Heather posted on Cultivating Minds
From Ideas and thoughts from an EdTech: Knowing When to Log Off
The challenge we face as educators is developing reflective skills, basic information literacy, and a balance between the digital and real world.
Over the last week, I got engaged in a conversation about integrating technology into classroom practice. The specific questions were:
- What should we teach pre-service teachers?
- What should we teach in-service teachers?
- How should we do this?
I haven’t dropped off the face of the Earth, but I’m sure it seems that way.
My personal life has taken over during the last week. You can see more on Ubiquity.
I’m hoping to get back into the swing of things this coming week.
Susan has a GREAT collection of ideas to bounce the dust off Willy the Shake.
E-Learning Queen: Taking a Class on Shakespeare on Your iPod Mini or Handheld — A Few Ideas
New flexible technologies make teaching and learning Shakespeare a raw, exciting, and relevant event. Envision a course called Love, Madness, and Shakespeare. It is possible using embedded journalist and video game-inspired collaborative strategies with the blend of portable devices, wireless laptops, desktop computers with high-speed or dial-up modem Internet access, and/or face-to-face instruction to accommodate your students’ needs and situations.
This is what Distance Education is about — getting out of the classroom box and into things you can’t do there. Oh, and there’s an associated podcast to listen to on your mp3 player if you’re too busy to read it.
Thanks, Susan.
In a comment on an earlier post, Sharon challenged us to get the conversation off the back porch.
Well. We’ve moved into the front room. The front room is a serverside aggregator tool that allows us to put an aggregation of the best, most interesting, most influential feeds onto a single page. Scott Adams and Rick Xaver (Rick! Get a blog, man!) have created this environment to begin to start a conversation about what constitutes the best, most interesting, most influenctial feeds — and Donal Little is anxious to start negotiating how we might decide.
Read the rest of this entry »
Last week I yanked the chain of some poor soul up in British Columbia who left this in the comments:
By your way of thinking, teachers are there to merely perform a trivial, rote task that could just as easily be carried out by trained parakeets? Can you be any more insulting to teachers? Why are they even there in your model at all? You obviously don�t like them.
Let me take the points in order.
- No. Toaster is a metaphor.
- Yes. If I put my mind to it, I’m sure I could.
- Because they are required to be.
- That’s a projection.
Read the rest of this entry »
When it comes to educational technology, who needs to know what?
I’ve been wrestling with that question for the last couple of days. Part of it is based in the whole “who should be blogging” notion. Part of it is based in the “who the heck are we” idea. Part of it is working through the strategic thinking about the AECT and its future.
Read the rest of this entry »
David Miller suggested a blog-journal with an editor and so on to collect the threads of conversations and collect them for later retrieval, consumption, and reference.
I like the idea of gathering the threads together in some kind of index. Maybe a journal is the way to go, but the thought that occurred to me was that the overhead would kill it. The blogosphere is just too volatile.
Then it smacked me in the middle of the night last night.
DUH!
Wiki.
So I started a page in The Overlay where we can start collecting and collating these ideas. It is NOT the best wiki available, but it’s there, it’s open to members (low spam), and it works. If any of the conversations gets too large (when the collection of conversations get’s too large), we can always split out the pages and give each topic a page of its own.
A New Literacy
Scott Adams did a tremendous post with references on how blogs are used and how they’re different from other online tools. He has a nice collection of links to people who explain, much better than I could, how blogs are different from discussion boards or regular web pages, for example. Behind the tool comparison, however, is an idea that blogs represent a new language – a new literacy.
Read the rest of this entry »
