Group items tagged

We’re going from districts fearing it and blocking it off to welcoming it and making it a major part of their technology plan. We’ll be surprised if a significant portion of districts aren’t using mobile learning inside and outside of schools soon.”

Each educator, each class, each school will have to find the best way to integrate mobile devices based on its student population. The opportunity of using mobile devices and all of its utilities allows educators to reconsider: What do we want students to know, and how do we help them? And what additional benefit does using a mobile device bring to the equation? This gets to the heart of the mobile learning issue: beyond fact-finding and game-playing – even if it’s educational — how can mobile devices add relevance and value to how kids learn?

personalized learning – students owning what they learn.

"Schools embody an industrial model of organization in a postindustrial world, and an authoritarian and hierarchical character in a world where networks and negotiations are increasingly prevalent."

The time has come to stop tinkering with an antiquated model.

In today’s Internet age, not having a social media understanding or even more importantly, a yearning for it, can spell trouble in the job market.

YouTube can be used as a valuable teaching tool in the classroom, but while it is chockfull of educational content and useful knowledge – it is also filled to the brim with distracting videos. Cute kittens, people “failing”, music videos, cartoon series, and more – content that distracts kids from using YouTube as a learning channel. Fortunately Google recognized this problem and has launched a solution called YouTube for Schools.

that factory-model schooling was not just ineffective but actually harmful to most students—a message which had been so radical and out of the mainstream twenty years ago, actually sounded very much like the messages of my other guests.

the Internet has become an unparalleled platform for learning, intitiative, participation, productivity, and creativity, almost all of this happens outside of formal educational institutions

technology as a liberating force

Other districts take a different policy stand. While they also use blocking and filtering that federal law requires, their policy is based on the premise that children need to learn how to be responsible users and that such cannot occur if the young person has no real choice. School personnel who take this stand contend that students need to acquire the skills and dispositions of responsible Internet usage and to be held accountable for their behavior. Moreover, those holding this position contend that restrictive school networks may provide more of an appearance of protection than reality since they can be bypassed by students. Schools with less restrictive environments often distinguish between the restrictiveness appropriate for older and younger students since young children may stumble across sites they ought not visit. 

Policies answer the “what” and “why” questions. Procedures answer the “how,” “who,” and “when” questions.

How My School Is Transitioning to Digital Textbooks: Organizing (Step 1 of 5)

This fall, Burlington High School will transition to a 1:1 school exclusively with the iPad 2. One of the goals of this initiative is to slowly transition curriculum and textbooks to ePub format. ePub file format allows anyone to create a file that is readable on an iOS device or Kindle like a book