Art teacher Tricia Fuglestad shares 122 STEAM ideas ready for your classroom, accompanied by this energized video celebrating student work from her implementation of these lessons in her classroom. These lessons utilize practical technology applications to take studies to new levels of interaction with content and images. You owe it to yourself to immerse yourself in the possibilities for your students!
technology
Privacy Pitfalls as Education Apps Spread Haphazardly
Reposted from the New York Times:
In the Fairfax County, Va., school district, technology experts have conducted their own security reviews of several hundred digital learning products, and failed a few of the most popular ones. In Houston, one of the largest districts in the country, administrators are testing their own rating system for digital learning products and developing a set of district-approved apps for teachers.
And in Raytown, Mo., Melissa Tebbenkamp, the school district’s director of instructional technology, vets every app that teachers want to try before allowing it to be used with students. Among other things, she checks to make sure those services do not exploit students’ email addresses to push products on them or share students’ details with third parties.
“We have a problem with sites targeting our teachers and not being responsible with our data,” Ms. Tebbenkamp said. For school technology directors around the country, she added, “it is a can of worms.” The new tools are being pushed by a rapidly expanding education technology industry. Some educators, entrepreneurs and philanthropists are particularly enthusiastic about adaptive learning products because they aim to tailor lessons to the individual abilities of each student.
A Deep Dive Into Learning Innovation [VIDEO 12:39]
Shekou International School (SIS) is in its second year of reimagining learning through the integral use of technology. This snapshot highlights broad examples of communication, collaboration, complex thinking, independent learning and global citizenship. Discrete practice includes ePortfolios, visible thinking, feedback loops, makerEd, global partnerships and more. Find us at http://www.sis-shekou.org/innovation and #SISrocks.
Tech Disrupts Traditional Work…Is That Really a Bad Thing?
Reposted from Time:
There is a strong counterargument that the jobs and value technology create just aren’t being counted properly. “GDP was designed to measure the output of 20th century industrial nation-states making stuff, not a 21st century economy generating bytes and ideas,” says Zachary Karabell, whose book The Leading Indicators: A Short History of the Numbers That Rule Our World examines what our current system does and doesn’t tally.
Academics like the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Erik Brynjolfsson, who believes we vastly underestimate the productivity created by the “free goods of the Internet,” would agree, as would Silicon Valley entrepreneurs like Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky. His company may have 30 million users and only 1,600 employees, but Chesky says it creates many more “21st century jobs” by helping generate extra income for hosts who monetize their homes and for local businesses and such service providers as cleaners who benefit from the influx of vacationers. For New York City alone, Chesky puts the value of that additional income at $768 million annually, which the company claims supports 6,600 jobs. Of course, those are “jobs” without the health care, 401(k) or other benefits that a traditional position might provide.
Which underscores a disturbing truth about the new economy: it’s all on you. People who are smart, well educated and entrepreneurial may well do better in this paradigm. But what about those who aren’t as well positioned or at least need help in tooling up?
A New Approach to Designing Educational Technology
Reposted from Slate:
Neuropsychologist David Rose spent years helping kids with learning disabilities participate in school by creating digital textbooks with pop-up graphics, text to speech, flexible fonts, and other customizable features to fit individual needs. The books were so engaging “that traditional books started to look relatively disabled by comparison,” says Rose, co-founder and chief education officer of the Center for Applied Special Technology outside Boston. Not just textbooks. The crew at CAST felt that traditional lesson plans built around print were leaving too many kids out, frustrating some students while boring others.
So they flipped their approach. Rather than help individual students plug back into the classroom, they set out to transform the classroom itself. They built software and digital tools to pack lessons with flexibility, offering every student multiple ways to learn and to express that learning—including print, speech, graphics, music, and interactive games, among others. They called their new mission “universal design for learning,” and a movement was born. Spurred by the rapid advance of computers and broadband Internet in schools, UDL initiatives have sprung up in nearly every state in the last five years.
And now, Rose and his team have concluded that the most pervasive learning disability in schools, and the No. 1 challenge for UDL, isn’t physical or cognitive, it’s emotional—turning around kids who are turned off by school.
Sleeping Well in the Digital Age [INFOGRAPHIC]
If you find you’re waking up exhausted or having lots of sleepless nights, you can partly blame the many hours you spend staring at screens of various sizes. A number of studies that have recently emerged suggest that the closer to bedtime you use your phone or tablet, the harder it is to get a good night’s sleep. Our bodies operate on circadian rhythms that play a role in how alert we feel throughout the day. And since our brains respond to light and darkness, that blue light emanating from your phone at 2 a.m. – when you are generally meant to be having the deepest sleep – messes with your internal clock and makes your brain tell your body you should be awake. This infographic by Boll & Branch offers more information and ideas on getting restful sleep in an age of 24/7 connectedness.
8 Maryland School Systems’ Ed Tech Success
Reposted from EdSurge:
As the birthplace of one of the first things you learn in school – the “Star Spangled Banner” – it’s no wonder that Baltimore is home to blossoming innovation. The city hasn’t just attracted edtech startups over the past few years, such as Common Curriculum and Citelighter. It’s home to schools and districts all driving technology use forward with an intense focus on how it can benefit not just students, but the entire community.
Before we packed our snow boots and scarves to head for Baltimore, the EdSurge team took a deep dive into eight districts in Maryland. We learned that while each district is undergoing methodical rollouts with devices, productivity tools and even big data systems, they are also being incredibly thoughtful about how they inspire innovation. From cohorts of schools experimenting with personalized learning, to afterschool community programs devoted to blending recreation and technology, these educators are committed to putting technology to work in the classroom.
Here are 8 Maryland districts and their noteworthy ed tech successes…
The Myth of the Minecraft Curriculum
Reposted from the Atlantic:
Everyone loves to talk about how Minecraft, the popular computer game where players build structures out of blocks, is educational. Indeed, the hype isn’t limited to people who make Pinterest boards, use Minecraft in the classroom, or writers who argue that the game teaches spatial reasoning, reading, computer programming and/or system administration. The parents I run into on a regular basis have also jumped on the bandwagon.
But the problem isn’t that children would miss out on such learning without Minecraft; kids can glean those skills simply by having interests. The real problem is that parents think every activity needs to be educational to have value.
The child psychologist Jean Piaget famously argued in 1936 that spontaneous, imaginative play leads to cognitive development. Kids, the theory goes, need to spend time playing super heroes, cooking pretend meals in pretend kitchens, or just inventing whatever comes to mind. I would add that, in addition to time and imagination, kids also need parents who don’t feel guilty about letting them play with wherever that combination of elements may take them simply because it might not look educational.
SETDA Seeks Ed Tech Startups for Private Sector Partners Program
Reposted from Marketwired:
The State Educational Technology Directors Association (SETDA), the principal non-profit membership association representing U.S. state and territorial educational technology leaders, announced today that it will begin accepting applications for the third cohort of startups seeking to join SETDA’s year long Emerging Private Sector Partnership Program (EPSP). The EPSP is a public-private partnership program tailored specifically for companies new to the U.S. K-12 education and technology market. No more than ten startups will be selected to be a part of the Emerging Private Sector Partnership Program. You can view SETDA’s partner’s page here.
Emerging Private Sector Partners will benefit from a variety of opportunities throughout the year to showcase their products and services, receive feedback and advice and engage in meaningful dialogue with state educational technology leaders. EPSPs will make their debut via a pitch fest at the SETDA Emerging Technologies Forum (ET Forum), June 26-27, 2015, immediately preceding the ISTE conference. Also during the ET Forum they will have the unique opportunity to participate in a full-day workshop led by SETDA’s Channel Partners and industry experts Charlene Blohm (C. Blohm & Associates, Inc.), Kevin Custer and Rita Ferrandino (Arc Capital Development) and Mitch Weisburgh (Academic Business Advisors). The workshop will provide valuable insights into the K-12 ecosystem and trends, advice on how to successfully market to K-12, and offer individualized feedback on pitch fest demonstrations.
Applications Due by March 17, 2015. To apply and access more information about the program and its benefits go to: http://www.setda.org/partners/strategic-partners/private-sector.
6 Technologies That Will Change the Face of Ed
Reposted from Campus Technology:
Makerspaces, wearable technologies and adaptive learning technologies are three of the six technologies that will have a profound impact on higher education within the next five years, according to the NMC Horizon Report: 2015 Higher Education Edition, released Wednesday by the New Media Consortium and the Educause Learning Initiative.
The annual report is developed by a panel of higher education experts to identify major developments in education technology and technological trends that will help shape teaching and learning in the near future. The researchers also identify the six most significant challenges facing education in the coming years.
Technological developments are sorted into three categories: those whose impact will be felt soon (or is being felt now), those that will come into p[lay in the mid-term (two to three years) and those that are a bit further out on the horizon (four to five years)…
Actualization 