journey into educational technology and share a few instances of “aha moments” that I think many can relate to
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Great Moments in EdTech History | Ideas and Thoughts - 3 views
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The beginning of cheap failure.
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Great concept = cheap failure. We have the opportunity for almost everything we create to be a work in progress. You can always learn and build upon your initial attempts. This should give people more freedom to try without the feeling of absolute and unrecoverable failure.
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Not just cheap failure but also instant failure, which is important to our students as well. We talk about rapid prototyping in the program and some in my classroom, which I think is an important note about this technology and an important concept for our students to grasp/be able to deal with. It's a vehicle for learning.
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'instant failure' - great phrase. It is important that they can make mistakes in a safe environment and have the guidance to learn from the mistakes.
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I guess my question is why would be considered a cheap failure, constant better/cheaper alternatives, integration in today's technology?
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I did ask a few folks on twitter about their great moment in edtech history.
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I’d encourage you to create your own list or add your ideas here.
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What would be on your list? Make sure your comments are not private, but visible to the LTMS600 group.
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I think my list, off the top of my head, would be Google Docs, Twitter, Cloud Servers/Saving, and Mobile Devices.
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And I forgot the first time around, the almighty text message. Who could forget the text message?
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My list would be Facebook, Twitter, Google Docs, and Mobile Devices/Text messages.
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I believe it was 640 x 480 resolution.
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Magazine - Is Google Making Us Stupid? - The Atlantic - 10 views
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By Nicholas Carr
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Nicholas Carr also wrote The Shallows an entire book about the effect the Internet is having on our brains - I highly recommend it. http://www.theshallowsbook.com/
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I can relate. I have the Google application on my phone which I use almost daily to check something such as a bus schedule, movie time, game score, etc.
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I am the same way on my phone. On car rides, dinner, you name it with my wife and one of us will say, "I wonder..." and the phones are out and we're finding answers. Sometimes I want to just wonder though...
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I would be interested to see a study done like this in the United States. In my one undergraduate class on politics and media we talked about "info snacking" which is the idea that people look for small bits of information at a time instead of reading the entire article. This is exactly what Carr is talking about here.
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I agree Charles. However I would suggest that I think that people will have to develop a way to info. snack and be able to do conventional reading too. It seems as though there is something lost when all you are able to do is skim and scan.
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The other thing that I wonder quite a bit about this entire article is does "info snacking" stem from the internet or does it stem from being a generation that was raised on frequent tv, video, video games, and the internet altogether. It would seem to me that those other factors would have to have something to do with it as well.
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Let's also not forget the constant stream of data to our mobile device(s) as well when thinking about that. Should this make us better, not worse, at multi-tasking.
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ity,” hopping from one source to another and rarely returning to any source they’d already visited. Th
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that provide access to journal articles, e-books, and other sources of written information. They found that people using the sites exhibited “a form of skimming activ
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As part of the five-year research program, the scholars examined computer logs documenting the behavior of visitors to two popular research sites, one operated by the British Library and one by a U.K. educational co
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This is the point I read until I got distracted. The ads on the side are distracting to me, and I also needed to get going because of the time.
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I am finding the sticky notes to be distracting. I keep skipping from the article to the notes.
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That is a very good point. I personally find it easier to read articles on paper instead of the computer screen because there are less distractions.
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My mind would
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What a good analogy. Before when you swam and simmered in the information and had to take time to digest, now we can just move from one thing to another quickly.
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Do you feel that this style allows for anything further than "In one ear, out the other"? How do you best capture the features of the web?
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It is clear that users are not reading online in the traditional sense; indeed there are signs that new forms of “reading” are emerging as users “power browse” horizontally through titles, contents pages and abstracts going for quick wins. It almost seems that they go online to avoid reading in the traditional sense.
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“We are not only what we read,” says Maryanne Wolf, a developmental psychologist at Tufts University and the author of Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain. “We are how we read.”
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Nietzsche’s friends, a composer
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Nietzsche’s prose “changed from arguments to aphorisms, from thoughts to puns, from rhetoric to telegram style.”
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The advantages of having immediate access to such an incredibly rich store of information are many, and they’ve been widely described and duly applauded. “The perfect recall of silicon memory,” Wired’s Clive Thompson has written , “can be an enormous boon to thinking.” But that boon comes at a price. As the media theorist Marshall McLuhan pointed out in the 1960s, media are not just passive channels of information. They supply the stuff of thought, but they also shape the process of thought. And what the Net seems to be doing is chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation.
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Thanks to the ubiquity of text on the Internet, not to mention the popularity of text-messaging on cell phones, we may well be reading more today than we did in the 1970s or 1980s, when television was our medium of choice. But it’s a different kind of reading, and behind it lies a different kind of thinking—perhaps even a new sense of the self.
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Carr's argument is that although we are perhaps reading more than ever...due to text messaging, social media sites, etc we are not taking the time to really delve into what we read and contemplate. Moreover, this premise seems plausible to a degree, as it seems generally that much of what is sent through social media may be trival or meaningless information.
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The human brain is almost infinitely malleable. People used to think that our mental meshwork, the dense connections formed among the 100 billion or so neurons inside our skulls, was largely fixed by the time we reached adulthood. But brain researchers have discovered that that’s not the case.
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Although I didn't read it (how appropriate - LOL = ) ) Carr's book on "The Shallows" alludes to this concept...in that our brains may in fact be coming re-wired, due to the common every day distractions that cause us to lose focus on thought-provoking topics. His argument is that the collective human attention span is becoming reduced, essentially due to our environment of perpetual distraction- spawned by the internet.
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With the approval of Midvale’s owners, he recruited a group of factory hands, set them to work on various metalworking machines, and recorded and timed their every movement as well as the operations of the machines. By breaking down every job into a sequence of small, discrete steps and then testing different ways of performing each one, Taylor created a set of precise instructions—an “algorithm,” we might say today—for how each worker should work. Midvale’s employees grumbled about the strict new regime, claiming that it turned them into little more than automatons, but the factory’s productivity soared.
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The idea that our minds should operate as high-speed data-processing machines is not only built into the workings of the Internet, it is the network’s reigning business model as well. The faster we surf across the Web—the more links we click and pages we view—the more opportunities Google and other companies gain to collect information about us and to feed us advertisements. Most of the proprietors of the commercial Internet have a financial stake in collecting the crumbs of data we leave behind as we flit from link to link—the more crumbs, the better. The last thing these companies want is to encourage leisurely reading or slow, concentrated thought. It’s in their economic interest to drive us to distraction
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I believe this segment is akin to "data mining" where companies look at human tendancies to advertise and create greater opportunities to feature their products by the locations (physically or virtually) of their prospective customers, clients or buyers. This idea (data mining) is relatively new to me, but there is no doubt that it will be a prevalent part of marketing in the future. During the reading of this article I received 5 text messages (responded to 2), but was disciplined enough not to check my email until I was finished. What portion of today's younger generation is disciplined enough to stay on task...until an assignment is completed?!?
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r use of the Net will be different from those woven by our reading of books and other printed works.
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I never really thought about this. Our brains are adapting to the net earlier than ever before now thanks to web tools that are being implemented earlier in the classroom. I do not remember using computers on an active basis to at least fourth grade, and I know they are starting much earlier with them.
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tual technologies is reflected in the changing metaphors we use to explain ourselves to ourselves. When the mechanical clock arrived, people began thinking of their brains as operating “like clockwork.” Today, in the age of software, we have come to think of them as operating “like computers.
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al of Gutenberg’s printing press, in the 15th century, set off another round of teeth gnashing. The Italian humanist Hieronimo Squarciafico worried that the easy availability of books would lead to intellectua
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The world would be so different without all of the great technology advances. I think back to when I had my first cell phone and it became easier to stay connected with my friends through phone calls, and now with smart phones we can be connected to the world at all times. Some people may fear change, but I think it is good to embrace it.
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Overall, I do not think Google is making us stupid. I think it is our society as a whole has become so fast paced, and we need information quicker so online resources are the first thing we go to. I think as long educators keep students focused on analyzing and deep thought, we won't let Google or other web tools make our society less intelligent.
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The idea of not being able to sustain attention to a lengthy article or book makes me think about how difficult it is more and more kids to sustain attention to tasks in class. It seems to get worse as the years go by and I feel like more and more kids are being diagnosed with ADD. Perhaps that type of attending "problem" is going to be the norm.
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I find this to be very true in the computer age as well. It is so easy to type something and change it multiple times now. I wonder if we actually give as much thought to what we are typing as we once did when changing a line meant getting a new piece of paper and starting over causing minutes or hours of extra work rather than seconds.
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I would agree with this statement. I feel that as I have gone through my education, I was taught all of the skills to read and analyze appropriately. Now that I have mastered those skills, I am only expected to recall information. If I can gather the information in a quicker/more efficent way, I will use it. But am I really learning?
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Using SAMR to Teach Above the Line - Getting Smart by Susan Oxnevad - 1:1 program, Appl... - 0 views
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State's graduation exam passes latest test - 1 views
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The regulation calls for the state to provide 10 end-of-course exams, beginning with English literature, Algebra 1 and biology in 2010-11, with other English, math, science and social studies subjects being phased in through 2016-17.
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School districts would be required to count the exams for at least one-third of a student's final grade or districts could use other options, including validated local assessments or Advanced Placement exams instead. Districts also could set up a project for students who failed exams.
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Opponents of the exams told the regulatory commission that the testing program would cost too much to administer and be unfair to otherwise good students who perform poorly on standardized tests.
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Some have said that the exams would discourage students who have a hard time taking tests and would prompt them to drop out.
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Study Finds That Online Education Beats the Classroom - Bits Blog - NYTimes.com - 0 views
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Some of it was in K-12 settings, but most of the comparative studies were done in colleges and adult continuing-education programs of various kinds, from medical training to the military.
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“The study’s major significance lies in demonstrating that online learning today is not just better than nothing — it actually tends to be better than conventional instruction,”
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But the report does suggest that online education could be set to expand sharply over the next few years, as evidence mounts of its value.
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The real promise of online education, experts say, is providing learning experiences that are more tailored to individual students than is possible in classrooms. That enables more “learning by doing,” which many students find more engaging and useful.
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“People are correct when they say online education will take things out the classroom. But they are wrong, I think, when they assume it will make learning an independent, personal activity. Learning has to occur in a community.
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I would agree that for colleges and adult learners it might be, but I'm not convinced that the same holds true for K12.
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Learning has to occur in a community, eh? If that's true, THEN can we get twitter, skype, Flickr, youtube, Diigo, etc unblocked so we can take advantage of that community?
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Weblogg-ed » If Every Student Had a Computer - 0 views
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120 or so teachers from Victoria who are part of a pilot where all of their students will have netbooks in hand in the next few months. There seems to be a growing commitment here to put technology in the hands of kids (instead of spending huge sums on stuff that students can’t use outside of the classroom) and to thinking about how practice and pedagogy changes when that happens. T
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Of course, there's more to this story, isn't there? Once you purchase the equipment (not cheap) there is also the need to make sure that your network can handle it. If not, nobody will use the laptops - at least not to the extent that they COULD be used. And then, the idea of suggesting that districts increae their budgets so that the program could be sustained, is a tough sell. Yet, the alternative is to remain stuck in the 20th century mentality and approach to teaching and learning.
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E5 (pdf) that I’ll be giving some more attention to on the plane ride home but that at first blush has some interesting language that focuses more on learning than teaching.
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It’s not just about if every student had a computer; it’s about if every teacher had a computer as well. (As opposed to if every teacher had a whiteboard.) Imagine if our students were being taught in systems where technology was just a natural part of the way we created and constructed and connected and learned, that it was how we do our business. S
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powerful potential in a world where every student AND every teacher has a computer and access to the sum of human knowledge we’re building online.
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Education Week: Filtering Fixes - 0 views
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Instead of blocking the many exit ramps and side routes on the information superhighway, they have decided that educating students and teachers on how to navigate the Internet’s vast resources responsibly, safely, and productively—and setting clear rules and expectations for doing so—is the best way to head off online collisions.
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“We are known in our district for technology, so I don’t see how you can teach kids 21st-century values if you’re not teaching them digital citizenship and appropriate ways of sharing and using everything that’s available on the Web,” said Shawn Nutting, the technology director for the Trussville district. “How can you, in 2009, not use the Internet for everything? It blows me away that all these schools block things out” that are valuable.
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While schools are required by federal and state laws to block pornography and other content that poses a danger to minors, Internet-filtering software often prevents students from accessing information on legitimate topics that tend to get caught in the censoring process: think breast cancer, sexuality, or even innocuous keywords that sound like blocked terms. One teacher who commented on one of Mr. Fryer’s blog posts, for example, complained that a search for biographical information on a person named Thacker was caught by his school’s Internet filter because the prohibited term “hacker” is included within the spelling of the word.
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The K-2 school provides e-mail addresses to each of its 880 students and maintains accounts on the Facebook and Twitter networking sites. Children can also interact with peers in other schools and across the country through protected wiki spaces and blogs the school has set up.
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“Rather than saying this is a scary tool and something bad could happen, instead we believe it’s an incredible tool that connects you with the entire world out there. ... [L]et’s show you the best way to use it.”
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As Trussville students move through the grades and encounter more-complex educational content and expectations, their Internet access is incrementally expanded.
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In 2001, the Children’s Internet Protection Act instituted new requirements for schools to establish policies and safeguards for Internet use as a condition of receiving federal E-rate funding. Many districts have responded by restricting any potentially troublesome sites. But many educators and media specialists complain that the filters are set too broadly and cannot discriminate between good and bad content. Drawing the line between what material is acceptable and what’s not is a local decision that has to take into account each district’s comfort level with using Internet content
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The American Civil Liberties Union sued Tennesee’s Knox County and Nashville school districts on behalf of several students and a school librarian for blocking Internet sites related to gay and lesbian issues. While the districts’ filtering software prohibited students from accessing sites that provided information and resources on the subject, it did not block sites run by organizations that promoted the controversial view that homosexuals can be “rehabilitated” and become heterosexuals. Last month, a federal court dismissed the lawsuit after school officials agreed to unblock the sites.
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Students are using personal technology tools more readily to study subject matter, collaborate with classmates, and complete assignments than they were several years ago, but they are generally asked to “power down” at school and abandon the electronic resources they rely on for learning outside of class, the survey found. Administrators generally cite safety issues and concerns that students will misuse such tools to dawdle, cheat, or view inappropriate content in school as reasons for not offering more open online access to students. ("Students See Schools Inhibiting Their Use of New Technologies,", April 1, 2009.)
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A report commissioned by the NSBA found that social networking can be beneficial to students, and urged school board members to “find ways to harness the educational value” of so-called Web 2.0 tools, such as setting up chat rooms or online journals that allow students to collaborate on their classwork. The 2007 report also told school boards to re-evaluate policies that ban or tightly restrict the use of the Internet or social-networking sites.
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Federal Requirements for Schools on Internet Safety The Children’s Internet Protection Act, or CIPA, is a federal law intended to block access to offensive Web content on school and library computers. Under CIPA, schools and libraries that receive funding through the federal E-rate program for Internet access must: • Have an Internet-safety policy and technology-protection measures in place. The policy must include measures to block or filter Internet access to obscene photos, child pornography, and other images that can be harmful to minors; • Educate minors about appropriate and inappropriate online behavior, including activities like cyberbullying and social networking; • Adopt and enforce a policy to monitor online activities of minors; and • Adopt and implement policies related to Internet use by minors that address access to inappropriate online materials, student safety and privacy issues, and the hacking of unauthorized sites. Source: Federal Communications Commission
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“We believe that you can’t have goals about kids’ collaborating globally and then block their ability to do that,” said Becky Fisher, the Virginia district’s technology coordinator.
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Educational Leadership:Teaching for the 21st Century:21st Century Skills: The Challenge... - 0 views
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But in fact, the skills students need in the 21st century are not new.
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What's actually new is the extent to which changes in our economy and the world mean that collective and individual success depends on having such skills.
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This distinction between "skills that are novel" and "skills that must be taught more intentionally and effectively" ought to lead policymakers to different education reforms than those they are now considering. If these skills were indeed new, then perhaps we would need a radical overhaul of how we think about content and curriculum. But if the issue is, instead, that schools must be more deliberate about teaching critical thinking, collaboration, and problem solving to all students, then the remedies are more obvious, although still intensely challenging.
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To complicate the challenge, some of the rhetoric we have heard surrounding this movement suggests that with so much new knowledge being created, content no longer matters; that ways of knowing information are now much more important than information itself. Such notions contradict what we know about teaching and learning and raise concerns that the 21st century skills movement will end up being a weak intervention for the very students—low-income students and students of color—who most need powerful schools as a matter of social equity.
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What will it take to ensure that the idea of "21st century skills"—or more precisely, the effort to ensure that all students, rather than just a privileged few, have access to a rich education that intentionally helps them learn these skills—is successful in improving schools? That effort requires three primary components. First, educators and policymakers must ensure that the instructional program is complete and that content is not shortchanged for an ephemeral pursuit of skills. Second, states, school districts, and schools need to revamp how they think about human capital in education—in particular how teachers are trained. Finally, we need new assessments that can accurately measure richer learning and more complex tasks.
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Why would misunderstanding the relationship of skills and knowledge lead to trouble? If you believe that skills and knowledge are separate, you are likely to draw two incorrect conclusions. First, because content is readily available in many locations but thinking skills reside in the learner's brain, it would seem clear that if we must choose between them, skills are essential, whereas content is merely desirable. Second, if skills are independent of content, we could reasonably conclude that we can develop these skills through the use of any content. For example, if students can learn how to think critically about science in the context of any scientific material, a teacher should select content that will engage students (for instance, the chemistry of candy), even if that content is not central to the field. But all content is not equally important to mathematics, or to science, or to literature. To think critically, students need the knowledge that is central to the domain.
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Because of these challenges, devising a 21st century skills curriculum requires more than paying lip service to content knowledge.
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Advocates of 21st century skills favor student-centered methods—for example, problem-based learning and project-based learning—that allow students to collaborate, work on authentic problems, and engage with the community. These approaches are widely acclaimed and can be found in any pedagogical methods textbook; teachers know about them and believe they're effective. And yet, teachers don't use them. Recent data show that most instructional time is composed of seatwork and whole-class instruction led by the teacher (National Institute of Child Health and Human Development Early Child Care Research Network, 2005). Even when class sizes are reduced, teachers do not change their teaching strategies or use these student-centered methods (Shapson, Wright, Eason, & Fitzgerald, 1980). Again, these are not new issues. John Goodlad (1984) reported the same finding in his landmark study published more than 20 years ago.
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Why don't teachers use the methods that they believe are most effective? Even advocates of student-centered methods acknowledge that these methods pose classroom management problems for teachers. When students collaborate, one expects a certain amount of hubbub in the room, which could devolve into chaos in less-than-expert hands. These methods also demand that teachers be knowledgeable about a broad range of topics and are prepared to make in-the-moment decisions as the lesson plan progresses. Anyone who has watched a highly effective teacher lead a class by simultaneously engaging with content, classroom management, and the ongoing monitoring of student progress knows how intense and demanding this work is. It's a constant juggling act that involves keeping many balls in the air.
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Most teachers don't need to be persuaded that project-based learning is a good idea—they already believe that. What teachers need is much more robust training and support than they receive today, including specific lesson plans that deal with the high cognitive demands and potential classroom management problems of using student-centered methods.
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Without better curriculum, better teaching, and better tests, the emphasis on "21st century skills" will be a superficial one that will sacrifice long-term gains for the appearance of short-term progress.
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