My educational philosophy is grounded in critical pedagogy, in the work of people like Paulo Freire and bell hooks. For Freire, the goal of pedagogy is the maturation of a critical consciousness—that capacity and willingness to inspect even our most foundational assumptions about learning and education, to be honest about them, and to change what needs to be changed. What that means is that critical pedagogy methodologies are often marked by the discomfort they create.

Critical pedagogy aims to deeply question our epistemological assumptions—about teaching, about education, about power, about expertise—and while this can be exhilarating, it is almost never a picnic. In fact, that’s kind of the rubric for critical pedagogy, if there is one: that it isn’t easy. In Teaching to Transgress, bell hooks writes that:

“Often when university students and professors read Freire, they approach his work from a voyeuristic standpoint… Many times people will say to me that I seem to be suggesting that it is enough for individuals to change what they think. And you see, even their use of the enough tells us something about the attitude they bring to this question.” (46-47)

There are additional ways to define AI and think about its possibilities in education, including its use to support collaboration and help teachers understand more about what their students know and don’t yet know. In the upcoming webinar series, “Educators, Artificial Intelligence, and the Future of Learning,” we will focus on three areas of learning that AI products currently support or are poised to impact in the next five to 10 years: assessment, learning environments, and teacher support.

• About two in ten districts have already adopted, plan to adopt, or are considering adopting virtual school as part of their district portfolio after the end of the COVID-19 pandemic. District leaders cited reasons related to student and parent demand for continuing various forms of online instruction in future years.
• Among a wide variety of school instructional and staffing matters, three widely shared concerns rose to the top for district leaders for the 2020–2021 school year: disparities in students' opportunities to learn during the COVID-19 pandemic, students' social and emotional learning needs, and insufficient funding to cover staff.
  School district leaders reporte

Parece que la época que estamos viviendo nos ha traído una serie de cambios en nuestros hábitos de vida, tanto a nivel personal como laboral. En este último campo, parece que el teletrabajo ha llegado para quedarse y empresas como Microsoft ya piensan como podría ser en el futuro.

En el caso de la empresa de Redmond, su propuesta tiene nombre y apellidos. Se llama Microsoft Mesh y es un sistema que usa la realidad aumentada y conexiones de alta velocidad a Internet de forma que se puedan celebrar reuniones en virtuales gracias a la realidad aumentada.

Ninety-four percent of college students surveyed believe online classes should cost less than in-person instruction, according to a new report from Barnes & Noble Education. The report is based on responses from 1,438 students and provides an outlook on the future of higher education following the coronavirus pandemic. Nearly half of the students surveyed also said that the value of college has declined as a result of the pandemic.

Prompted by the recent boom in videoconferencing, communication Professor Jeremy Bailenson, founding director of the Stanford Virtual Human Interaction Lab (VHIL), examined the psychological consequences of spending hours per day on these platforms. Just as “Googling” is something akin to any web search, the term “Zooming” has become ubiquitous and a generic verb to replace videoconferencing. Virtual meetings have skyrocketed, with hundreds of millions happening daily, as social distancing protocols have kept people apart physically.

In the first peer-reviewed article that systematically deconstructs Zoom fatigue from a psychological perspective, published in the journal Technology, Mind and Behavior on Feb. 23, Bailenson has taken the medium apart and assessed Zoom on its individual technical aspects. He has identified four consequences of prolonged video chats that he says contribute to the feeling commonly known as “Zoom fatigue.”

Studies have shown that students learn better from instructors displaying positive emotions—in other words, an upbeat lecturer is more effective than someone delivering in monotone. But when video lessons are led by computer animations instead of live instructors, how much do their simulated emotions matter?

That’s the subject of a research project at the University of California at Santa Barbara. Researchers have created a series of video lessons—some delivered by humans and others by animated digital characters—to see whether students notice the difference, and how it matters.

The pandemic has taken a toll on all our institutions, and schools aren’t exempt. School leaders know that schools are closed, but teaching must go on, and; learning must go on.

Schools have moved to online learning. Educators are working from home, delivering classes to learners over the video, preparing lesson plans, collaborating with other educators, amongst many other tasks. Educators are working harder and longer, and many are exploring the edtech at their disposal. It is a big change that requires school leaders to manage their educators’ motivation to prevent loss in productivity and burn-out.

Here are a few strategies to make sure your educators remain motivated and online schooling continues smoothly.

In both the Instructional Supports Guide and Edtech Leadership Guide, we suggest to edleaders they take advantage of this opportunity for updating not just policies but their technological infrastructure as well. We cover topics in both guides indicating a shift in priorities to a more learner-centered approach is well worth the effort to improve our educational offerings for a more equitable learning environment for all students, regardless of the continued impact of a global pandemic and call to eradicate systemic injustice. For the sake of sustaining such endeavors and see it reflected in the procurement, implementation, and integration of tools to accomplish this mission, we will focus on those enterprise tools that impact most directly the shared vision and mission of most local education agencies in Texas, regardless of size and location.

Una de las características más grande del conocimiento en este momento es la obsolescencia rápida. Creo que la obsolescencia nunca había sido tan rápida, tanto del conocimiento como de la información. Eso quiere decir que una educación que enseña unas técnicas o que enseña alguna información se vuelve obsoleta muy rápidamente. Entonces es muy posible que la educación tenga que ir en la dirección de una formación más fundamental. Quién sabe qué nombre tendrá la ingeniería del futuro, nombres raros y combinaciones diferentes, pero no hay duda de que esa ingeniería va a necesitar matemáticas, física, conceptos fundamentales.La educación seguro migrará hacia lo fundamental, lo básico, y hacia entrenamientos específicos en técnicas y tecnologías.

El eLearning nació en la época de la industria 3.0 y se ha ido desarrollando en estos años, de una forma veloz y acompasada con la tecnología que forma parte intrínseca del llamado, por José Lozano, presidente de AEFOL: “Triángulo del eLearning”, que está conformado por: tecnología (LMS-campus virtual, herramientas de autor, etc.) contenidos (cursos online multimedia, etc.) y servicios (acción tutorial).

En estos momentos y como se trató en la 19 edición del Congreso Internacional EXPOELEARNING, ya existen ejemplos del uso de la Inteligencia Artificial-IA en eLearning, como mostraron empresas como IBM, Telefónica y Microsoft.

Esta tendencia irá creciendo en los próximos años, por lo que podemos afirmar que el eLearning se encuentra ya en plena Industria 5.0, podemos hablar por tanto del e-learning 5.0.

Elegant interfaces. Clear and effective communication of value. Smooth payment transactions. It is no secret that the seamless designs of the retail user experience — also known as UX —are causing students to have increasingly higher expectations for user experiences in education.

UX is ultimately about improving customer experience and online engagement, two elements that are critical to the resiliency of digital campuses. Considering that the wild successes of Uber and Netflix are attributed to their investments in cutting-edge user design, how can colleges and universities adopt a similar business model centering the user experience?

An appropriately titled RAND Corporation research report, “Remote Learning Is Here to Stay,” finds that one in five U.S. school districts plans to offer fully online learning even after the pandemic ends. The survey, conducted of RAND’s nationally representative American School District Panel from September through November 2020, included more than 375 K-12 public school districts and charter management organizations.

RAND researchers found that remote learning, in some form, is likely to outlast the COVID-19 closures. Virtual school or a fully online option is in the to-be-continued cards—either planned or being considered—by 20 percent of districts and charter orgs, and a blended or hybrid model by 10 percent. Seven percent indicated a more generic “remote learning in some form” based on the open-ended responses. Respondents’ answers could be applied to more than one option.

Mesh is a collaborative platform that allows anyone to have shared virtual experiences on a variety of devices. “This has been the dream for mixed reality, the idea from the very beginning,” explains Kipman. “You can actually feel like you’re in the same place with someone sharing content or you can teleport from different mixed reality devices and be present with people even when you’re not physically together.”

Initially, Mesh will present people as virtual avatars taken from the AltspaceVR social network that Microsoft acquired back in 2017. Mesh will eventually support what Microsoft calls “holoportation,” allowing people to appear as themselves in a virtual space.

A lot of us have been confused, angry, and frustrated by the reluctance of some teachers, and particularly their unions, to resume in-person instruction. It defies not just science, but common sense, and feels like an exercise in shifting the goalposts or flexing political muscles. No in-person class until teachers are vaccinated. Or until kids are vaccinated. No, until everyone’s vaccinated and Covid-19 is eradicated. Then and only then will it be “safe” to return to something approximating normal schooling.

Over the weekend, a New York math teacher named Michael Pershan tweeted an astute observation, later expanded into a blog post, which suggests one possible cause of many teachers’ reluctance to resume in-person instruction: It’s less that they’re scared of Covid. They’re scared of hybrid teaching. And this, Pershan argues persuasively, is “an entirely reasonable concern about working conditions.”

Cómo aprenderemos de un futuro que aún no ha ocurrido. El pasado ya no es capaz de predecir el futuro. Ahora vivimos en un tiempo en el que el conocimiento se obsoletiza más rápido que nunca.  Ahora tenemos que aprender a utilizar brújulas para saber cómo navegar por senderos nunca antes vistos...

Una cosa es aprender lo que ya sabemos. Ese es el negocio de la educación mediante las asignaturas en los colegios y universidades y los cursos de formación en las organizaciones. Los problemas sobre los que nos hace pensar el sistema educativo son casi siempre de respuesta correcta, es decir, predecibles y cuantificables: “Un tren se desplaza a 50 km/h…”. El asunto es que ese conocimiento del pasado, que resulta necesario porque nos garantiza el presente, pronto lo vamos a automatizar y caduca cada vez más rápido. Pero otra cosa muy distinta es aprender lo que no se sabe, aquello que no tiene respuesta correcta, como ha ocurrido con el coronavirus.

Sticky eLearning or stickiness refers to creating memorable eLearning experiences that learners remember even after a training session is over. In other words, activating the brain for long-term retention and designing learning based on cognitive experiences. For instance, most of us still remember certain learning experiences from our childhood because of an interesting story, an activity or simply because your instructor was so good.

But there is a trend that goes against the way of life inspired by consumerism, as more and more people decide to live with less: it’s called minimalism. We have seen it in architecture and interior design, but it goes beyond that. Some people get by with only a few t-shirts, a pair of jeans, and a leather jacket, and they are perfectly happy with their wardrobe. They don’t feel the need to follow trends or buy the newest items. Minimalism is a philosophy of life.

With the plethora of apps and platforms, the digital world can be overwhelming. Students and teachers across the globe who were forced by the pandemic to learn and work online may sometimes feel digital fatigue. This is why embracing digital minimalism (doing more with less) may come in handy, especially when you feel lost in the sea of apps.

I recently attended a conference about teaching students with executive functioning challenges. Executive functions are a set of essential cognitive capabilities and skills typically encompassing the three areas of self-control, flexible thinking, and working memory. Depending on which executive function skill or capacity you’re targeting, students can be supported by changing the environment, changing the student, or changing the teaching.

As we discussed in the first post of this series for evaluating your student information system (SIS), the software we use in our EdTech stacks are the tools we use to stay organized and keep instruction moving forward which are used by the largest swath of our learning communities. Specialists throughout our schools and in our district central offices may use other tools for productivity or supporting compliance and daily operations, but those platforms in which we invest our instructional intellectual property are the spine of our digital ecosystems tied to the core mission of helping kids grow.

Evaluating the learning management system (LMS) is the focus of this piece. The LMS is where instructional interaction occurs. It’s been said that the teacher is the learning management system and that learning transpires not in schools or in classrooms, whether digital or brick and mortar, but in the learner. Keeping in mind that these sophisticated platforms don’t usurp or displace the exchange between a teacher and learner is an excellent stance for evaluating whether or not the LMS (or how your current LMS has been used thus far) is serving your needs and respecting the agency of both the teacher and the learner.

Me parece importante volver sobre el tema sobre el papel del educador. Tanto a nivel de los teóricos como de los grupos de base viene dándose una tendencia muy fuerte y generalizada a concebir la relación educativa entre educadores y educandos como una relación horizontal, “entre iguales“, en la que, finalmente, nadie enseña a nadie. A tal punto ha llegado a extenderse esta visión que varios autores proponen la eliminación del rol del maestro. Y es este punto, justamente, el que suele encontrar mayor rechazo y mayores resistencias entre los educandos.