NewEngland

Four Prepositions Framing #edtech

Appropriate Proper Reasonable When we think about computers and information technology (ICT), and the models that educators have developed to use ICT in classrooms, it seems we can capture the nature of students’ and teachers’ interaction with it with four prepositions. Each is described and illustrated in this post.  Teaching about computers- When computers first Read More

NewEngland

MOOC’s

A colleague asked a question… she suggested I share the answer… So, I have several students taking Coursera courses…. also EdX and Udemy… there are other MOOC providers out there as well. The model for MOOC’s (massive open online courses) is generally the same regardless of the provider: 1) Some MOOC’s have start dates and Read More

NewEngland

ISBN’s and Citation Management Software

A colleague asked a question… she suggested I share my answer… An ISBN (International Standard Book Number) is a wonderful tool for writers and researchers to understand and use. The 13-digital number is unique to each book published, and it is associated with metadata about the book. Metadata includes much that writers care about when Read More

NewEngland

What the Tofflers Wrote About Rates of Change

In 2006, futurists Alvin Toffler and Heidi Toffler captured the relative speed of change throughout society with this scale: businesses appear to be adopting new information technologies and adapting to them at 100 miles per hour, with other organizations (such as professional organizations and non-governmental organizations) moving almost as quickly; families in the United States Read More

NewEngland

Semiotic Democracy

Palfrey and Gasser (2016) used the term semiotic democracy to describe the effects of participatory content creation on society. They observed, “any citizen with the skills, time, and access to digital technologies to do so may reinterpret and reshape the stories of the day” (p. 233). It appears high school students are providing us with Read More

NewEngland

Frameworks Defined

Appropriate Proper Reasonable A continuum can be created with educational scholars placed at one extreme and educators at the other; educational theory is placed on the extreme with scholars and models of instruction are placed on the extreme with practitioners. Between these two extremes, there exists a gap that must be filled if instruction is Read More

NewEngland

Putt’s Law & School IT

The situation regarding IT management in many schools is well-captured by the hypothetical (and sarcastic) Putt’s Law. According to Archibald Putt, “Technology is dominated by two types of people: those who understand what they do not manage and those who manage what they do not understand” (Putt, 2006, p. 7). Further, Putt articulated a corollary, Read More

NewEngland

Progressive Discourse

Appropriate Proper Reasonable As a wicked problem, the process of education—and thus the planning for education—appears different depending on many personal and societal factors that influences one’s perspective. (Stakeholder groups are commonly identified to categorize those with different perspectives on education; but that does not capture the individualized nature of one’s perspective, nor does the Read More