Scott McLeod
When it comes to digital technologies, facilitating effective learning integration is the most important—but also perhaps the most difficult—task school leaders face. Like teachers, administrators often are unfamiliar with the affordances of many digital devices and environments. Even if they are users of digital technologies in their personal lives, school leaders may not adequately understand the learning and teaching uses of those tools. Ramping up entire schools to robust technology-suffused pedagogy is necessary but also can be quite a challenge. Read more
Technology
The Rise of the Global Digital Citizen
Categories: 21st Century Skills, Instruction, Technology
“Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has.” —Margaret Mead
When we woke up one August morning in 1991, the World Wide Web had officially been introduced into our lives. It seemed like a novelty at first, but then it began to attract more and more curiosity and interest as we explored its potential. Today our level of global interconnectedness is staggering, and the Internet has been incorporated into many facets of human life. We have become very aware of the need to understand this continuous rapid change and forecast parameters of safety for our most vulnerable users. Read more
11,000 Tweets Later—the Decade in Review
Categories: School Improvement, Technology
How Twitter Can Help Your Professional Development
I am reading the fascinating book Thank You for Being Late: An Optimist’s Guide to Thriving in the Age of Accelerations by Thomas L. Friedman, the author of The World is Flat. The title of chapter 2caught my attention and inspired this blog post. The title is “What the Hell Happened in 2007?” Let’s say a lot. The first iPhone was released, Facebook reached the masses a few months before, Android was introduced, the Kindle arrived, and a chapter filled with more. Thrown into 2007 was the platform Twitter. Read more
Can technology make the assessment process more effective and more efficient?
Categories: Assessment, Technology
More than 15 years ago, I was a middle school principal trying to help my staff implement the four critical questions of a PLC. We purchased a technology tool that was intended to make the common formative assessment process easier for teachers. As principals sometimes do, I thought it was a great idea! Unfortunately, as we got more sophisticated with our own assessment work, the tool shortly lost its glamour because it couldn’t do many of the things we wanted it to. So, I’ve been really excited to see how far we’ve come in those 15 years. Read more
Using eWriters to support reading and writing instruction
Categories: Instruction, Literacy, Technology
(Note: This post is co-authored by Kristine E. Pytash and Richard E. Ferdig, and guest authors John Dunlosky and Karl W. Kosko of Kent State University.)
Whether children are reading electronic storybooks, creating interactive videos and multimedia stories, or reading and responding to standardized tests in digital formats, technology is influencing what it looks like to read and write and how teachers and parents are using new digital tools to transform reading and writing instruction. As researchers and teachers, we are interested in these various ways technology and digital media support reading and writing instruction. Recently, we’ve been studying eWriters and how these tools might influence children’s writing acquisition and composition process. Read more