This is a great vignette of how a first year teacher weaves technology into her teaching practice.

I happened upon a new video tutorial and learning platform called Curious.com. When you compare the features against using YouTube, Vimeo or other video hosting platforms – it pretty much blows them out of the water. 

Take for instance this screen from Introduction to Arduino Microcontrollers:

The rich amount of information would make any learner feel a bit more connected to the lesson and give them contextual clues on what to do now, next and if they had any questions.  The seems to make what we do in blended and the flipped classroom much more compelling to a learner.

I’m betting that some K-20 education company would love to have something like this in their toolchest.  Take a quick tour around the site and think about how you might use it with your learners.

Sir Ken Robinson outlines 3 principles crucial for the human mind to flourish — and how current education culture works against them. In a funny, stirring talk he tells us how to get out of the educational “death valley” we now face, and how to nurture our youngest generations with a climate of possibility – via TED

Rita Pierson, a teacher for 40 years, once heard a colleague say, "They don’t pay me to like the kids." Her response: "Kids don’t learn from people they don’t like.’”

An excerpt from our just-released book on Essential Questions | Granted, and….

The New Media Consortium (NMC) posted their interim results of their 2013 Horizon Report at the CoSN Conference in San Diego.  Here are a few trends, emerging technologies and challenges to keep on your RADAR:

Near-Term Horizon: One Year or Less

• BYOD (Bring Your Own Device)
• Cloud Computing
• Mobile Learning
• Online Learning

Mid-Term Horizon: Two to Three Years

• Adaptive Learning and Personal Learning Networks
• Electronic Publishing
• Learning Analytics
• Open Content

Long-Term Horizon: Four to Five Years

• 3D Printing
• Augmented Reality
• Virtual and Remote Laboratories
• Wearable Technology

Selected Trends (See NMC.org for the full list)

• People expect to be able to work, learn, and study whenever and wherever they want.
• Schools are beginning to move away from textbooks to web resources and open source books.
• The focus of assessments are shifting from “what you know (can memorize)” to “what you can do (portfolio).”
• The abundance of resources and relationships made easily accessible via the Internet is increasingly challenging us to revisit our roles as educators.

Selected Challenges ( See NMC.org for the full list)

• Faculty training still does not acknowledge the fact that digital media literacy continues its rise in importance as a key skill in every discipline and profession.
• Too often it is education’s own processes and practices that limit broader uptake of new technologies.
• Many activities related to learning and education take place outside the walls of the classroom and thus are not part of traditional learning metrics.
• New models of education are bringing unprecedented competition to the traditional models of education.

Here’s an interesting article by Dr. Gary Stager as published in Scholastic’s Administrator magazine: For the Love of Laptops – As learning tools, tablets don’t cut it.

He sums up the article with this:

Schools are buying tablets with a reckless ferocity. There are pronouncements of how iPads will revolutionize or transform education, without a coherent vision of what that might look like or a single example rooted in practice. The iPad provides an illusion of modernity with no real challenge to the nature of schooling—a win-win proposition unless you’re a child. Add hysterical Web filtering, social media bans, and locked-down devices incapable of installing software, and the tablet becomes a tool of compliance, not empowerment.

Tablets could have all the functionality of a laptop, but they don’t. Until they do, I recommend that schools invest in laptops for student use.

The opposing viewpoint is by Dan Brenner, ‘Day of the Tablet”.

Read both when you get a moment.

If students designed their own schools… from Charles Tsai on Vimeo.

The "best small town" in America experiments with self-directed learning at its public high school. A group of students gets to create their own school-within-a-school and they learn only what they want to learn.

Does it work? Charles Tsai finds out by spending a week with the Independent Project.

If you would like to learn more or try to replicate this program, join us at
https://www.facebook.com/groups/independentproject/

The Pew Internet & American Life Project recently released a study on how educational technology (EDTECH) is being used in primary and secondary schools across the United States.  The results show that teachers are increasingly reliant on using the Internet as a valuable resource in their teaching practice, however, there are some issues with technology use once our students are outside of school.

Here are some key points from the survey:

92% of these teachers say the internet has a “major impact” on their ability to access content, resources, and materials for their teaching
69% say the internet has a “major impact” on their ability to share ideas with other teachers
67% say the internet has a “major impact” on their ability to interact with parents and 57% say it has had such an impact on enabling their interaction with students

From another report on the findings:

When it comes to income gaps, what starts out as a simple disparity in access to technology spirals into more nuanced effects. For one, there is a correlation between income and openness to digital technology in school. The number of teachers of low-income students who say their teaching is majorly impacted by their schools’ Internet filters and rules about classroom cell phone use is double that of teachers of higher-income students.

Addressing these various forms of digital divides is a pressing issue for teachers. Of the teachers surveyed, 84 percent agree with this statement: “Today’s digital technologies are leading to greater disparities between affluent and disadvantaged schools and school districts.”