate on December 8 2011. Reich argues, from his research on the use of wikis in the schools, that educational technology tends to benefit affluent students, rather than under-served students, primarily because there are more resources for students and teachers in the affluent environment, so teachers can use technology to its best advantage. He recommends technology initiatives that specifically target low-income and under-served students as a solution, and cites some interesting programs.

By David Nagel, in Policy & Advocacy section of THE Journal, April 23 2010. The article announces the newly published National Educational Technology Trends: 2010, Innovation Through State Leadership report, published by State Educational Technology Directors Association (SETDA). Trends include "enhancing teacher effectiveness" through professional development and "scaling up success" by expanding innovative programs that have worked. Report is bookmarked as well, see trends_edtech tag.

excellent introduction to what the alliance does. see description below: Business or Operational Model: how the initiative fits into the organization's ecosystem. 2.Social Architecture: how collaboration is facilitated and what aspects should supported, such as performance support; communities of practice; knowledge management, informal learning or distributed work teams. 3.Technology Platform: identifying and implementing technologies that are best-suited for the organization's business and collaboration objectives and how they can be integrated within existing constraints.

I like his division of services into business or operational model, social architecture, and technology platform

from the U.S. Department of Education. Plan calls for applying the advanced technologies used personally and professionally to the U.S.'s entire education system. The plan presents five goals with recommendations for states, districts, the federal government, and other stakeholders. Goals address the five essential components of learning powered by technology: Learning, Assessment, Teaching, Infrastructure and Productivity. This page has a link to the plan (PDF).

By Leslie Harris O'Hanlon in Education Week; part of Technology Counts 2013: Building the Digital District, March 11 2013. O'Hanlon looks at ways that K-12 teachers are bringing technology into the classroom. While in some cases this is self-directed, there are districts and national initiatives to do as well. Online professional development is discussed.

Last paragraph is really important: "Teachers should find one thing that they would like to change or something they want to make better and look for ways to use a technology tool," [New Hampshire kindergarten teacher Maria Knee] says. And "teachers need to get outside of their school and see what is happening in other places. And be open to learning."

Published by SETDA (State Educational Technology Directors Association), April 21 2010. This report summarizes a national survey of the 50 "states' implementation of the technology sections of the ESEA [Elementary and Secondary Education Act], Title II, Part D (Title II-D) Act."

eduTecher is a great place to look at new educational technologies, or to find just the right technology to do a job (e.g. document collaboration or word clouds). Each tool is reviewed by the staff, and users can search the database various ways. While many tools have a K-12 focus, there are plenty that would be useful in postsecondary education as well.

Edited by Terry Freedman and published on Informations and Communications Technology (ICT) in Education: The Educational Technology Site, March 2010. This is a really great e-book (free, downloadable PDF) which organizes Web 2.0 education projects by grade level, including a section for adult learners, and a section of resources. There are links to all projects and analysis and self-reflection by the project creators.

Part of the Information Society Policy Research Unit, from the European Commission Joint Research Centre Institute for Prospective Technological Studies Centre (EC - JRC - IPTS). This is a resource page that looks innovative ways to use Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) in education.

By David Hayward and originally published in April 2009 Integrating Technology column of Beyond Penguins and Polar Bears; here it is part of the blog Expert Voices published by the National Sciences Digital Library. The post provides a great overview of Diigo, with advice on how middle school teachers can use it.

A National Science Foundation Science of Learning Center, this site is a collaboration between the University of Washington, Stanford University, and SRI International, and is funded by the NSF. A quick scan of the Research tab shows publications in a wide-range of areas from "National Technology Plan 2010 - Transforming American Education: Learning Powered by Technology" to "Learning Science in informal environments."

By Virginia Heffernan in Opinionator in the New York Times. A review of Cathy Davidson's new book,Now You See It. Heffernan's review suggests that Davidson's new book argues that we not hold current students to out of date standards for education. Educators must not just embrace new technologies, but understand the position of these technologies in the changing world. Follow the davidson tag for her blog.

very interesting article on Forsyth County schools in GA (I just drove through there the other day and had no idea of their innovativeness!) encouraging students to bring their own technology to classrooms to use in project and inquiry based learning. Amazing openness by school district to open up learning.

Tagline: A forum to encourage and amplify technology-based moonshine thinking and teamwork. Similar to TED talks, but with a (so far) much smaller archive, each talk in this series focuses on solving a "moonshot" problem, generally through significant and radical innovation. From their About page, "Solve for X is a place to hear and discuss radical technology ideas for solving global problems."

"Technology enhanced learning (TEL) aims to design, develop and test socio-technical innovations that will support and enhance learning practices of both individuals and organisations. It is therefore an application domain that generally covers technologies that support all forms of teaching and learning activities. Since information retrieval (in terms of searching for relevant learning resources to support teachers or learners) is a pivotal activity in TEL, the deployment of recommender systems has attracted increased interest. This chapter attempts to provide an introduction to recommender systems for TEL settings, as well as to highlight their particularities compared to recommender systems for other application domains. "

This wiki offers an evolving collection of technology tools for collaborative work and online education. It is maintained by Margaret Riel and faculty and others from the Masters of Arts in Learning Technologies, Graduate School of Education and Psychology from Pepperdine University. There are a variety of tools and other useful links here -- watch out for currency, though. When visiting the site on 4/1/10, the last update had been Dec 2009.

Interesting academic opportunity in London, an MSc in Learning Technologies offered by the London Knowledge Lab. The program directors are Diana Laurillard and Alex Poulovassilis. The program focuses both on computer science and on learning theory. Link to application details on this page.

Hosted by The New York Times September 22, 2011, a panel of distinguished speakers (see Speakers on left navigation) on how technology can transform how students learn. A live stream of the conference will be available here on September 22.

This is the blog space of Dr. Alec Couros, professor of educational technology and media at the Faculty of Education, University of Regina. He's been blogging in this space since 2004 and, according to the About page, posts "personal reflections and resources related to teaching and learning, democratic media, critical media literacy, digital citizenship, openness, and social justice."

This website,created by the Clinton RESA, Ingham ISD, Macomb ISD & Shiawassee RESD, offers 21 technology concepts (e.g. blogs, digital citizenship, online video resources) that teachers might want to incorporate into their classrooms. While the site is aimed at K-12 teachers, it is likely that teachers at all levels can find something worthwhile here. NOTE: the site was built in 2008; in the fast-moving 2.0 world, there might be tools that are since out of date.