Tips For Anyone Nervous About EdTech

Dear “Nervous To Try Something New With EdTech”:

You know when you spoke with me the other day and told me that that introducingmore tech into my class was fine for me because I was ‘into it’ and ‘understood’ it? That you were not going to try a new way of doing things (edtech-wise) because your students would see that you weren’t an expert. Well I need to let you in on a secret. Neither am I. It would probably shock you that me, a proponent of choice/more edtech started exactly where you are now in terms of knowledge and confidence. It took, it takes, some courage, and a big leap of faith to step out and try something new in class – in front of 30 teenagers?

How do I do it? I remember 3 key things:

I Am Not the First to Do This

“Search Engine” It – Take the simple voice recorded phone conversation. I am in Canada have no access to Google Voice – so my default is the ‘voice memo’ utility on student’s phones. I use this quite a bit and when I naively did it the first time I received files that my computer couldn’t work with. Disaster or challenge? When you get a file your computer can’t open – “search engine it”. Seriously – when the .amr and .mp3 file extensions come in from your student’s mobile-phone recorded conversations don’t panic. Just type in your problem into your favourite search engine and hit ‘enter’. Amazingly you will probably find out what you need.

I Have Help Available in Every Program/App

Prior to teaching I worked for a developer in the area of school administrative software. My job, in the early 1990′s, was to provide demonstrations of the possibilities of the program to rooms full of educators who had limited exposure to computerized administration tools. One of the biggest selling points for me was the “help” menu item. I knew the people who wrote the documentation for us and the detail that they went into to assist people to understand how something worked. I know to look at the menu items for a software program and locate the ‘help’ one. And if I can’t find my answer there – see tip 1.

My Peers Are A Great Resource

In a school of over 120 staff members the chances are that someone out there has faced a similar challenge/implemented a similar tech tool. And if they haven’t they probably know someone who has. So prior to trying the new tool/trick – send out an email and ask. Before my first on-line discussion I sent a blanket email to all the teachers on my staff with the subject “Have you done any ‘on-line’ discussions?”. Amazingly a teacher in the Social Studies department had. He was invaluable in giving me tips on how to structure and conduct the discussion. All I had to do was put it out there. If you aren’t a fan of the blanket email then ask your school librarian. They see so many classes, and work with so many teachers, that they probably have an idea of who does. And if that doesn’t work – see tip 1.

So go ahead and try something new. It could be as simple as using a wordcloud instead of a worksheet. Or perhaps allowing students to send in files that you will mark/comment on in Google Drive. In any case be sure that someone out there has an answer when you confront a challenge. And if you happen to find success – let your department, you staff, and even perhaps your online PLN know what you have done. After all the way we really know we’ve learned is to help out someone else.

Post Source : http://www.edudemic.com/nervous-edtech-tips/

The Future of Education: It’s More Sci-Fi Than You Think.

By Katie Lepi

For parents right now, the classroom may already seem fairly alien.  When an elementary school student shares their frustration with their Prezi presentation about apartheid, or laments the lameness of their PowerPoint animated transitions, parents know that the world has changed.  When a high school student makes a video accompanied by music and special effects, demonstrating how Ovid’s word choices reveal character, the change is undeniable.  However, having computers in the classroom is just the beginning.  The future school is likely to be almost unrecognizable, in both good ways, and in ways that will need careful management in order to be an unmixed blessing.

Computers in the classroom!  It sounds new.  It scares some teachers, delights some students, and baffles some parents.  Bring Your Own Device, as a policy, can be intensely stressful when first implemented.  It was so scary and anxiety producing this September that it caused a major domestic disturbance in this parent’s household.

It Isn’t Really So New

In fact, however, that particular innovation has been under development since the 1970s.  One person who undertook to figure out how to help teachers teach and students learn with technology, starting in the mid-70s was Dustin Heuston.  His ideas seemed ‘out there’ back in the 70s and 80s, but now seem standard.  He recognized that just putting a computer in a school would not make kids better learners. To achieve his goal of providing a nearly one-to-one educational experience to each child, the whole approach to presenting information and helping students use it constructively would need adjustment.  This, in turn, would largely re-define what teaching and learning mean.

The equipment that will be available to students may soon be nearly unrecognizable.  While laptops and tablets are in some classrooms now, in the future, each child could well have a wrist-mounted computer.  More conveniently, students might have a computer chip implantedsomewhere on their person that could communicate with whatever serves as the equivalent of the internet in their decade.  In such an environment, teachers will need to figure out how to do more than merely direct students to websites for facts and then ask them to regurgitate them.  Teachers will need to be able to teach kids how to think critically and apply the information that is available to them in solving problems.  With any luck, and the right preparation, the kids of the future will go on to solve world problems such as hunger, environmental degradation, and geopolitical conflict.

Current Distractions

One immediate challenge, and one that teachers (and some committed, serious students) are trying to resolve right now, is the problem of distraction.  For the teacher, having kids involved in multiple social interactions online while sitting at their seats may seem like a class control nightmare.  For many students, the activities of their classmates may prove fatal to their focus on the task at hand and on the instructor.  There are, indeed, tools available at present, such as Insight by Faronics, to control and manage the problem of kids visiting websites off-topic, playing games, Facebooking, or simply continuing legitimate work but doing so when the teacher has called for attention.  They are even beginning to seem less creepy and intrusive.  Thank goodness, because in the future, the teacher may confront student web activity that may be nearly invisible to the eye.  The solution of some teachers at the moment, for example, some faculty at the Science Leadership Academy in Philadelphia, is to permit most online activity, but to offer no leniency if the student has missed a key instruction, or course content, and fails an assessment.  Thus, in the words of one teacher, there may be a great deal of what looks like goofing off during class, but one can distinguish the kids who are fooling around on their devices too much by their grades.

The advantages may outweigh such problems.  Imagine being able to teach several classrooms at once, in widely dispersed regions of the world.  This is already happening to some extent via MOOC courses such as Coursera.  A webcam, a decent microphone system, and a solid internet connection are all that are needed to reach literally tens of thousands of students globally.  At least one instructor, Al Filreis, at the University of Pennsylvania, reports that it was “a blast”. Of course, in the case of Coursera, there are plenty of teaching assistants and a good bit of peer reviewing by other students to help with the volume of work.  This model for making quality instruction available to the entire world is likely to expand, and the potential impact is hard to fathom. The limitations of affordability, cultural prohibitions (for example, against women in the classroom), and geography, will become simply irrelevant.

Imagine students being able to do collaborate in real time, with no barriers of messaging or signal loss. This is happening to some extent now using Skype or Facebook or one of the Google tools. However, there are sometimes delays in these otherwise rich media channels, due either to dropped signals, or slow internet connections.  A future of untrammeled, nearly effortless, and reliable communication will be accompanied by other challenges.  How can teachers design assignments and assessments to require rather than punish the inevitable cooperation that will occur?  This is going to require imagination and creativity, but good teachers are endowed with these anyway.

Many classrooms are already filled with equipment and software that would have seemed like science fiction just a few years back.  Many students have access to a breadth of information that seems to rival Dr. Who.  With any luck, these kids will go on to use all these resources to solve tough global problems like hunger, environmental degradation, and conflict.

About the Author: Alex Dundee is a professional blog writer and editor. Alex currently works with Place4Papers.com – quality content management service, specializing in academic guides and educational materials. Alex loves to spend his free time with family and friends.

Post Source : http://www.edudemic.com/future-education-sci-fi-think/

Contact Us -

Web- www.mschools.co.in, www.linkites.com

Email - enquiry@mschools.co.in, info@linkites.com

Phone - +91-731-2401952

Skype - mschools, linkites

                         

Useful Way To Teach Basic Math

                           

By Katie Lepi

So you guys have probably figured it out by now: I like graphic visualizations of just about anything. Accordingly, the fabulous artist Grant Snider has that on his side: I absolutely love his stuff. And tons of it is educational and funny.

So here’s your visual of the day: a math visualization. Grant helps you meet the numbers in his typically witty way. So the next time your students can’t remember what an imaginary number is, you can remind them that its like the unicorn number.

Post Source : http://www.edudemic.com/teach-basic-math/

Contact Us -

Web- www.mschools.co.in, www.linkites.com

Email - enquiry@mschools.co.in, info@linkites.com

Phone - +91-731-2401952

Skype - mschools, linkites