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Digital Information Literacy. In this digital age with information at our fingertips, students AND adults must learn to evaluate and interpret this information

A teacher is not expected to know everyone’s device or operating system. This would be impossible. The students know their device because it is theirs.

A skill that students must learn is how to choose the best app/software for the task at hand. It doesn’t mean that every student in the class has to turn in a PowerPoint. They can each publish something different, such as a Glog, VoiceThread or Prezi, while still meeting the objectives or requirements of the projects.

The key to success is “formative assessment,” Brovold said, which means teachers first determine which students understood the material, which students need more practice, and which didn’t understand at all.

assessment in education conjures up images of testing, its Latin root “assidere” means “to sit beside.” This raises a provocative question: In this era of high-stakes testing that’s used to rank kids and schools, what if we reclaimed the word assessment and put it more authentically in the service of learning?

ultimate result with this shift has been increases in engagement as well as a sense of relevancy and meaning amongst learners, all of which are foundations for improving achievement.

some of the reasons for not embracing technology have to do with several misconceptions revolving around fear.

time excuse seems to rear its ugly head more than any other reasoning to not move forward with technology

Common Misconceptions of Educators Who Fear Technology

Control: For technology to be not only integrated effectively, but also embraced, a culture needs to be established where teachers and administrators are no longer fearful of giving up a certain amount of control to students.  T

Lack of training: With the integration of technology comes change.  With change comes the inevitable need to provide quality professional development. 

Because information is easy for students to get, they deal with problems, projects, and learning in a different way.

So, there is a gap between students and teachers. I can’t say for sure how wide the gap is, but it certainly seems to be getting smaller (that’s the good news). But, it is not happening fast enough (that’s the bad news).

Traditionally, it has been the teachers showing the students something new – now, it seems as though the students are showing something new to their teachers. That’s not an issue, it just means that teachers need to be aware of these changes, accept them, and make sure that students learn how deal with it all. The job is still the same – prepare the students for their future.

Math lesson time. Math scores: Manitoba, 468; Yukon, 469; Newfoundland and Labrador, 472; Nova Scotia and Saskatchewan, each 474. That's five provinces within 1.2 percentage points of each other. Put another way: Billy got 80 per cent on his test. Sally got 81 per cent on her test. Math lesson, part two: The creators of this test, the Council of Ministers of Education, rightly points out that the margin of error on these scores is greater than the differences in these scores. In plain English, that means that the statisticians who crunch the data are saying that the scores are basically equivalent.

Manitoba remains the child-poverty capital of Canada

Math lesson, part three: Manitoba was the only jurisdiction in Canada to have 100 per cent of the selected schools do the PCAP assessment.

10 BYOD Classroom Experiments (and What We’ve Learned From Them So Far)

What can Holy Trinity teach us? That when it comes to BYOD, it pays not to be overly strict with how the devices can be used in the class, as greater freedom allows teachers to work with students to develop the best uses for technology for their subject matter and teaching style.

BYOD requires much more than just changing tech policies and can sometimes mean overhauling the curriculum and spending money training teachers, though it does help students create a more personal and memorable learning experience.

Do you regard educators as life-long learners? Can an educator ever know everything there is to know?

Being an educator also means being a learner. Each generation is different, every class will have its own culture and personality, each individual student is a world of his/her own. The culture of education is rich and complex; a never-ending learning challenge.

It is a third gadget, the long-awaited Amazon tablet called the Kindle Fire, that represents his company’s most ambitious leap into the hearts, minds, and wallets of millions of consumers.

the Fire is an emblem of a post-web world, in which our devices are simply a means for us to directly connect with the goodies in someone’s data center.

Amazon, on the other hand, is a content-focused company—almost half of its revenue comes from sales of media like books, music, TV shows

As needs change over time, addressing them might mean switching devices (remaking the choice). As schools progress in their technology implementation, they may find that their needs have changed, and should not hesitate to change devices as their understanding of their students’ needs develops. This seasonal view of devices (rather than “device as school identity”) is essential to helping schools move forward, meet their current students’ needs, and keep the curriculum relevant and timely for the future. A focus on pedagogy and key technology skills will transfer from one device to another, making the shift easier; a focus on being a device expert, or mastering device specific mechanics, will not. Students will graduate into a world that will demand technological fluency, the ability to move and process information across various platforms and devices.

digital devices are increasingly viewed as a means to bring students together in collaboration, rather than separate them further.

In the late 1990s, the Singapore Ministry of Education unveiled its master plan for technology. The first phase was spent building up infrastructure and getting computers into schools. In the 2000s, in phases two and three, the ministry focused on training teachers in how to use gadgets and identifying schools to experiment with new innovations.

Ask students what they think it means to say that a source is reliable. With the class, develop a definition of the term reliableas it relates to information sources.