Technology is great. I love my iPhone. It can do all sorts of things, but making me a better dancer isn’t one of them. Every day parents ask their kids, “What did you learn today?” It’s never “How did you learn it?” or “On what device did you learn it?” but always, “What?” Yet so long as the answer to that doesn’t change, neither will educational outcomes.
What did Earth's continents and oceans look like 250 million years ago, or 1 billion years ago for that matter? Can we say anything about Earth's climate as far back as our planet's origin?
How do we know that formative assessment isn’t just a passing fad?” The answer is simple. A focus on formative assessment requires teachers to relate two central issues in teaching – ‘What did I do as a teacher?’ and ‘What did my students learn?’ As long as teachers are focusing on the relationship between those two central issues, they will continue to improve their practice for as long as they stay in the job.
Different people define formative assessment in different ways
f we as teachers fear learning or integrating these new "digital literacies" into our classrooms, is it the same as being afraid of teaching the reading literacy that has taken hold largely in part due to Gutenberg? I realize that this argument is a bit of an oversimplification. However, new literacies will in fact continue to develop and have the potential for significant disruption, much like what happened 500 years ago.
Which of course, begs the next question: how do we know that we are using reliable information.
So how did I learn all of the technology I use in my instruction and in my online collaborations with teachers? I learned it on my own.
So, I started using the internet to learn how to do what I wanted to do – blog, make videos, make podcasts, publish student work, etc. Of course it wasn’t easy, but I wanted to learn it so I did. (That is key – my learning was self-directed.)