Tagged with:  

Integration of Pedagogy and Technology in Teacher Education: An Interview with Emily Hixon — from etcjournal.com by Lynn Zimmerman

Excerpt:

What is the nature of the course you are planning?
The new course being developed, Educational Technology for Teaching & Learning, will explore classroom applications of educational technology in K-12 settings and address strategies for effectively integrating technology into the teaching and learning process. Students will learn about technology-based instructional resources and the pedagogical processes they can facilitate.

What is the goal of this course?
Given the increasingly important role technology is playing in our society and the educational process, this new course is being created to allow preservice teachers to experience technology integration in a more meaningful way. It will replace a previously offered educational technology course that students were required to take very early in their program of study. By offering the course later in their program and in conjunction with a field experience, students will be able to learn about technology integration in an authentic context. This course will focus more on pedagogical aspects of effective technology integration, which was difficult to do previously because of the novice level of the students early in their program.

— Originally from GETideas.org by Jes Kelly

eCampus of the Month: Abilene Christian University — from eCampusNews.com by Dennis Carter
ACU has established itself as a leader in mobile education, particularly with popular Apple products like the iPod and iPad

 

ACU gives iPhones and iPods to its 4,700 students.

 

Abilene Christian University (ACU), long a leading advocate for the use of web-ready mobile devices in higher education, is taking its tech savvy to K-12 schools, where students are becoming familiar with the ins and outs of tablets such as the Apple iPad.

ACU’s commitment to mobile technology has earned the 4,700-student institution the distinction of being eCampus News’s first eCampus of the Month, an award given to colleges and universities that push for more advanced and efficient use of educational technology, establishing national models for small and large schools alike.

Five steps for implementing a successful 1:1 environment — from Edutopia.org by Andrew Marcinek

Tagged with:  

A hugely powerful vision: A potent addition to our learning ecosystems of the future

 

Daniel Christian:
A Vision of Our Future Learning Ecosystems


In the near future, as the computer, the television, the telephone (and more) continues to converge, we will most likely enjoy even more powerful capabilities to conveniently create and share our content as well as participate in a global learning ecosystem — whether that be from within our homes and/or from within our schools, colleges, universities and businesses throughout the world.

We will be teachers and students at the same time — even within the same hour — with online-based learning exchanges taking place all over the virtual and physical world.  Subject Matter Experts (SME’s) — in the form of online-based tutors, instructors, teachers, and professors — will be available on demand. Even more powerful/accurate/helpful learning engines will be involved behind the scenes in delivering up personalized, customized learning — available 24x7x365.  Cloud-based learner profiles may enter the equation as well.

The chances for creativity,  innovation, and entrepreneurship that are coming will be mind-blowing! What employers will be looking for — and where they can look for it — may change as well.

What we know today as the “television” will most likely play a significant role in this learning ecosystem of the future. But it won’t be like the TV we’ve come to know. It will be much more interactive and will be aware of who is using it — and what that person is interested in learning about. Technologies/applications like Apple’s AirPlay will become more standard, allowing a person to move from device to device without missing a  beat. Transmedia storytellers will thrive in this environment!

Much of the professionally done content will be created by teams of specialists, including the publishers of educational content, and the in-house teams of specialists within colleges, universities, and corporations around the globe. Perhaps consortiums of colleges/universities will each contribute some of the content — more readily accepting previous coursework that was delivered via their consortium’s membership.

An additional thought regarding higher education and K-12 and their Smart Classrooms/Spaces:
For input devices…
The “chalkboards” of the future may be transparent, or they may be on top of a drawing board-sized table or they may be tablet-based. But whatever form they take and whatever is displayed upon them, the ability to annotate will be there; with the resulting graphics saved and instantly distributed. (Eventually, we may get to voice-controlled Smart Classrooms, but we have a ways to go in that area…)

Below are some of the graphics that capture a bit of what I’m seeing in my mind…and in our futures.

Alternatively available as a PowerPoint Presentation (audio forthcoming in a future version)

 



 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

— from Daniel S. Christian | April 2011

See also:

Addendum on 4-14-11:

 

Tagged with:  
Tagged with:  

The Exodus — via social media — my thanks to Valerie Bock for this item

or

Happy Passover from aish.com

 

 

Faculty “buy-in”– to what? — from CampusTechnology.com by Trent Batson

Excerpts:

We can continue incrementally to find our generalized theory as a national and international enterprise if we are willing to wait decades and waste enormous energy and time on failed experiments. Or, we can make efforts to bring together the learning theorists and researchers with those who understand the capabilities of the technology.

At conferences of learning theorists and researchers, we hear about useful new ideas, research results, hopeful new ways of framing what we have gleaned from a century of careful thought and work about how humans learn. But, we don’t find that these learning theorists understand the dynamics of the new technologies sufficiently to recommend a path toward implementation of the theories.

At conferences of technologists, we hear of successful work in innumerable contexts across the country. But the technologists are not aware of learning theory in most cases, or they do know about learning theory but are not active in a learning theory research field. The innumerable technology implementation contexts, then, remain just anecdotal as they are not tied to a developing new theoretical construct.

The challenge is to build a cultural theory that guides academia to re-imagine itself in every tiny bit of being. Who is taking up this challenge? Where is our theory? Where are our theorists?

I hope our community will move away from the simplistic notion that somehow information technology can be “bolted on and not built in” to quote a colleague from last November’s ePortfolios Australia Conference in Melbourne.

Academic transformation is under way. Don’t put the technology first; put understanding of the technology implications first–the unifying learning theory. Second, start the changes on campus that will provide the road system for academics to use in our new landscape.

 

From DSC:
Having just completed a course re: learning theories, I greatly appreciated Trent’s article here. In that class, I was constantly looking for the applications of the learning theories. While learning to give up on the idea of a silver bullet, I was still in search of answers to questions like:

  • What does all this mean?
  • What’s the bottom line for such and such a learning theory?
  • How does this learning theory impact someone’s teaching and learning strategies (pedagogy and/or andragogy)?

Graphically speaking, I came up with these thoughts:
(Depending upon how you are viewing them, you may need to right click on these graphics and save them down to your desktop; them up them up in a new window/application)

 

 

 

 

 

And my thanks to Capella University for the underlying graphics/information here:

 

 

 

 

TEDxNYED -- March 2011

 

Some presentations:

 

Will Richardson -TEDxNYED Talk -- 3-5-11

From DSC:
A couple of my take-aways from Will’s presentation:
We need life prep, not test prep.
We need a “different” system vs striving to make the current system “better”.

 

Also see:

 

Also see the TEDxNYED Speaker Lineup:

  • Don Buckley, Co-Host
  • Sylvia Martinez, Co-Host
  • Rinat Aruh
  • Steve Bergen
  • Patrick Carman
  • Luyen Chou
  • Brian Crosby
  • Maria Fico and John Ellrodt
  • Lucy Gray
  • Heidi Hayes Jacobs
  • Dennis Littky
  • Morley
  • Stacey Murphy
  • Will Richardson
  • Alan November
  • Gary S. Stager
  • Samona Tait
  • Homa Tavangar

 

 

From DSC:
Though I saw this posted at a variety of blogs/social learning sites,
it’s definitely worth relaying here for those who might have missed it.


 

Campus ed tech ‘must haves’ by 2014 — from InsideHigherEd.com by Joshua Kim

 

Digital skills in Higher Education - Spring 2011

April 2011:
Hear from analyst Ellen Wagner as she covers research showing the expansion of technology in higher education. Evolving expectations for digital skills for students and faculty require use of technology that have traditionally been used by art and design schools.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Also see:

 

Skype Community Comes to the Classroom — from The Journal by David Nagel

Skype in the classroom offers teachers a free platform for communications and collaboration.
Skype in the classroom offers teachers a free platform for communications and collaboration.

Skype has launched a global community for educators called Skype in the classroom.

The free service is focused on connecting teachers from around the world to allow them to communicate, collaborate on projects, draw expertise from one another, and share learning materials and best practices. It also serves as a launchpad for connecting students with their peers in classrooms across the planet using Skype video.

 

 

Addendum on 4/1/11:

© 2024 | Daniel Christian