Group items tagged

"create a rubric with a blatant challenge and ample encouragement for students to push themselves beyond the basic requirements" - from Shawn McCusker of EdTechTeacher.org, on Free Technology For Teachers

A great explanation of the power of blended learning, whether or not you think Khan's Academy is the pinnacle of the practice. "Educational technology pioneer Salman Khan maps how online learning tools can help physical classrooms evolve to become hubs for creativity and hands-on experiences, and how Khan Academy and the Discovery Lab summer camp fit into that big picture."

From the site: "Adobe Youth Voices Essentials provides free curricula and tools for educators to inspire young people to create digital media on issues they care about. Based on the best practices of educators from around the world, our curricula promotes youth expression, creativity, and engagement, helping young people build critical 21st century technology and life skills."

Overview of many educational technology vendors and systems. For our purposes, pay attention to the Curricula section.

Totally free to educators. "Can the expertise we have developed over the past 25 years enable us to produce technologies that enhance learning? The answer-an enthusiastic Yes-came only after deliberating with educators. SAS Curriculum Pathways is the result of those deliberations."

Valuable reading, as understanding how these cycles reinforce learning leads to better planning for blended learning. The Pedagogy and Technology Workshop employs a cycle much like the first few diagrams. 

"We teach numbers, then algebra, then calculus, then physics. Wrong!" exclaims the Massachusetts Institute of Technology mathematician, a pioneer in artificial intelligence. "Start with engineering, and from that abstract out physics, and from that abstract out ideas of calculus, and eventually separate off pure mathematics. So much better to have the first-grade kid or kindergarten kid doing engineering and leave it to the older ones to do pure mathematics than to do it the other way around."

A study that sheds light on the debates and the intersections of technology and 21st century skills from the vantage point of school-based educators. Attitudes of more than 1000 educators is explored

RCS Professional Development Day 2012 presentation by Sean Dagony-Clark and Don Ostrow on the creation of the Pedagogy and Technology Workshop.

"iEARN empowers teachers and young people to work together online using the Internet and other new communications technologies. Over 2,000,000 students each day are engaged in collaborative project work worldwide."

Thanks for pointing out this one, John! I'd forgotten about it.

A passionate and eloquent plea from a university lecturer, attesting to the continued relevance of the lecture as a learning tool. I value her point that a lecture promotes active listening, but I disagree with the notion that a technology that has worked for thousands of years should see continued use simply because it has worked in the past.[1] Given the multitudes of other means of delivery of information today (remember, the lecture was developed when the only other means to spread information was handwriting), the lecture as transmission of information is a tool, not THE tool. She also equates books to lectures, and says that if we abandon one we move toward abandoning the other. A bit of tenuous logic, if you ask me. Still, perhaps worth a read.  [1] See also: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scriptorium#Trithemius.27_Praise_of_Scribes

"Exploring the intersections of education, learning, and technology"

A classroom music experience in which 24 kids (many on iPads) and several professional musicians collaborated on a piece of digital music. The piece they created may not shatter any sales records (though it is actually on sale in the iTunes store), but it's certainly not bad for student work. It's unclear how long they worked on this piece, or how many takes were involved, but the resulting music and video are good. And the students are left with a downloadable song that they created. So here are my questions: - are these students learning music? - is their learning transferable to real instruments? - to tweak Sting's words: is technology a legitimate teacher in this case?

"One of the most common questions we get is, "But where do we find the time to use all this new technology?" To answer that question, we developed this infographic - A Day in the Life of a Connected Educator to show that using social media in your classroom and in your life can be integrated, easy, and fun."

"Online education has officially arrived. What five years ago was the ubiquitous domain of University of Phoenix, is now dominated by sexy start-ups like the recently announced edX by Harvard and MIT. The unprecedented boom of these education technology outfits has thrown the media into a tizzy about the coming of an education revolution. It certainly will happen, but there are some fundamental challenges it must tackle before it can disrupt and transform elite higher education."

Basic article on the concept of Khan Academy. My takeaway was the importance of the following quote: "It can give the teacher additional class time to do more creative and customized teaching. " If you are not taking up classtime imparting knowledge where the teacher is speaking more of the time, you give students the voice to explain what is going on in their heads, or working on collaborative problem solving.

Programming made easier

Smart post by Sam Gliksman on the reasons for classroom iPad use. A lot of what he says applies to technology in general.

Interesting possibility for replacement of paper maps, built on Google Map technology.

Riverdale's year-long PTW experience in less than 6 minutes.