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.
Google is pushing their machine learning to new and interesting processes, and is now applying their AI to Google Photos. New features Google can now find older photos of recently photographed people, making it easy to remember those moments with friends and family. Google photos can now put together an album of a subject of…
I took a speech class one semester when I was in undergraduate school. For our first assignment we had to give a short speech that the teacher videotaped. Our extended assignment was to watch the recording and critique our performance. That proved to be a very eye-opening experience for me. If you had asked me…
When the Montgomery bus boycott electrified the struggle against segregation, it was all recorded in appeals bonds, court motions and $10 fines. A forgotten trove has turned up in a courthouse vault. Source: Found: Rosa Parks’s Arrest Warrant, and More Traces of Civil Rights History – The New York Times What a great source of information…
Because implementing artificial intelligence would create new positions—such as people who would train machines or ensure that the machines do not, say, hurt humans—the Accenture analysis found that employment could increase by 10 percent due to the increased need for human-machine collaboration. Humans would need new digital skills to collaborate with machines, and “human-interface designers”…
I received a Christmas gift in fourth grade that profoundly impacted my career path and thus the rest of my life. That gift was a VTech PowerPad Plus “pre-computer.” While just a toy, the PowerPad line of products from the late 1980s and early 1990s were functioning computers that featured, among a handful of educational…
Like most things that don’t favor the richest and most privileged in the world, the future of public education for disabled students in America is currently under threat. With an attorney general who has been vehemently opposed to the concept of putting disabled students in general classrooms, and an education secretary who is, at best,…