Beth Holland
Writings by Beth
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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.
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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.
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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…
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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…
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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’…
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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.
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“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)…
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“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…
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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 –…
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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,…
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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…
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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,…
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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…