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.
A writer for The Guardian warns that artificial intelligence will be taking over many jobs that we previously assumed were safe from automation. Like teaching. Source: Is That “Teaching”? We’re still in the dark ages of what artificial intelligence will be able to do. Sure, we have AlphaGo being able to make “beautiful” moves in the game of…
With an emphasis on test scores and “digital literacy,” there is a myth among many that the school library is irrelevant and even old-fashioned. Talk to students and you will find that they don’t feel this way. Children want access to books. They want to spend time in a library perusing titles and discussing what…
The one application that is probably used the most by teachers is email. Here are 13 hacks for Gmail, although a lot of them would work with any email system. These are the tricks I use every day to manage my email and make myself more productive in reaching inbox zero. Inbox zero is a…
Pick any field “X,” from archaeology to zoology. There either is now a “computational X”, or there soon will be. Doctors, lawyers, teachers, farmers, whatever—the future of all these professions will be full of computational thinking. Whether it’s sensor-based medicine, computational contracts, education analytics or agriculture—success is going to rely on being able to do…
The massive new study analyzes every major contested news story in English across the span of Twitter’s existence—some 126,000 stories, tweeted by 3 million users, over more than 10 years—and finds that the truth simply cannot compete with hoax and rumor. By every common metric, falsehood consistently dominates the truth on Twitter, the study finds:…
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…
