ICT in Education
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education technology articles/ideas
I’d like to share a couple of videos with you that I have used recently in the courses I teach . I find these videos particularly interesting because they show such contrasting approaches to learning and in particular - for want of a better word - elearning. This first one is from the early 1950’s and is about something called a ‘ teaching machine ’ which was created by behavioural psychologist B F Skinner. As you see Skinner’s teaching machines , though not exactly iPads do look remarkably like what we would recognise as computers. What’s also remarkable is the claims that he makes for them and the reasons why he believes they are effective are remarkably similar to those made by many producers of learning and especially language learning software today.
Two Contrasting Views of Educational Technology
Reducing academic isolation in favour of learning relationships through a virtual classroom Mike Goldrick, James O'Higgins Norman Abstract Abstract Due to geographical distances and sporadic contact with peers and faculty members, many off-campus or distance learners experience feelings of inadequacy, reduced self-confidence and other social anxieties. As a means to reduce and avoid these consequences of academic isolation, Higher Education institutes have traditionally used asynchronous forms of communication in order to bridge these geographical gaps. However, due to advances in technology, it is now possible to offer distance learners the opportunity to communicate synchronously with their peers and their teachers as they would in a real classroom.
Reducing academic isolation in favour of learning relationships through a virtual classroom | Goldrick | Journal of Learning Development in Higher Education
Five Tips for Using Student Response Systems for Formative Assessment by @karenlmahon
This post originally appeared on the Promethean Planet community blog on May 17, 2012. There are a few redundancies with another of my posts, Top 12 Best Practices for Clickers in the Classroom , but the current post endeavors to focus specifically on using clickers for Formative Assessment . Enjoy – KM Whatever Student Response System (SRS) you are using in your classroom—e.g. Promethean’s ActiVote, ActivEngage or ActivExpression—these systems are ideal for conducting formative assessment.
Creative learning spaces
For me, one of the highlights of the Estonian Elearning Conference in Tallinn was listening to Stephen Harris , principal of the Sydney Centre for Innovations in Learning . SCIL is an Australian secondary school that practices teaching and learning within open spaces, where student autonomy and personalisation of learning are top priorities. Under Stephen's leadership, the school enables BYOMD - bring your own multiple devices, which means that students can learn in a number of different spaces and places around the school, using their own familiar tools.
Ethiopian kids hack OLPCs in 5 months with zero instruction
What happens if you give a thousand Motorola Zoom tablet PCs to Ethiopian kids who have never even seen a printed word? Within five months, they'll start teaching themselves English while circumventing the security on your OS to customize settings and activate disabled hardware. Whoa.
Internet Safety
The digital divide is real. There’s a major gap between the schools, people, and organizations who can afford high-speed connections and those who cannot. Imagine a classroom with wi-fi versus one without. The former can launch a 1:1 iPad program, BYOD, and deploy all kinds of new technology . The latter classroom is tethered to a single desktop or laptop computer at best. Now, imagine that you don’t have any internet connectivity at all.
The 5 Big Reasons Schools Should Have Free Internet Access Right Now
We already know that there’s a lot of buzz about technology in education – that’s why we’re all here, right? But how do people feel about integrating technology into learning? Do teachers, parents, and students have differing opinions about it? Check out what this poll from the LEAD Commission shows: Nearly all good news for technology in education.
Study Shows What Teachers and Parents Really Think About Education Technology
I often find that the social networking and information site Quora is found amongst a list of the top social networks to use in the classroom. There is usually a little blurb about the network, and then the article moves on to a blurb about another network. However, there are so many things that a classroom can do with Quora that a short description simply is not enough.
Top 5 Ways Schools Can Take Advantage of Quora
Five Steps to Starting a Class Blog
Posted by Mrs Kathleen Morris on Thursday, August 9th 2012 I have revised the posts I have written in the past to create a nine page, five step guide to beginning a class blog. Feel free to view, print or download the document to help you get started on your blogging journey. Five Steps to Starting a Class Blog If you’re having trouble with the Scribd document, you can access the PDF here Five Steps to Starting a Class Blog <p style="text-align:right;color:#A8A8A8"></p>
Edmodo, A "Facebook For Schools," Chalks Up API To Become Classroom Platform
Edmodo started out as the Facebook (or Yammer) for classrooms--a social network-style place for teachers to coordinate online with their students (and sometimes parents). Today the company becomes even more like Facebook as it opens up its API so that outside companies can build apps that sit on top of the Edmodo platform. CEO and cofounder Nic Borg tells Fast Company the change will make things easier for teachers, helping them save time by allowing them to plug the digital tools they often are already using directly into their Edmodo classrooms. But it also presages a larger digital shift in schools--one in which every classroom may very well one day have an online hub that will sit at the center of their on- and off-line worlds.Edmodo and the NSW Quality Teaching Framework |
Because I am a nerd, I enjoy reading education documents. OK, not all of them – just the ones that I feel might help me to be a better teacher. I was introduced to the NSW Quality Teacher Framework in my first year of teaching, but it only started making sense to me in my third or fourth year – when I started trying to do things in new ways and when I wanted to create my own ‘units of work’.Two of the most popular videos on the Learn with Dr Eugene O'Loughlin YouTube Channel are about embedding YouTube videos into PowerPoint 2003 and 2010. My most recent addition today is about doing the same for PowerPoint 2013. The procedure is straight-forward enough - all you have to do is find the embed code for the video you want from YouTube and use the tools in PowerPoint to insert the video. Normally you do not need to do anything to the embed code, but recently, YouTube have added "version=3" for a new Player that causes problems in PowerPoint (no problems embedding anywhere else such as web pages).
Careful With That Axe, Eugene: How To... Embed a YouTube Video into a PowerPoint 2013 Presentation (and dealing with the "version=3" problem)
YouTube is a goldmine for content. Yes, it’s also a goldmine for trash and whimsy, but more than anything it’s a kind of circus-mirror reflection of culture. Which should make it useful to teachers.
The Official Educator's Guide To YouTube
Mobile technology
iPads