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Since 2012, the EdSurge Product Index has been the first stop for educators in search of learning technology solutions. The redesigned EdSurge Product Index_(BETA) features enhanced product profiles and validations from trusted education and technology organizations. Now, educators will be able to find the most complete, reliable and up-to-date information available on learning technology products.

Also see:

New Tools for Instructional Design and Development Teams — from learningsolutionsmag.com by Bill Brandon

Some Pods Will Outlast the Pandemic [Horn]

On 11/11/2021, in education, education reform, future, K-12 related, learning hubs & pods & microschooling, parents/guardians, reinvent, society, student-related, teachers, teaching & learning, by Daniel Christian

Some Pods Will Outlast the Pandemic — from educationnext.org by Michael Horn
Students, parents say they appreciate the support

And yet many pods that have an institutional structure behind them, rather than being fully parent-run, have survived. They are finding their niches and growing. Despite fears that pods would benefit only people in prosperous suburbs such as Newton, some of the most robust pod experiments have taken place in school districts disproportionately serving low-income and minority students.

How to Support Students and Families through Technology and Innovation — from thejournal.com by Jeremy Davis

Excerpt:

Here are just a few district-wide innovations that resulted from the pandemic:

Worked with our local public access television station to broadcast district updates and educational resources. We contracted with Discovery Education to post some of their content to local channel 3 for students without home Internet access, and we built a television studio where our Innovation team worked with district teachers to produce content for local cable from 8–3 every week day.

DC: Which reminds me of this idea/graphic:

Students were provided with Internet hotspots to ensure every student in the district could access the content and the video conferencing lessons with their teachers.
The Educational Services department created an amazing curriculum and summer school program where students could log in and complete curricular activities as enhancements to the curriculum and throughout the summer.
Created videos of “how” we could do both live and online teaching at the same time to help teachers feel more comfortable with the new way of teaching.

What is Stop Motion Studio and How Does It Work? Best Tips and Tricks — from techlearning.com by Luke Edwards
Stop Motion Studio is a movie maker that’s easy to use and ideal for students and teachers

Excerpt:

Stop Motion Studio is an app that makes turning images into video a fun and educational process for students.

Designed to be easy to use, and with the basics coming free, this is a useful tool to allow students to express ideas in video format. Since it is app-based it can be accessed on personal devices, both in class and elsewhere.

Also see the Stop Motion Studio website:

Supporting Student Accessibility: Digital Equity | Special Needs & More [Tech & Learning]

On 11/09/2021, in accessibility / UDL, Artificial Intelligence/Agents/LLMs/and Related, Bias | Diversity Equity & Inclusion (DE&I), bots, digital learning, digital textbooks, distance education, e-books, e-publishing related items (EPUB and more), e-readers, education, education technology, ethics, experimentation, face-to-face, funding / grants, ideas, innovation, instructional design, K-12 related, languages and translation, learning, learning ecosystem, Learning from the Living [Class] Room, neurodivergent/special needs, remote teaching and learning, student-related, teachers, teaching & learning, teaching online, United States, vendors, by Daniel Christian

Supporting Student Accessibility: Digital Equity | Special Needs & More — from Tech & Learning | November 2021

What Are The Best Online Teaching Strategies For eLearning Classrooms? — from teachthought.com

We Need to Make Schools Human Again. That Means Treating Teachers With Respect. [Yoo-Brannon]

On 11/05/2021, in collaboration, communications, education, education reform, health, hearts -- matters of the heart, K-12 related, leadership, more voice more choice more control, professional development, strategy, teachers, United States, user experience (UX), by Daniel Christian

We Need to Make Schools Human Again. That Means Treating Teachers With Respect. – from edsurge.com by Jennifer Yoo-Brannon

Excerpts:

The first thing I noticed when we returned to school after remote learning was that my conversations with teachers got real deep real fast.

But we are not just educators, of course. We are mothers of multiple school-aged children, parents of special needs students who need a high level of support, individuals with anxiety disorders exacerbated by the worldwide anxiety of the pandemic. We are human too. While we transform our schools into welcoming spaces for students, we must also make them a human place to work for educators as well. We can’t forget that we saw each other’s humanity—shared a universal human experience—and then return to business as usual. We must make schools human again.

Avoid toxic positivity. Toxic positivity is the belief that no matter how bad a situation is, we should all have a positive mindset about it. Toxic positivity isn’t optimism. Toxic positivity rejects or refuses to acknowledge how difficult things can be. This message is for administrators in particular.

From DSC:
When I read this…

In other words, the question is not “How do we get teachers to participate in professional development?” but rather, “How can we create a context in which everyone will want to engage in professional learning?” To feel human in our workplace, we all need to feel like we have choices and teachers need to feel trusted and empowered to make those choices.

…I’m thinking to myself…isn’t this the same for our students?

5 Ways to Make Edtech More Inclusive [Ofgang]

On 11/05/2021, in accessibility / UDL, Bias | Diversity Equity & Inclusion (DE&I), creativity, education, education reform, education technology, K-12 related, learning, learning ecosystem, Learning Experience Design, neurodivergent/special needs, student teaching/teacher education, student-related, teachers, teaching & learning, by Daniel Christian

5 Ways to Make Edtech More Inclusive — from techlearning.com by Erik Ofgang
Better communication with students and more representation within edtech are just some ways we can better serve all special education students with technology, says University of California, Irvine’s Gillian Hayes.

Excerpt:

Making edtech accessible to all students has always been important but as it is now an essential part of the classroom, it has never been more vital.

Gillian Hayes, vice provost for graduate education and dean of the Graduate Division at University of California, Irvine, has studied edtech accessibility extensively. Making technology more accessible in the classroom is one of her goals at The Connecting the EdTech Research EcoSystem (CERES), which she coleads with UCI colleague Candice Odgers.

She shares strategies for how educators, programmers, and researchers can help foster more accessibility in edtech.

Getting the word out to our learners about the best ways for them to study [Christian]

On 11/05/2021, in Canvas - and other Instructure-related items, CMS/LMS, colleges, communities of practice, community colleges, corporate / business world, corporate universities / corporate training, Daniel S. Christian, digital learning, education, education reform, education technology, elearning, higher education, ideas, instructional design, IT in HE, K-12 related, law schools, learning, learning ecosystem, Learning Experience Design, Learning from the Living [Class] Room, learning hubs & pods & microschooling, learning spaces, learning theories, liberal arts, online learning, online media, pedagogy, platforms, research, student teaching/teacher education, student-related, teachers, teaching & learning, teaching online, tools, training / L&D, United States, universities, vision/possibilities, by Daniel Christian

From DSC:
I was reading about a Ph.D. who was currently doing some research into the science of learning. This person had been teaching in a School of Education for years, but just (relatively) recently embarked on a Ph.D. During this person’s research, they came across a lot more information regarding the science of learning.

If this was true with someone who had been in education for years (and I can relate to that as well), it made me wonder:

How can we better get the word out to our learners re: how they can maximize their Return On Investment (ROI) from their studying time and efforts…?

Then I thought, why couldn’t we put these tips directly into our banners on our CMS’s and LMS’s and/or link our banners to some other web pages/resources that provide such best practices and tips for our learners!?! This could occur within the corporate training world as well.

Examples:

Along these lines, we should have 11×17 (or larger) posters like this plastered in every hallway of every learning space out there:

10 great Chrome tips for teachers and educators [educatorstechnology.com]

On 11/02/2021, in adjunct faculty, faculty, Google, internet, IT in HE, law schools, teachers, tools, by Daniel Christian

10 great Chrome tips for teachers and educators — from educatorstechnology.com

A Crusade to End Grading in High Schools — from washingtonpost.com by Thomas Toch and Alina Tugend; with thanks to Ryan Craig for this resource
One educator is leading an effort to evaluate students differently. Can it catch on?

Excerpt:

He envisioned schools where students learned math, history and science not as isolated subjects in classroom-bound courses but while working together to address real-world issues like soil conservation, homelessness and illegal immigration. Such learning would make schooling more meaningful for students and thus more engaging, Looney believed. It would let students demonstrate more talents to colleges, holding out the prospect of a wider, more diverse range of students entering higher education’s top ranks.

The existing high school transcript, however, with its simple summary of courses and grades, wouldn’t do justice to the interdisciplinary, project-based learning he wanted. It wouldn’t capture students’ creativity, persistence and other qualities. Looney needed a radically different way to portray students’ high school experiences, one that replaced grades with a richer picture. But he didn’t know what it was.

Today, 275 private high schools and 125 public schools are part of the nonprofit Mastery Transcript Consortium (MTC). They are in various stages of designing and launching the transcript — and working to make Looney’s radical vision a reality. Started in 2017, the organization is expanding rapidly.

What is NaNoWriMo and How Can It Be Used to Teach Writing? [Ofgang]

On 11/01/2021, in adult learning, communities of practice, creativity, higher education, K-12 related, teachers, teaching & learning, tools, United States, web-based collaboration, writing, by Daniel Christian

What is NaNoWriMo and How Can It Be Used to Teach Writing? — from techlearning.com by Erik Ofgang
November is National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) and there are plenty of ways to have your class participate and learn in the process.

Excerpt:

National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) aims to help aspiring writers of all ages and levels, including students, get their novels written. Every year, tens of thousands of participating writers commit to writing a first draft of their novel within the month of November.

The NaNoWriMo program is designed to help writers silence their inner critic and get their thoughts down on the page, which it accomplishes by encouraging participants to wait until the end of the month to go back and edit, by helping them establish a deadline, and by using technology to help them connect and inspire one another.

Educators can facilitate their students’ participation in NaNoWrMo in order to teach storytelling, grammar, written communication, creativity, and more, all while helping encourage young novelists.

How to Get Students to Watch Your Videoshttps://t.co/m2EeDAkHqq pic.twitter.com/L8mMQIsXqg

— Daniel Christian (he/him/his) (@dchristian5) November 1, 2021

Can MasterClass teach you everything? — from newyorker.com by Tad Friend

Malala Yousafzai on set. Though the site’s C.E.O., David Rogier, says, “Learning is uncomfortable,” the shoots are lavish. Photograph by Lewis Khan for The New Yorker

Excerpt:

When MasterClass launched, in 2015, it offered three courses: Dustin Hoffman on acting, James Patterson on writing, and Serena Williams on tennis. Today, there are a hundred and thirty, in categories from business to wellness. During the pandemic lockdown, demand was up as much as tenfold from the previous year; last fall, when the site had a back-to-school promotion, selling an annual subscription for a dollar instead of a hundred and eighty dollars, two hundred thousand college students signed up in a day. MasterClass will double in size this year, to six hundred employees, as it launches in the U.K., France, Germany, and Spain. It’s a Silicon Valley investor’s dream, a rolling juggernaut of flywheels and network effects dedicated to helping you, as the instructor Garry Kasparov puts it, “upgrade your software.”

The Great Education Unbundling and How Learning Will be Rebundled — from gettingsmart.com by Nate McClennen, Tom Vander Ark

Key Points

The pandemic accelerated the great unbundling of learning – at least for those with access, agency, and advocates.
While unbundling will expand, how learning is rebundled will emerge as the next innovation — accessible, personalized, accountable and massive.

Excerpts:

By removing the barrier of full credit/school offered, schools become more robust in terms of richness of offerings as well as more personalized to meet the needs of students and communities.

The majority of unbundled experiences still fall back on the course level as the smallest granular level of choice. Following the lead of industry, unbundling in schools should mean a reduction in grain size so that skills are the level of unbundling rather than courses.

Learning Ecosystems

The EdSurge Product Index

10 great Chrome tips for teachers and educators [educatorstechnology.com]

Can MasterClass teach you everything? [Friend]

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