Writings for the New Year 

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,…

Assessing 21st Century Learning: Free Live Webinar on December 20th 

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 –…

Every Kid a Khan Student? From EdTechResearcher 

“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…

Bud the Teacher Becomes Bud the Researcher, from EdTechResearcher 

“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)…

Connecting the K-12 Classroom to the 21st Century: article from DMLcentral 

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.

Global Education Conference 2011 

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’…

Thoughts on Digital Equity 

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…

The Mobilization of Research 

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…

Open Education & Classroom Tools – articles from the EdTechTeacher Team 

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.