Educational Leadership and Technology

Your own PL is right at your fingertips!

Useful tips to avoid DBP (Death by Presentation).

Always good to see the current demographics in social.  Facebook continues to be the king, with women, city dwellers, Hispanics and below $30K on the list, via Pew Research.    Hmmm....   ~  D

How did I miss this one, Deb? Thanks for the scoop!!

Interesting but not surprising. I think the older the Gen X-, Gen Y, Millenials and Digital Natives grow, the higher the stats for all ages.

Ed tech is getting to be a big deal in classrooms; part-and-parcel for the digital age. This infographic explores its development in the K–12 classrooms of today and gives some teachers' insights and opinions, and also gives us a glimpse of what the future holds for the tech-oriented classrooms of tomorrow.”

Interesting scoop on different learning channels.

Whole lotta good info here. 

"Stategy-Tactics" with the use of "Tools".  This graphic shows the overlapping nature of information tools available online.

1. Multi-Media Learning Platform

2. Digital Tools for Finding Information

3. Digital Tools for Understanding Information

4. Digital Tools for Using Information

5. Digital Tools to Support Writing

Assignment: What specific tools do you use for each of these Tactics?

What can we add to these circles? Add your answers to the comment section.

I visited this blog to dig a little deeper and find that they have updated their model with pop-up explanations of how teachers of the 21st Century may apply this to their students either in a classroom setting or virtually across the world.

http://d97cooltools.blogspot.com.au/2012/02/digital-differentiation-get-wired.html

It's well worth the visit, my friends, to see the miracle of the internet and it's effect on the modern "classroom."

Warmly,

Susan Daniels

http://crazydreamersdo.com

In the wrong hands, this is just layering over what already is not working. We need something different, full of risk, and creative.

"Open Educational Resources (OER) – that is, teaching, learning and research materials that their owners make free to others to use, revise and share – offer a powerful means of expanding the reach and effectiveness of worldwide education. Those resources can be full courses, course materials, modules, textbooks, streaming videos, software, and other materials and techniques used to promote and support universal access to knowledge.

This book, initiated by the UNESCO/COL Chair in OER, is one in a series of publications by the Commonwealth of Learning (COL) examining OER. It describes the movement in detail, providing readers with insight into OER’s significant benefits, its theory and practice, and its achievements and challenges. The 16 chapters, written by some of the leading international experts on the subject, are organised into four parts by theme:

La investigación sobre educación abierta sigue adelante.

In Paul Miller‘s excellent book, The Digital Workplace, he defines the digital workplace as, “the technology-enabled space where work happens.”  He further states that, “it involves all the tools we use to do our jobs:  email, phone, text, intranet, micro-blogging, Internet, office documents, shared documents, teleconferences, video, software packages, smart phones, tablets, and the cloud.”

The Digital Workplace is about an overall philosophy and approach for managing a very flexible and free organization.  He is referring to the digital workplace as the entire underlying technical infrastructure that allows such an organization to exist.  It is a very broad usage that includes all of the technical capabilities that power a modern business organization and really focuses on a management philosophy rather than on how to use a specific system to implement that philosophy.

Mark Morrell, a noted internet blogger, defines the digital workplace even more generally as, “Work is what you do, not where you go to.”  Again, this definition focuses on an overall philosophy for how we approach work.

For the purposes of this blog series I’m going to focus much more specifically on a digital workplace as a collection of tools and capabilities that allow team members to work much more effectively together, especially in an environment where the participants may be physically separated from their offices, and from each other, by hundreds or thousands of miles.

For the purposes of this blog entry, a digital workplace is an integrated collection of tools and capabilities that allow team members to connect, communicate, collaborate, and conduct all of their required work activities wherever and whenever they may be working.

This was shared by my friend Gretel Patch who has great insight in how to thoughtfully incorporate technology into education. She added her insights to parts of the article:

When we speak of 21st Century Skills (as defined by groups like ATCS and the Iowa DOE), we seem to have an ethereal idea of the skills children need. But how are they measured or assessed? Does it matter that most of today’s 8th grade students can’t pass exams from the turn of the last century? We have given up the need to memorize facts, thanks to the Internet, but we need to do a much better job at synthesis and evaluation than previously required. In today’s world, we can easily “phone a friend” or at least text them. So why do we insist on requiring memorization for finals and standardized assessment? Technology can help us move away from the lower reaches of Bloom and create more dynamic assessments that require the true 21st century skills of analysis, evaluation, and synthesis. Some great examples of student work focused on creation are available here. How are you helping to move the students in your district to become creators and evaluators of information? As we approach final exams and the end of the year, I think it is a create question to reflect on.

Great for visual learning, and for synthesis of ideas.

Things really are moving fast. Some very interesting options for online learning, creating your own textonline as well as learning about programming. The future begins now.