You don’t need to be a Dickens scholar to understand that for many teachers it is both the best of times and the worst of times.
Let’s start with the good stuff. Digital innovation is inspiring imagination. Educators from all over the world are learning how to responsibly blend technology into their teaching, while sharing resource suggestions and best practices with colleagues and their growing professional learning networks.
The freedom to choose an assortment of apps, videos and open educational resources that can augment – if not replace – traditional curriculum for any given unit or lesson plan is empowering. Learning how other teachers put these tools into their own practice via Twitter Chats, EdCamps and other collaborative environments is exhilarating.
A few months ago, I noticed an increased amount of discussion around the notion of blended learning. Many of these conversations started on a similar note: “We’re blended—all of our teachers use Google Classroom” (or Edmodo, Schoology, Canvas, Moodle, etc.). However, in probing further, I often discovered that these tools had merely digitized existing content…
Increased screen time has multiple risks for children’s psychosocial well-being. These risk factors seem to be significant in the long term, and are related to problems in children’s socio-emotional development later on. Health professionals and pediatricians have an important role as communicators of the current research results on the safe usage time of e-media for…
At first I thought it was a teacher thing. I would ask how someone was doing and they would say, “I’m really busy.” This was often followed by a description of how little sleep they had gotten and how much grading they had done. Teachers weren’t whining. It wasn’t a “poor me” attitude. It was…
“A number of studies have shown that mindfulness can improve cognitive abilities, including certain verbal abilities. However, little research has examined how mindfulness can affect verbal learning and memory. Furthermore, no research has examined the mechanism by which mindfulness may improve learning and memory,” said study author Adam Lueke, an assistant teaching professor at Ball…
5 things about Google Slides that you did not know. New features in Google Slides make an amazing product even better! Try out these tips. Source: 5 Things About Google Slides You Did Not Know – Teacher Tech Voice typing into the speaker notes is genius! What an awesome way to set up the speaker…
Serious people sometimes make silly predictions. Source: The Future of Education Will Never Arrive History is littered with failed experiments, but these failures are what have brought us the world we have today. Cynicism aside, computers will get better at understanding people, and when that happens, who knows what will happen. To get an…
