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.
When Mike Bloomberg, ex-mayor of New York, said he’d like to fire the lower-scoring half of the city’s teachers and give their students to the better-scoring half, doubling the size of their classes but paying them twice as much, he was affirming his belief in a particular theory of learning. For a short demonstration of…
Google offers all sorts of neat little tricks with the URL of a Google Drive document, and the /preview trick is one of the best. I’m going to demonstrate the /preview trick with Google Slides, since that’s when it’s most noticeable. For my classes, I have prepared lessons in Google Slides. This is a pretty…
Once a month, this column will examine the insights that science offers about the way people learn, and how such findings could influence schools. Most of us can remember a moment like this from our school years: the teacher poses a question – maybe it’s math, maybe history. You raise your hand, you give your…
