Google Tools to Support Bloom's Digital Taxonomy
It’s something that will eventually be widespread in classrooms everywhere and as Google Apps in the classroom gains wide acceptance, will be seen in your school too. Why not take a look at this presentation and try it out!
My foray into online teaching- week one notes
It’s been a busy but extraordinary week. This is the week I began doing two jobs at once- my regular day job where I teach science to excitable Grade 6 students at a suburban middle school. At night, and during other spare moments in the week, I doubled as an instructor teaching online for the Elementary Teachers Federation of Ontario. These online courses are for teachers upgrading their qualifications, and the one I am teaching is Part 2 of the 3-part Integrating Information and Computer Technology qualification.
Candidiates generally enter the course with a wide background of experience and knowledge about the use of computers in the classroom and the goal of the course is that they will learn skills that will assist them to take on greater leadership roles in the use of technology in their schools.
I’d have to say that I am very pleased with the way that the teachers in the class have built a community and shared ideas, resources and personal experiences in the first week. Already there is a sense of community here, and that they are willing to risk a lot to learn more. As the instructor, I am learning a lot from them too- and that’s the way it should be.
The Rodcast Reborn
So here’s my new blog, restyled and reworked in a new WordPress theme (at least for me). I’ve renamed it and made it bigger and better, or, at least I intend to.
Please take a moment to subscribe to this Blog’s RSS feed in your feed reader (Google Reader is highly recommended) and follow along with me!
School Hierarchy vs Network Hierarchy
This amazing little graphic that I ran across, published by PLearn on Flickr, really captures the two opposing environments. The question is, where do we fit in? What’s the learning environment that we create around us? How do we make the transition to the other? And how do we take others along with us?
Developing a Personal Learning Network is a revolutionary practice, but the next logical step, is to challenge one’s own colleagues to join in the transformation. And therein lies the biggest challenge.
eReader Textbooks? A Paradigm in need of traction
I just had a flash occur. One of those “ah ha!” moments. Schools are struggling with budgets. Textbooks eat away huge amounts of money each year which could be spent on other things.
What is a new paradigm existed for textbooks? Maybe it already does.
Read, Write Web reports that Kindle books now outsell print bestsellers.
What if we changed how schools deliver textbook materials?
What if books were made available to students digitally? What if, for now, schools that purchased hard copies were able to “sell” digital copies to the public to recoop part of the cost? Or maybe, to extend the paradigm, that the resources used to print the paper copies were replaced with school issued digital licenses to each student?
It raises equity issues, sure. But maybe, just maybe, we can move this idea along faster if we embraced it.
Maybe we need to start thinking of the 22nd century now, as Will Richardson, educational blogger has recently pointed out in a Tweet, since educational change takes so long.
Social Media at the Office?! Dilbert’s View
Click the comic strip to see in full view on the Dilbert site!
A 21st Century Education: Film Series
The film below is a must see for educators. We live in the 21st century. We teach in the 20th. How can we make the transition? Here are some ways to challenge our thinking about the need to move more quickly to change what is learned, what is taught, how we teach it.
The introduction to the film series “21st Century Education” can be viewed in its entirety here.
History as Art
The world’s history of nuclear explosions reduced to 10 minutes in the form of digital art.
I have written a lot about Internet filtering here and hosted a live broadcast about it.
This Edutopia report suggests there are progressive technology leaders out there prepared to take the risk. Are you one of them? Or are you satisfied with the status quo? What will our children say in 10 years about us when the rest of the educational world has already opened the Internet in more progressive ways that support 21st century learning?
Are we prepared to tap into the new energy created when the floodgates open, or are we prepared just to sit by and watch what happens. Will we be making things happen, watching things happen or saying, “What just happened?!” Canadian schools, without the economic noose around their necks that exists in the form of CIPA, the US Children’s Internet Protection Act, should be leading the way with this. Sadly, this isn’t doesn’t appear to be true.
The Rodcast 