Learning Technology

One of the greatest conflicts between new and old literacies is many educators’ continuing belief that students’ analytical skills are not properly developed through the use of new media. There is some justification for this: Many student-created new media works are simplistic mishmashes of audio and video clips with no thesis or rationale. New media is used more as a toy than as an educational tool. It is no wonder that many teachers, uncomfortable with new media to begin with, see it as harming student literacy.

The Framework presents a holistic view of 21st century teaching and learning that combines a discrete focus on 21st century student outcomes (a blending of specific skills, content knowledge, expertise and literacies) with innovative support systems to help students master the multi-dimensional abilities required of them in the 21st century.

Underestimating students is an epidemic, one that even critical pedagogues and so-called student-centered classrooms can easily fall victim to. This happens at every scale. It’s especially egregious, though, to underestimate students in classes of 20 or 10 or 5, where the student-to-teacher ratio creates more space for the voice of the teacher and less critical mass for student revolt. Watching a teacher drone incessantly to a room of 10 bored-to-death students makes even a TED Talk look blissfully interactive.

Underestimating students is an epidemic, one that even critical pedagogues and so-called student-centered classrooms can easily fall victim to. This happens at every scale. It’s especially egregious, though, to underestimate students in classes of 20 or 10 or 5, where the student-to-teacher ratio creates more space for the voice of the teacher and less critical mass for student revolt. Watching a teacher drone incessantly to a room of 10 bored-to-death students makes even a TED Talk look blissfully interactive. - See more at: http://www.hybridpedagogy.com/Journal/files/Pedagogies_of_Scale.html#sthash.xXKKZyXB.dpufUnderestimating students is an epidemic, one that even critical pedagogues and so-called student-centered classrooms can easily fall victim to. This happens at every scale. It’s especially egregious, though, to underestimate students in classes of 20 or 10 or 5, where the student-to-teacher ratio creates more space for the voice of the teacher and less critical mass for student revolt. Watching a teacher drone incessantly to a room of 10 bored-to-death students makes even a TED Talk look blissfully interactive. - See more at: http://www.hybridpedagogy.com/Journal/files/Pedagogies_of_Scale.html#sthash.xXKKZyXB.dpuf

Minecraft’s mainstream appeal may not lie in the poetry tucked away in an endgame few will see, but it is to be found in this poetry’s sentiment. Here is a game that enables humans to experience an accelerated form of existence—of dominion but also of stewardship. It makes clear the ancient ties between creativity and survival, and the wonder of collaboration, coöperation, and community, both in its world and in the reality on the other side of the screen. This is a recipe that demonstrates how video-game design, in the right hands, can be elevated to an art form every bit as strange and wonderful as any other, revealing deep truths about the human condition.

Deciding how a school or district should invest its limited resources is a tough job, made even more difficult by the multitude of educational technology products that have exploded onto the market.

If it is tech related, some people think it’s my realm and don’t appear to have the personal motivation to gain understanding.  This the professional goal I have set for myself, to help bring people the table to gain from the learning that is out there on a daily basis.

 

Does new technology conflict with or complement established teaching and learning? What is the impact on the teaching profession as we have traditionally known it? Will the power of the internet, with new innovations such as Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs), create an unstoppable ‘avalanche’ of education reform, or are these reforms a false revolution? Can the value of face-to-face quality learning and student-teacher relationships ever really be questioned, at any level of education? Will the class room, lecture theatre, and traditional notion of education space – schools and universities – be usurped by a screen, online and distance learning, or alternative spaces such as the workplace, home, or concert-hall?

Does it continue to make sense to go to college when the sticker price of a college education is soaring, the amount of debt college students are taking on – even for the non-elite universities and what were formerly affordable public universities...

“Technology is just a tool. It’s how the tool is used to support learning that is key,” he said. “This study had nothing to do with how technology can support learning. It was just, ‘Let’s put this in here, and see if it has any impact.’”

The results may have been different had the students had some guidance on how to best use the computers and if teachers  had been involved in connecting the home computers with what was going on in the classroom.

 

Teaching in an environment where the internet and discussion are allowed in exams would be different. The ability to find things out quickly and accurately would become the predominant skill. The ability to discriminate between alternatives, then put facts together to solve problems would be critical. AThat's a skill that future employers would admire immensely.

The inclusion of integrated hardware sensors in mobile devices provides the possibility of augmenting learning activities with sensor data. Technology enhanced learning activities, such as those created with the mobile authoring tool in this project, capture spatially distributed physical sensory data, such as video, photos, audio recordings, and GPS locations. Vogel, Spikol, Kurti, and Milrad (2010) state that there are ongoing research challenges related to integrating this collected sensor data to support learning but conclude that “mobile learning can best provide support for learning in context” (p. 65). Thus, the proposed tool must promote capturing contextual experiences via multimedia examples of the environment and their locations. Context is defined as any information illustrating the situation of a learner such as location, time, activities, and surrounding environmental characteristics (Vogel, Spikol, Kurti, & Milrad, 2010). As a result, the proposed tool will capture a representation of these contextual attributes.

We’ve certainly come a long way but some things seem hauntingly similar to many years ago. For example, Thomas Edison said in 1925 that “books will soon be obsolete in schools. Scholars will soon be instructed through the eye.” I’m pretty sure this is exactly what people are saying these days about the iPad.

 

Here’s a list of blogs that feed my teaching soul, hunger for knowledge, and need for deeper insights into teaching,  learning and writing. There are so many wonderful blogs that it’s impossible to list them all here,  so I’m listing the ones that have been most relevant to my own professional development. As such, they should be relevant to any teacher who wants to turn online teaching and/or publishing into a fully-fledged career.

 

In order for tech to make our students smarter and not dumber, we need to help them understand when to take full advantage of their devices, and when to put them away.

But the most important thing Williams does as a forward-thinking superintendent is to support principal and teacher innovation. Rather than saying no when an idea conflicts with district policy, he works to change the policy. He’s found that working that way removes most of the barriers people cite as obstacles to fully integrating technology into classrooms.