Five Tips for School Leaders Here are 5 simple things that school leaders can do to help teachers as they transition their classrooms to Web 2.0 learning. There is so much pressure on school leadership in this day and age. School budgets are growing tighter and tighter. More, now than ever, schools and districts are facing the real possibility of laying off teachers and not having enough in funds to to even keep the doors open to some schools. The vast majority of districts across this country have had to make hard decisions regarding budgets; many of them deciding to make drastic, but necessary cuts in order to save jobs and still give students the best possible education. There is pressure from state and federal mandates on testing. With all of these external pressures there is little time for school leadership to encourage teachers to take risks in their classroom and be creative in terms of technology. 1) Why do we even need to be having this conversation? 2) What do good school leaders do?
This Time Its Personal Personalized Learning | Feature This Time It's Personal Truly student-centered learning has a lot of support in high places in education, but it can’t happen without the right technology infrastructure to drive it. By Jennifer Demski01/04/12 Educators have known for some time now that a one-size-fits-all approach to learning does not lead to the level of student engagement and academic success that schools strive to achieve. In their search for a more customized approach to delivering instruction, they’ve explored project-based learning, addressed different learning styles, and increased collaborative learning among students. But, for the most part, schools have incorporated these 21st century instructional techniques and tools as add-ons to the teacher-centric 19th century classroom structure, in which the majority of the curriculum is pulled from a textbook, and, despite best intentions, most students learn the same thing in the same way at the same time.
We Live in a Mobile World - Room for Debate Let’s face it: For my children and for millions like them, life will be an open phone test. They are among the first generation who will carry access to the sum of human knowledge and literally billions of potential teachers in their pockets. They will use that access on a daily basis to connect, create and, most important, to learn in ways that most of us can scarcely imagine. Given that reality, shouldn’t we be teaching our students how to use mobile devices well? The analog, 20th century curriculum that most classrooms deliver doesn’t fit well with the realities of the exploding mobile, digital world. Right now, schools are resistant, fearing the disruption that mobile access might cause and the dangers that might lurk online. There's no doubt that the current slate of mobile devices have their limitations. Access in our kids’ pockets will force us to rethink much of what we do in schools. Join Opinion on Facebook and follow updates on twitter.com/roomfordebate.
Top 5 Ed Tech predictions for 2012 Earlier this week I wrote about five major technologies that should have had real impacts in education this year, but which never amounted to much. I called more than one of them out a year ago, when all signs pointed to their potential for disruption and transformation in 2011. I can't resist giving it another shot this year, though. Here are my top 5 predictions for the state of the art in Ed Tech in the coming year. Analytics and BI will go mainstream In a former life, I was a SAS programmer doing data management and statistical analysis for clinical trials. SAS is still going strong in large-scale, mission critical statistical programming, but much of its business focus is now on analytics and business intelligence (BI). Google's tablet will NOT be the holy grail of 1:1 A reader emailed me the other day and asked me if I thought that Google's tablet, expected for release before fall 2012, would finally make tablet-based 1:1 initiatives a reality.
How to Create Your Own Textbook — With or Without Apple By Dolores Gende Apple’s iBooks2 and authoring app has created big waves in education circles. But smart educators don’t necessarily need Apple’s slick devices and software to create their own books. As the open education movement continues to grow and become an even more rich trove of resources, teachers can use the content to make their own interactive textbooks. Here’s how to create a digital textbook and strategies for involving the students in its development in three steps. 1. Teachers can work with colleagues within their subject area departments and beyond the walls of the classroom to aggregate resources through social bookmarking. Also try Paper.li or The Twitted Times, which will sift through your connections’ resources and organize them. 2. One of the most user-friendly tools to post resources for your course is LiveBinders. You can find many more useful tools for curation. 3. Google Sites also allows you to create and share Web pages, and has lots of customizable features.
Educational Technology Bill of Rights for Students The following are what I believe are the rights of all student to have with regards to using technology as an educational tool, written as a student to their teacher: 1) I have the right to use my own technology at school. I should not be forced to leave my new technology at home to use (in most cases) out-of-date school technology. If I can afford it, let me use it -- you don’t need to buy me one. If I cannot afford it, please help me get one -- I don’t mind working for it. 2) I have the right to access the school’s WiFi. 3) I have the right to submit digital artifacts that prove my understanding of a subject, regardless of whether or not my teacher knows what they are. 4) I have the right to cite Wikipedia as one of the sources that I use to research a subject. 5) I have the right to access social media at school. 6) I have the right to be taught by teachers who know how to manage the use technology in their classrooms. 8) I have the right to be accessed with technology. About Brad
Why Digital Learning will Liberate Teachers I spend a lot of time writing about how digital learning can transform our education system into a student-centric one. In my last blog, I wrote about why parents—of all stripes—matter for digital learning and make it fundamentally different from past “reform” movements. Digital learning should similarly be a game changer for teachers. Teachers will be critical to our nation’s future in a world of digital learning. Today, teachers spend a significant amount of time engaged in what we call “monolithic” activities—one-size-fits-all, standardized activities that are designed to reach the mythical middle of a class of students. On top of this, there are a lot of demands made of teachers—bolstering student learning being the overriding one, but there’s a lot of administrative asks that go along with the job, too. In a world where digital learning becomes the platform for our education system, however, this whole notion should turn around. The bottom line? - Michael B.
Can Khan Move the Bell Curve to the Right? It was goal-setting day in Rich Julian’s 5th-grade class at Covington Elementary School in Los Altos, California, when I visited last fall, and Julian was asking each of his 29 students to list three math goals for the week. To become proficient at dividing a one-place number into a three-place number, a girl with blue-painted fingernails wrote in her math journal. To become proficient in multiplying decimals, wrote a dark-haired boy. To become proficient at subtracting one four-place number from another. To become proficient in arithmetic word problems. To complete an exercise in the properties of numbers, like (4 + 9) + 5 = ? No two youngsters seemed to have quite the same math goals because, of course, no two youngsters are quite alike when it comes to learning. For the next 45 minutes, Julian met individually with his 5th graders to refine their goals. But just as powerful are the data kids have on themselves. Salman Khan (on left) and the team at the Khan Academy. Khan’s Rise
Utah is working on free online textbooks This is an archived article that was published on sltrib.com in 2012, and information in the article may be outdated. It is provided only for personal research purposes and may not be reprinted. Heavy textbooks weighing down teens' backpacks might soon become a thing of the past in Utah. The State Office of Education has announced that it will develop open textbooks in math, language arts and science — which will be available online, for free — for junior highs and high schools. That's a big savings compared to a traditional high school science textbook, which can cost about $80 on average, according to the state office. "Rather than just reading a flat text, kids get to experience learning with multiple media in the book itself," Dickson said. She said math textbooks could be available as soon as this fall, and other textbooks will likely become available within the next two years. "What the students liked best was the ability to access online resources," Call said. lschencker@sltrib.com
The Must-Have Guide To Helping Technophobic Educators The following is the third in a set of 7 ‘ The Future of Education ‘ articles. It is written by Dr. Abir Qasem , an Assistant Professor of Computer Science, and Director of Academic Computing at Bridgewater College and Tanya Gupta who has worked on technology and economic development. The blogosphere and the mainstream media is filled with success stories of technology’s successful adoption in education. However, many educators complain that when they try to introduce technological innovation on their campuses, they face obstacles. For example, according to Boston.com , there are many schools that are Internet-free. There are others, such as Sherry Turkle, a professor at MIT who travels around the country encouraging colleges to pull back on Internet access. This Washington Post article describes how professors have banned laptops from their classrooms at George Washington University, American University, the College of William and Mary and the University of Virginia, among many others.
Educational Technology Bill of Rights for Students Part II Wow! I must of hit a nerve with educators when I wrote my first draft of the Education Technology Bill of Rights for Students last month. I got a boat load of emails (about 90% positive and 10% negative), and based those emails I would like to add these to the original: 11) I have the right to use the cloud. I hate to save things on the school's server, especially since I cannot get to it from home. 12) I have the right to use alternative forms of data entry. 13) I have the right to use apps that cost money. So here are another three, keep the ideas coming. - Brad Flickinger, Bethke Elementary School About Brad Brad Flickinger is a technology integration specialist who teaches technology at Bethke Elementary in Timnath, Colorado and is the founder of SchoolTechnology.org