Over the past decade as many school budgets have remained stagnant, spending in educational technology has climbed to record levels, with no signs of slowing. As schools around the country consider investing in technology as a way to improve student outcomes, particularly for those students deemed “at-risk,” it’s imperative that district leaders understand the methods research has shown actually work.
Here are seven ways principals can use technology in their buildings to enhance learning. I firmly believe number 1, lead with a vision for learning, not technology, is the most important.
As solutions go, it is certainly radical: in order to thwart a mass epidemic of cheating by students taking their school leaving exams, Algeria shut down the internet for up to three hours a day this week – for everyone. “It’s beyond ridiculous,” said Lyès Rekkeb, 28, who works for a web design agency….
As researchers in learning and text comprehension, our recent work has focused on the differences between reading print and digital media. While new forms of classroom technology like digital textbooks are more accessible and portable, it would be wrong to assume that students will automatically be better served by digital reading simply because they prefer…
Fans of Douglas Adams’s Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy treasure the bit where a group of hyper-dimensional beings demand that a supercomputer tells them the secret to life, the universe and everything. The machine, which has been constructed specifically for this purpose, takes 7.5m years to compute the answer, which famously comes out as 42….
In a corner of SpaceX’s headquarters in Hawthorne, California, a small, secretive group called Ad Astra is hard at work. These are not the company’s usual rocket scientists. At the direction of Elon Musk, they are tackling ambitious projects involving flamethrowers, robots, nuclear politics, and defeating evil AIs. Those at Ad Astra still find…
In a world where accusations of “fake news” are thrown around essentially at random, critical thinking would seem to be a must. But this is also a world where the Moon landings are viewed as a conspiracy and people voice serious doubts about the Earth’s roundness. Critical thinking appears to be in short supply at…
When my son started middle school last month, he brought home a slew of consent forms for this that and the other. Most weren’t problematic, but one was deeply troubling to me — the consent form for the Google Education App. In accordance with the Freedom of Information and Protection of Privacy Act, the form…