The classroom looks drastically different than it did just 20 or 30 years ago. Now, the education industry has never been a stranger to trying out new ways of learning. In fact, the history of distance learning (the ancestor of elearning) comes from the formal education sector.
When I was in the fourth grade, I lived in a small, mostly rural community surrounded by giant rice fields in Arkansas. I spent my summers floating stick boats down the gutter after a thunderstorm or “racing” my Hot Wheels™ cars against each other in the living room.
I recently had the opportunity to Keynote the University of Pennsylvania Literacy Network’s Winter Symposium. Penn Literacy Network founder Mort Botel (who was also a former President of the International Reading Association) wrote one of the most influential works in my teaching career, “The Plainer Truths of Teaching/Learning/Assessing Across the Curriculum”; and with his passing this past …
by Terry Heick It could be argued-and probably argued well-that what a student fundamentally needs to know today isn’t much different than what Tom Sawyer or Joan of Arc or Alexander the Great needed to know. Communication. Resourcefulness. Creativity. Persistence. How true this turns out to be depends on how macro you want to get.
Digital citizenship lessons often focus on Internet safety, online predators and cyberbullying. While those conversations are vital, students need always to be aware of what they do online and how their posts, photos and comments can impact them beyond their K-12 years.
While some experts -like disruptive innovation guru Clayton Christensen-believe that new technologies will profoundly transform educational models, others are taking a more skeptical stance, arguing that the advent of radio or television had raised similar speculations. The jury is still out.
It’s an open secret in the education community. As we go about integrating technology into our schools, we are increasing the risk and potential for plagiarism in our tradition-minded classrooms. In fact, a recent PEW research study found that while educators find technology beneficial in teaching writing skills, they feel it has also led to a direct increase in rates of plagiarism and infringement of intellectual property rights.
The supply and demand sides for U.S. educational technology deserve closer scrutiny in light of the release of the 2016 National Education Technology Plan by the Department of Education. That plan, the fifth in a series, was preceded by the Federal Communication Commission’s (FCC) 2014 comprehensive reform of its E-rate program.
What Teachers That Use Technology Believe by Terry Heick What do teachers that use technology believe (as it pertains to teaching with technology)? This will read a lot like a pro-education technology post because it (more or less) is. I tried to get in the head of both teachers skeptical of “edtech” and teachers that have embraced it full-on.
When Peter James published his novel Host on two floppy disks in 1993, he was ill-prepared for the “venomous backlash” that would follow. Journalists and fellow writers berated and condemned him; one reporter even dragged a PC and a generator out to the beach to demonstrate the ridiculousness of this new form of reading.