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In addition to this annotated list of apps and ideas, EdTechTeacher’s Greg Kulowiec and Beth Holland also maintain the iPad for ETT Diigo Group as well as The iPad As… page which groups apps and resources based on learning goals. Technology in (SPL) Education | Recommended Apps by IEP Goal/Skill page This site provides a complete listing of apps to support students with learning differences. Tags: assistivetechnology, iPad, apps, education, differentiation Reading: The Core Skill:Reading Remixed This is a great article about the evolution of reading. Given the influx of iPads and eReaders into classrooms, the concept of “books” is certainly changing.…
As I argued in my #beyondthetextbook post, I believe it’s naïve to assume textbooks will disappear from our classrooms anytime soon. A more realistic outcome, in fact, is a transition from the print textbook to the digital textbook. By this, I am not discouraging or discounting the incorporation of Internet resources. Rather I am simply recognizing that the time and skill needed to research and incorporate an array of “open” resources effectively is beyond the inclination and comfort of most teachers. Thus, it makes sense for us to focus now on what a digital textbook could/should be and how we can use…
In addition to this annotated list of apps and ideas, EdTechTeacher’s Greg Kulowiec and Beth Holland also maintain the iPad for ETT Diigo Group as well as The iPad As… page which groups apps and resources based on learning goals. Noteshelf This note taking app includes multiple pen and highlighter tools and functions much like a paper notebook. For $5.99, it offers a lot of organizational and editing tools. Additionally, Noteshelf exports notes as PDF or image files to either Evernote or Dropbox. Tags: ipad, apps, technology, notetaking iPad Insight | iPad blog for app reviews, news, tips,how-tos Another great source for…
In addition to working for EdTechTeacher, Beth Holland also coaches a high school sailing team. Recently, on her blog, when describing a situation with some of her sailors, she wrote: “About half-way through our lesson, I looked at my group’s slightly glassed over expressions and said, Go get a notebook and write all of this down! As the words came out of my mouth, I stopped in my tracks, turned to them and then said, “No, wait, go get something to keep track of this information. I don’t care if it’s a notebook, a Google Collection, Evernote, or some random…
In addition to this annotated list of apps and ideas, EdTechTeacher’s Greg Kulowiec and Beth Holland also maintain the iPad for ETT Diigo Group as well as The iPad As… page which groups apps and resources based on learning goals. The Best Sites To Practice Speaking English Though this is not necessarily a post specific to the iPad, many of the suggested resources either have apps or can be used on the iPad via a web browser. There are some interesting concepts for ELL/ESL or even foreign language learning. Tags: audio, resources, esl, pronunciation, ipad, apps, english, foreign language Online converter –…
I followed with keen interest Monday’s #beyondthetextbook Twitter chat stemming from an onsite roundtable discussion at Discovery Communication headquarters. Not only is the future of textbooks a pertinent educational topic, but this particular event (online and onsite) brought together some of the country’s leading edtech integrationists – David Warlick, Wes Freyer, and Angela Maiers, just to name of few. While many tweeted gleefully and expectantly about a textbook-free age and transformations wrought by “open” resources, I was struck by the lack of scrutiny of the educational textbook industry. Some might be surprised by what my colleagues and I have learned about industry efforts to leverage the affordances…
In addition to this annotated list of apps and ideas, EdTechTeacher’s Greg Kulowiec and Beth Holland also maintain the iPad for ETT Diigo Group as well as The iPad As… page which groups apps and resources based on learning goals. Best content in ISTE Mobile Learning | Diigo – Groups This Diigo group posts links not only about the iPad, but about mobile learning in general. It is sponsored by the International Society for Technology in Education (ISTE). Tags: ipad, apps, education, technology, ISTE, SIGML SIGML & ISTE Mobile Learning Wiki “SIGML is the ISTE special interest group that is an advocate…
For the past several weeks, Greg has been working to set up two iPad carts in his school (we posted iPad Cart & App Selection last week). Now that everything is up and running, he has embarked on a completely paperless research process with colleague @katrinakennett and her 10th grade English class. This will be a three week process, throughout which, Greg is going to blog his observations. Here is the beginning from Greg: “Before we start the process, we had a conversation about the goals of this research process and why iPads would be a good fit. I think it is critical…
In addition to this annotated list of apps and ideas, EdTechTeacher’s Greg Kulowiec and Beth Holland also maintain the iPad for ETT Diigo Group as well as The iPad As… page which groups apps and resources based on learning goals. iStudiez Pro for your Mac, iPhone, iPad This is an interesting app for students looking to get rid of their paper planner. It works on an iPad, iPhone, or as a Mac App. For $2.99, students can track assignments, schedules, and projects. Tags: app, ipad, education, organization The Apple iPad in Education Workshop & Course | John Larkin “The aim of this…
After two weeks of setting his school up with two new iPad carts, Greg posted iPad Cart & App Selection to his blog, chronicling some of the decision making process that he employed in setting up two carts of 30 iPads for his school. Rather than focusing first on the apps, Greg took a goal-based approach, much like the one implemented in the design of the EdTechTeacher iPad As… page, where apps are suggested based on how they help teachers and students achieve specified learning objectives. “I am in the process of setting up an iPad cart at my…
In addition to this annotated list of apps and ideas, EdTechTeacher’s Greg Kulowiec and Beth Holland also maintain the iPad for ETT Diigo Group as well as The iPad As… page which groups apps and resources based on learning goals. iPad Apps to Meet 14 Learning Objectives Richard Byrne of Free Technology for Teachers featured the new EdTechTeacher iPad As… page. His blog is full of great posts about how educators can integrate iPads into their curriculum. iPad Adventures at Lower School This is a great teacher blog from an educator at Sidwell Friends School, chronicling her use of iPads in the…
Tom, myself, and our colleagues at EdTechTeacher have worked hard over the last year to put together a fabulous program for our first ever Winter Conference on the theme of Leading Change in Changing Times. Our theme is not simply a slogan; we have designed our conference very deliberately to address three essential questions facing school and district leaders: Why change? How do we build stakeholder support for new learning initiatives? How do we foster change? What does technology-rich, 21st century learning look like in classrooms? What can leaders do to promote that kind of learning? How do we assess change?…
For Immediate Release from EdTechTeacher Co-Director, Justin Reich (also at http://www.edtechresearcher.com/2012/02/the-state-of-wiki-usage-in-u-s-k-12-schools/) I’m very pleased to announce that the first report from my research project, the Distributed Collaborative Learning Communities project, is published in this month’s issue of Educational Researcher, the flagship journal of the American Educational Research Association. The article can be found through this direct link or at this landing page and is titled, “The State of Wiki Usage in U.S. K-12 Schools: Leveraging Web 2.0 Data Warehouses to Assess Quality and Equality in U.S. K-12 Schools.” I’m very grateful to the Hewlett Foundation’s Open Educational Resources initiative for financial support, and to my co-authors Richard…
The iPad As… In addition to this annotated list of apps and ideas, EdTechTeacher’s Greg Kulowiec and Beth Holland have recently completed a new type of resource for teachers looking to integrate iPads into the their curricula. Check out The iPad As… for a list of their favorite apps organized by learning goal. They will continue to also maintain the Diigo Group as well as build on this new list. Learning Without Boundaries The Virginia Department of Education helped to create this list of apps for students. You can download them from the Apple App Store. Some of them include digital texts…
At the annual National Council for the Social Studies (NCSS) conference this fall, Greg Kulowiec presented with three colleagues on the topic of Video in the Classroom. Edutopia regularly features great examples of Project-Based Learning and Comprehensive Assessment, and the presentation that Greg and his colleagues delivered addresses both of those themes. In the article, Lights, Camera . . . Engagement! Three Great Tools for Classroom Video, Ron Peck presents the slides from NCSS as well as simple directions and classroom examples that leverage Animoto, Common Craft style, and Choose Your Own Adventure videos. Their Google Presentation is embedded below. What makes video a…
At EdTechTeacher, we have been wrestling with four essential questions: Why Change? What Does Change Look Like? How Do You Lead Change? How Do You Assess Change? Last week, EdTechTeacher Co-Director Justin Reich touched on some of these questions on EdTechResearcher. In his post on February 13th, Which Facts Do We Need?, Justin wrote: “What kinds of knowledge do you have to have at your fingertips in order to create new knowledge?… This was a question that my 11.125 [MIT class] began the class wrestling with, as we read from John Bransford’s excellent (and free) How Students Learn. Bransford introduces three key…
EdTechTeacher’s Greg Kulowiec and Beth Holland maintain a Diigo Group full of iPad resources. The list below represents their finds for the week of February 5, 2012. This week’s list features some of the apps discussed during their iPads in the Classroom and Web 2.0 Tools for Teachers webinars. Smashwords — Ebooks from independent authors and publishers This site helps to publish, disseminate, and market ePubs. Tags: iPad, apps, ebooks, digital content, publishing, self-publishing Wolfram|Alpha App WolframAlpha is an alternative search engine that is based on providing computational results. Now, there is an app. Tags: iPad, apps, education, technology, science,…
Over the past few weeks, EdTechTeacher’s Greg Kulowiec and Beth Holland have presented two webinars about iPads in the classroom. (If you missed them, you can watch the recordings on the EdTechTeacher webinar page.) Two themes that came to the forefront of these online discussions included Creating & Reading Digital Content and Student Learning. Both Greg & Beth have elaborated on these themes through recent blog posts. Creating & Reading on the iPad During the iPads in the Classroom Part 1 webinar, Greg spoke about the potential for using annotation tools with custom digital content generated from web pages. “One…
EdTechTeacher’s Greg Kulowiec and Beth Holland maintain a Diigo Group full of iPad resources. The list below represents their finds for the week of January 30, 2012. This week’s list features classroom examples, blog entries, and articles related to successful iPad integration into the curriculum. The Nearpod Mobile Classroom This is an interesting program that combines student response system, content delivery system, and student monitoring all in one. Schools can apply for the new iPad pilot program for free (at the moment). Tags: iPad, apps, education, management, content delivery iPad deployment: First school iPad deployment with iOS 5 step by…
As mentioned earlier in the week, EdTechTeacher’s Tom Daccord and Justin Reich are currently in Singapore as part of the Educators in Residence Program. The slides below are from two of Justin’s most recent presentations. Next week, Tom will be leading workshops and giving presentations on Advanced Search Techniques, iPads in the Classroom, Leading Change, and Assessment 2.0. We will try to post some of his materials at that time. Changing Cultures: How U.S. School Leaders Support ICT Changing Cultures: Teaching and Learning with ICT
Since the 25th of January, EdTechTeacher Co-Director, Justin Reich, has been working with school leaders and educators in Singapore. During this time, he has taught workshops on the use of technology in History classrooms, discussed training programs with the Educational Technology Division, presented on the use of social networking tools to facilitate collaboration, and visited schools. On his blog, EdTechResearcher, Justin has chronicled some of his lessons learned and observations. Singapore Education–Teachers Leading the Next Level of Work “So if you are one of the world’s best education systems, how do you keep getting better? In Singapore, the answer is…
EdTechTeacher’s Greg Kulowiec and Beth Holland maintain a Diigo Group full of iPad resources. The list below represents their finds for the week of January 23, 2012. This week’s list features classroom examples, blog entries, and articles related to successful iPad integration into the curriculum. Transforming Classroom Practice with iPad Content Integration – YouTube This is a video of a webinar given at the Reform Symposium in July 2011. The speaker gives ideas about best practices for integrating iPads into the classroom Tags: ipad, education,
Recently, EdTechTeacher’s Greg Kulowiec was quoted by both the Washington Post and the New York Times. In Teachers take to Twitter to improve craft and commiserate, Greg comments on the value of Twitter for promoting his own professional development. “I always tell people the the most valuable 15 minutes I spend, in terms of my professional growth, is when I jump on Twitter at night and see what’s going on.” The New York Times interviewed Greg about his involvement in creation #SSchat for Teachers Teaching Teachers, on Twitter: Q. and A. on ‘Edchats’. This question-and-answer session also included Thomas D. Whitby and Shelly Sanchez…
This school year, at EdTechTeacher, we are doing our first iPad T21 program. During our second face-to-face workshops, our participants raised an excellent question: how do we actually USE these in the classroom? This seems to be a common thread throughout the blogosphere as educators grapple not with finding apps, but the challenge of truly transforming teaching and learning with these new devices. When not working as an EdTechTeacher instructor and presenter, Greg Kulowiec is a history teacher and Technology Integration Specialist at Plymouth South High School. In the latter capacity, he collaborates with teachers to successfully integrate iPads into…
EdTechTeacher’s Greg Kulowiec and Beth Holland maintain a Diigo Group full of iPad resources. The list below represents their finds for the week of January 16, 2012. Feedlly Feedly is a social reader for your RSS feeds. It works across multiple devices and integrates with Twitter, Facebook, Google+, and Gmail. Tags: RSS, aggregator, web2.0, feedly, ipad, apps Pearltrees Unlike other social bookmarking sites, Pearltrees gives you a visual way to see and share your bookmarks. It also helps to consolidate bookmarks between devices. Tags: bookmarking, web2.0, mindmap, pearltrees, visualization Tony Vincent’s Learning in Hand – iPad Learning in Hand features…
The education technology community has been in an uproar today regarding the two bills currently in the house. As a community that has embraced Web 2.0 for its educational benefits, these bills could be crippling to all of the progress that we have made over the past decade. EdTechTeacher’s Justin Reich and Beth Holland have sent Anti SOPA and PIPA letters to the representatives in Massachusetts and Rhode Island. Excerpts of their letters are pasted below. If you are looking to bring this issue into your classroom, you may also be interested in these resources: Wikipedia and YouTube Battle Hollywood…
EdTechTeacher’s Greg Kulowiec and Beth Holland maintain a Diigo Group full of iPad resources. The list below represents their finds for the week of January 9, 2012. Sliderocket The lite, free, version of this web service lets you create presentations and import them from either PowerPoint or Google Docs. Tags: presentation, slideshow, web2.0, tools, ipad, apps, technology LitCharts.com The LitCharts Library provides chapter summaries to some of the most frequently read books in high school English curricula. It also features an iPhone App for reading. Teachers should be aware of this site as it bills itself as “the faster,…
After returning from a Teaching for the 21st Century (T21) Program workshop at Xaverian Brothers High School, EdTechTeacher’s Beth Holland reflected on her blog about how she could leverage new technologies to transform one of her first lessons. My first foray into using technology in the classroom came in 1999. Desperate for a way to help my 9th grade English students understand the content of the dust-ridden, antiquated text book foisted on me by my predecessor, the Director of Technology suggested that I try using PowerPoint. I had never heard of PowerPoint, and after a few hours of trial and…
To kick off 2012, here are a few new articles from us at EdTechTeacher. On EdTechResearcher, Justin Reich published Is the inequality inside or outside of your classroom? As he prepares for a January 17th talk at the Berkman Center, he writes: Teachers who had concerns about digital divides and did not use technology in the classroom often focused on within classroom inequality. They would talk about variability in home access, not wanting to have students feel shame, concerns that not all students could complete online work. Since not every student had equal access–or an equitable baseline of access–to technology,…
Throughout this fall, our webinar series Making 1-1 Work for 21st Century Learning has fostered discussion with education leaders from around the country and addressed key issues related to shaping learning environments that support critical thinking, complex communication, and new media literacies. During our final webinar, we will address the essential question: How Do You Assess Change? To conclude our talks, EdTechTeacher’s Justin Reich and Jean Tower, president at METAA, will host Assessing 21st Century Learning with Ann Ashworth – Associate Director of the New England Association of Schools and Colleges: Commission on Public Secondary Schools (CPSS), Paul Livingston –…
“I have a been working recently with several schools and organizations in thinking about the Flipped Classroom (we even have a summer workshop coming up at Harvard this summer).” Writes EdTechTeacher’s Co-Director, Justin Reich. I’ll probably write more about Flipped in a future post, but the idea is that you reorganize instructional time so that the most cognitively demanding tasks occur in the classroom. Content delivery should happen through online video outside of classtime, and the in-class time should be devoted to projects, processing, etc. One of the leading tools out there for flipping the classroom are the series of…
“We’re unlikely to have much luck improving student learning outcomes with technology if we don’t measure the impact of our technology investments and interventions.” Writes EdTechTeacher Co-Director, Justin Reich, as he addresses the essential question How Do You Assess Change? in his latest post EdTechResearcher. In the last year or so, I’ve been thinking a lot about how I can be of service to school leaders who are trying to figure out how technology should fit in their schools. In general, I’ve been sharing two messages with school leaders: 1) technology should be in the service of defined learning goals and 2)…
Justin Reich, Co-Director of EdTechTeacher, was interviewed in DMLcentral about both his participation in the DML Research Associate Summer Institute and his work as the project manager of the Distributed Collaborative Learning Community, “a Hewlett Foundation funded initiative to study issues of excellence, equity and analytics in the use of social technologies in K-12 settings.” The full interview can be viewed in the video below. For more information about Justin’s research, visit his website, EdTechResearcher, or the News & Media page at EdTechTeacher.
This week, I presented Gaining Global Perspective in an Elementary Classroom at the Global Education Conference. An interdisciplinary project on which I collaborated while working as the Director of Academic Technology at St. Michael’s Country Day School served as a great case study for how to incorporate global studies, themes, and cultures into an elementary curriculum. The 4th grade teachers devoted most of their year to the study of Africa, allowing it to run as a theme through every academic area including the arts. Each year, the project evolved to incorporate new technologies, address differing learning styles, and enhance the students’…
Today, Headlines at the Harvard Graduate School of Education featured a video with Justin Reich. In addition to being Co-Director of EdTechTeacher, Justin is also a fifth year doctoral student at the Harvard Graduate School of Education and the project manager for the Distributed Collaborative Learning Communities project. “The DCLC project is funded by the Hewlett Foundation Open Education Resources initiative, and Richard Murnane and John Willett are the principal investigators. The DCLC team investigates issues of excellence, equity, and analytics in the use of social media in K-12 settings.” In this video, he discusses his research with the #edtech commmunity. Justin will be further exploring this topic as the…
Last spring, Lory Hough from Harvard’s Ed Magazine and I swapped emails for several weeks regarding the use of Wikipedia in the classroom. Her final product, Truce Be Told, appeared last month. Throughout the process, I started thinking about how I have not only changed the way that I approach finding information for research, but also how I actually work through the process itself. In middle and high school, I first learned the research process – a rigid system involving note cards, encyclopedias, card catalogs, more note cards, and multi-colored paper clips. Begin with an encyclopedia to generate a list of…
Justin Reich, Co-Director of EdTechTeacher, just returned from the Open Education conference in Park City. He has posted his thoughts on The Future of Open Educational Resources to his blog, EdTechResearcher. Instructor and Presenter, Greg Kuloweic, recently wrote about Cell Phones as Classroom Tools for teachinghistory.org – the National History Education Clearinghouse. In his article, he discusses two tools for turning cell phones into classroom response systems, Poll Everywhere and Socrative.
The EdTechTeacher team presented throughout MassCue 2011. Co-Directors, Tom Daccord and Justin Reich, as well as Instructor & Presenter, Greg Kulowiec, hosted several sessions during the event. Tom’s presentations at MassCue 2011: Assessment 2.0: Frameworks, Strategies, Examples Primary Sources 2.0 In collaboration with Jean Fitzgerald, Toni Carlson, and Elizabeth Kaplan of Watertown Public Schools, Justin presented Teacher to Teacher Professional Learning. Greg Kuloweic presented YouTube, Twitter, and the Curriculum.
I’m getting ready this week for MassCUE, the annual Massachusetts gather of the EdTech community. It’s held at Gillette Stadium, which is a quirky and awesome place to go for a conference. The Kraft family is very generous in sharing the space, and John Kraft last year gave the best impromptu “keynote” of the conference in his welcoming address. I’m very fortunate to be presenting at MassCUE with the folks from the Watertown Public Schools; we’re doing a session called “Teacher to Teacher Professional Learning.” Over the last five years, Watertown has built the best teacher-led, job-embedded, blended professional development program…
We are pleased to announce that EdTechTeacher will be bringing together the education technology community for an inaugural EdTechTeacher2012 Winter Conference on March 3-4, 2012, hosted by the Microsoft New England Research and Development (NERD) Center in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Leading Change in Changing Times is a gathering of educational leaders — both in and out of the classroom — to discuss and explore the impact of new technologies on our schools as well as the need to incorporate 21st century competencies into our learning environments. Participants will leave with both powerful conceptual frameworks and sustainable, practical applications for innovating their…
Technology now permeates almost every sphere of life and has proven transformative in diverse sectors – from marketing and communications to journalism and political campaigning. Technology also offers new opportunities for student-student and educator-student interactions and new audiences for student-created content. Yet, few educators have experienced the transformative potential of these new tools in their classrooms and few schools are aligned to meet the demands and realities of a 21st century society. Schools systems have spent vast sums equipping their schools with hardware, software, and network infrastructure, but classroom instruction remains essentially unchanged. Most educators continue traditional teacher-centered instructional practices, though today’s society demands a broader…
Emerging technologies, a globalized world, and a changing labor market are spurring innovative approaches to district and school curriculum design. Innovative educators are incorporating inquiry-based learning strategies that make meaningful and innovative use of the “Read-Write” Web to prepare students to be effective global citizens. With this in mind, we are pleased to offer a unique online institute from November 3rd-21st for school and district curriculum designers, academic department heads, classroom teachers, and other educational leaders, focused on preparing how to use new technologies to foster 21st century competencies in students. Nurturing Instructional Change in 21st Century Classrooms is an…
The technology on offer for teachers and learners today can be baffling. The question is: how can schools prepare their teachers so they can succeed in the 21st century? In this free webinar, co-hosted with ItsLearning, Tom and Justin explain how schools, colleges and universities can help their teachers develop the skills – and motivation – they need to use 21st century skills in and outside the classroom. Date: 29 September 2011 Time: 3 PM CEST Duration: 60 minutes We are excited to be presenting with ItsLearning as we use their platform to deliver the online course content for our…