Visitors and Residents: What Motivates Engagement with the Digital Information Environment?
Building on research of individuals’ modes of engagement with the web (Visitors and Residents4), and the JISC-funded Digital Information Seeker report5, this project is exploring what motivates different types of engagement with the digital environment for learning. The investigation focuses on the sources learners turn to in order to gather information, and which ‘spaces’ (on and offline) they choose to interact in as part of the learning process. It is using the Visitors and Residents6 framework to map learner’s modes of engagement in both personal and institutional contexts.
Educational Technology and Mobile Learning: 4 Pinterest Boards Packed Full of...
My blogging journey this year has been so eventful and busy. I have covered a wide range of topics from reviews of iPad apps to newest releases in the world of educational technology. The driving purpose was and will always be to help those of you working in the first lines, in the trenches teaching our kids; help them better integrate technology into education and introduce them to the recent technology needed to fulfil their endeavour. In today's post, I want to share with you some of the most popular Pinterest boards for Educational Technology and Mobile Learning. These boards sum up the major content I have been sharing with you here.
What’s Not to ‘Like’? Rethinking Restrictive Social Media Policies
“Swimming pools can be dangerous for children. To protect them, one can install locks, put up fences, and deploy pool alarms. All these measures are helpful, but by far the most important thing that one can do for one’s children is to teach them to swim.” —National Research Council, Youth, Pornography, and the Internet (National Academic Press, 2002) A few years ago, as members of an Illinois School Library Media Association task force, we surveyed members to gauge the intellectual freedom concerns of school librarians.
11 Quick and Amazing ways to use PowToon in your Classroom by PowToon!
Read Time: 6 minutes I recently read a study on creativity that blew my mind: “A major factor in creativity is education: not whether you had a ‘good’ or ‘expensive’ or ‘public’ education, but whether you were encouraged to develop your creativity starting at an early age and continuing throughout your school years.” — Adobe Powtoon in Your Classroom — Creativity & Education We saw this first-hand, when Edson Tellez, a volunteer teacher in rural Mexico, wrote to us about how Powtoon changed the way his students viewed the world. “They’re getting more creative, more receptive, and more dynamic in each class.”
Effective Social Media Practices and Good Online Teaching
I have this theory that if you are effective on social media then you stand a good chance of being effective in online teaching. How do these two activities go together? Two words: presence and community.
Why disruptive innovation matters to education
There is a common tendency at this time of year to reflect and refocus on what matters most and then use that renewed focus to chart into the year ahead. In that spirit of reflection, I want to share some thoughts on why the theory of disruptive innovation, which guides our work here at the Clayton Christensen Institute, is so important to education. If you are not familiar with the theory of disruptive innovation, a brief explanation is available here on our website. For a more thorough explanation, The Innovator’s Solution lays out the theory in a comprehensive yet digestible format. My purpose here is not to explain the theory, but rather, explain in brief why that theory should matter to people who want to improve our education system. First, disruptive innovation is the catalyst for bringing about more equitable access to high-quality education.
50 Education Technology Tools Every Teacher Should Know About
Technology and education are pretty intertwined these days and nearly every teacher has a few favorite tech tools that make doing his or her job and connecting with students a little bit easier and more fun for all involved. Yet as with anything related to technology, new tools are hitting the market constantly and older ones rising to prominence, broadening their scope, or just adding new features that make them better matches for education, which can make it hard to keep up with the newest and most useful tools even for the most tech-savvy teachers. Here, we’ve compiled a list of some of the tech tools, including some that are becoming increasingly popular and widely used, that should be part of any teacher’s tech tool arsenal this year, whether for their own personal use or as educational aids in the classroom.
Twitter Rubric
University of Wisconsin - Stout — Schedule of Online Courses, Online Certificate Programs, and Graduate Degree Follow us on
How to Easily Insert Questions and Quizzes into Videos Using EduCanon
Have you ever wished you knew how to easily add questions into a video to create lesson content or to help ensure that students are engaging with video content? Well, you can, for free! One of the many great tools I learned about at FlipCon14 in June was EduCanon. I’d been interested in finding a tool that would enable users to easily add questions or quizzes into a video, but just had not been able to make the time to find a good one. EduCanon and EdPuzzle are two apps with this type of functionality that heard about at the excellent flipped teaching and learning conference. Today I took EduCanon for a spin, and recorded a new 3 Minute Teaching With Technology Tutorial to show how easy it is to add questions to a video and create a quiz using this wonderful free tool.
50 Ways to Use Twitter in the Classroom
Many critics of Twitter believe that the 140-character microblog offered by the ubiquitous social network can do little for the education industry. They are wrong. K-12 teachers have taken advantage of Twitter’s format to keep their classes engaged and up-to-date on the latest technologies. The following projects provide you and your students with 50 ways to Twitter in the classroom to create important and lasting lessons. 1.
The History of the Future of Education
6 min read (This was delivered at Ryerson University's ChangSchoolTalks.) It's a refrain throughout my work: we are suffering from an amnesia of sorts, whereby we seem to have forgotten much of the history of technology. As such, we now tell these stories about the past, present, and future whereby all innovations emerge from Silicon Valley, all innovations are recent innovations, and there is no force for change other than entrepreneurial genius and/or the inevitability of "disruptive innovation."
UPDATE: 36 Digital Formative Assessment Tools for the Classroom
If you’ve followed our blog here at Teach Learn Grow, you know that we’re a huge proponent of formative assessment. There is no shortage of formative assessment techniques available to teachers to use in their classroom. They provide teachers the valuable feedback they need to adjust their teaching so student learning moves forward. Add to the many techniques the digital tools available these days in smartphones and tablets, and formative assessment becomes easier than ever to implement.
