21st Century Concepts-Technology in the Classroom

"Last year I volunteered in my child’s Kindergarten class daily for an hour with our family’s three iPads. I learned a lot about selecting educational content (primarily early math & literacy apps) and how to set up an environment most conducive for learning. I was most impressed by the potential for mobile devices to improve the experience in class for both teachers and students. So this year I volunteered to bring our iPads into my child’s First grade class once a week for ‘buddy reading’. As I do more outreach and training for local teachers in my community, I am surprised at the large number of classrooms getting devices without any guidelines about how to integrate them into their existing institutional structures or curriculum. From these experiences, I have come up with the following five tips for starting a new program in any classroom …"

The Resource for Education Technology Leaders focusing on K-12 educators.

"QR Codes (Quick Response Codes) are just barcodes. There is nothing fancy about them.

Just like the grocery store clerk uses barcodes to look up the product and scan the price into the computer, your mobile device or computer can look up QR codes to:

take you to a website, read some text, give you a phone number, or generate a text message.

QR Codes are barcodes of information that hardlink the physical world with the online world. They are considered a form of simple augmented reality."

"How do you learn best?  For me, it depends on what I am learning.  Sometimes I need to take notes, other times I need to think out loud.  Some things are easier to learn with another person while with other things, I need to be alone.  My guess is most of us have different styles for learning depending on what it is we are working on."