Technology in the Classroom
February 8th, 2010
Like it or not, what happens in cyberspace doesn’t stay in cyberspace. According to a recent Pew Research Center report, 15 percent of our students have received a nude or nearly nude photo or video of someone they know. Four percent are sending sexual photos or videos of themselves.
As teachers we know that the schoolhouse gate doesn’t serve as a barrier to information from the real world. The sexual text messages and instant messages (sexting) our teens send to one another during their online evenings can create a lot of trouble during the offline school day.
February 1st, 2010
Your students are spending a lot of their free time online. Think of the number of hours you estimate they spend online. Double it. The doubled number is probably closer to the truth.
According to the Norton Online Living Report 2009, parents believe their children spend 21 hours online. The reality is that students in twelve countries reported spending 39 hours online. Don’t tell me these kids don’t have time to finish their assignments or clean their rooms.
January 11th, 2010
Despite many recent online learning inroads in schools, many professional educators and administrators remain hesitant, reluctant, and perhaps even highly resistant to try online learning and teaching with technology. However, with accelerating demand for online learning, significantly reduced budgets, and the emergence of hundreds of free or relatively inexpensive Web technologies, that resistance is coming to a sudden halt. While some may prefer to wait for massive instructor attrition, lightning to strike, or made-for-movie serendipitous events to occur to change this situation, I prefer more direct approaches. Listed below are 10 such ideas.
December 16th, 2009
If you’ve ever had a technology failure in your classroom, you know that your best resources can be your students. When the DVD player spins and blinks, but doesn’t play, a half dozen students will volunteer to fix it. If your presentation file becomes corrupted, chances are you have a guru sitting in the front row who can open it and save your lesson plan.
Students as technology guides. The latest research proves what you already know: our students are digital experts. Project Tomorrow’s Speak Up National Research Project has interviewed 281,000 K12 students in all 50 states for its latest report “Speak Up 2008 for Students, Teachers, Parents and Administrators.” The researchers call our students the Digital Advance Team. These students are an asset to adults, especially those whose job is to plan these kids’ education and prepare them for 21st century jobs.
December 2nd, 2009
According to a report from The Center for Public Education, next to critical thinking and problem solving, employers believe that students should be prepared to apply information technology in their future jobs. Tied for third place are teamwork and collaboration skills as well as creativity and innovation.
In other words, employers want creative thinkers who can work in groups and solve problems using technology.
November 23rd, 2009
Web-based instruction has transformed traditional notions of education so swiftly that there has been scant time to reflect on why this is occurring. In a June 8, 2009 front page story in my local paper, the Herald Times, Bruce Colston, Director of the Indiana University High School (IUHS), was interviewed about the growth and benefits of programs like the IUHS. Colston outlined ten distinct audiences for the courses at the IUHS. The audiences he mentioned and several additional ones are listed below.
February 20th, 2009
Cell phones often are a source of distraction in the classroom. Despite admonitions to turn them off, someone forgets and everyone hears the incoming call. Text messaging, on the other hand, tends to distract the instructor but no one else. Rather than fight the texting, perhaps instructors can engage students by encouraging them to text about the class subject matter. Obviously, this needs to be done in a structured and meaningful way, and Audience Response Systems (ARS) provide a promising model.
February 16th, 2009
Our students are digital natives, a term that means that teens look at the Internet, cell phones, instant messaging, and text messaging as a part of their normal social lives. Adults are digital immigrants who use technology as a tool to supplement our lives. For students, asking them to turn off the communications technology is like asking them to eat steak without a knife and fork. Sure, the kids could eat the steak, but it’s messy and awkward without the right tools. Our students are so used to their digital tools that face-to-face communication and online communication blend seamlessly.
That seamless blend of the live and the virtual makes cyberbullying, bullying that takes place through a digital medium, a more complex problem to solve than just turning off the cell phone or logging off the computer. Thirty percent of our students have experienced cyberbullying, the effects of which extend beyond the online universe and into their offline world – including the classroom.
January 16th, 2009
As of this writing, the economic downturn is the third longest since 1945. Families are stretching their dollars further and kids are less likely to wear the latest tennis shoes or play the latest video game.
We’re all tightening our belts, but some of us do it better than others. Financial literacy is important for students to understand, not just during economic recessions, but for positive life-long spending habits.
December 12th, 2008
If you’re like 60% of the teachers researcher Dr. Jeff Ertzberger surveyed, you want to use video games in your classroom, but you don’t have a lot of time to create your own. You also want to customize the game for your curriculum and state standards and you’d like the technology to work every time, and to have plenty of LCD projectors and computers to go around.
Ertzberger, the Director of Technology at the Watson School of Education at the University of North Carolina Wilmington, can’t help you with getting you the technology you need, but if you have access to an LCD projector and have basic skills with Microsoft Office programs, he has some game templates for you to incorporate into your daily plans at his Template Games and Utilities site: http://people.uncw.edu/ertzbergerj/msgames.htm.
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