Information and digital literacy in education via the digital path

A Faculty Focus survey on the flipped classroom sought to find out who’s flipping, who’s not, and the barriers and benefits to those who flip.

If you’ve been using media for as little as two weeks, you would know that things change. Fast. Social media is an ever-evolving machine that works to enhance the user experience. Businesses use it to market their business. Individuals use it to connect to others and their favorite businesses.

By Tom Vander Ark - There are at least 50 ways new EdTech tools are helping teachers to create new learning environments and experiences for students.

It’s hard to blame students for wanting to type notes instead of write them out longhand. Think of how much quicker you can type an e-mail than write a letter: Digital note-taking is simply easier. A paper published online in the journal Psychological Science last month, however, suggests that longhand may actually hold an advantage when it comes to the most important reason we take notes—that is, to help us remember what we’ve heard. What Pam Mueller of Princeton University and Daniel Oppenheimer of UCLA’s Anderson School of Management observed is an illuminating example of what psychologists call “desirable difficulty”—the fact that sometimes, obstacles that frustrate us actually help us learn.

In a time when most American toddlers are as comfortable with a touchscreen as with a crayon, one would be remiss to think that the current classroom-based model of education will survive as is. Change is most evident in higher education, where massive open online courses (MOOCs) account for a growing share of academic content, but exactly how much disruption can we expect from online learning?

Web-based education technology has seen both promising and lackluster results in terms of adoption and course completion rates; however, online education proponents assure us that the traditional classroom is on the cusp of a dramatic change.