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.
Using the Chrome speech API, dictation.io is a quick and simple speech to text web app. Requiring no registration, dictation.io works a lot like Voice Typing in Google Docs. Click the START DICTATION button and start talking. The document is saved in the browser, but I could see this being used to enter text into the computer…
Computational thinking has been a hugely successful idea and is now taught at school in many countries across the world. Although I welcome the positioning of computer science as a respectable, influential intellectual discipline, in my view computational thinking has abstracted us too far away from the heart of computation – the machine. The world…
Internet Travels Of bits and bytes is my weekly round up of interesting links and ideas I discovered on the internet. It is published on Mondays for the previous week Whoa, students start at our district on Wednesday! The beginning of the school year always sneaks up on me, especially when there are a million…
Classrooms around the world have been the equivalent of open offices almost since their inception. Is this the best way? Some new research shows that schools may want to think about how the classroom affects their students. Open offices are as bad as they seem—they reduce face-to-face time by 70%: Employees at two Fortune 500…
