With the Common Core’s emphasis on data-driven instruction there is a misguided focus on using technology to deliver content and collect data rather than cultivate learning and stimulate cognitive development.Using education technology isn’t so much about students mastering a device or procedure so much as it is about mastering themselves first.
I’ve seen assessment tools used by teachers in the belief that the tools are an instructional tool. Just because you can get pretty graphs out of a piece of software does not mean it can be used as an instructional replacement. Assessment tools have taken over a lot of edtech, because they are easy to use to generate pretty graphs under the guise that student use of the tool is teaching students. This couldn’t be further from the truth.
I’m an idea guy. That is, I have a lot of ideas. As a teacher I would constantly improvise, come up with new projects, lesson ideas, tweaks to traditional assessments, and have an organic approach to learning in my classroom. But they were still my ideas. I was failing to value, foster, and spark ideas…
Factitious is an online game to help people recognize fake news. This would be a great way to teach students how to check sources and identify fake news sites.
But in April this story dropped. Folks had begun a mild-tomedium freakout because the East Asian PISA math superpowers (South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Singapore, etc), the people whose program everyone else was trying to imitate, had seen their scores start to drop. But now Andreas Schleicher, the official in charge of Pisa, has said…
Synergyse is a company that offers Google Apps training for the various Google Apps products. This training is delivered in the form of videos or in browser tutorials. While this has been a paid product, Google has purchased the company allowing anyone to use the training for free. To try it out, head over to…
The more time we spend on our phones, the more text messaging seems like a natural artistic medium, a modern outgrowth of the epistolary novel. You can see it in the fake text messageweb fiction genre, in games like Sarah is Missing… and in the silly quasi-interactive thriller that a smartphone writing app has somehow seduced me into creating….
