I had AI create this post based on a chapter I wrote a few years ago. 188: Elevating EdTech Professional Development: Training, Planning, and Design If you have ever sat through a school professional development (PD) day focused on “technology integration,” you might be familiar with the following scenario: A room full of educators with Read More
Author: Gary Ackerman
Profile of Early Majority User
This post is the profile of an “early majority user” (Rogers, 2003). This was a school leader whose work aligned with the characteristics of one at that stage. Our project started with me talking with another curriculum coordinator at one of our regionalmeetings. He was talking about how they were supporting teachers. Teachers were sharing Read More
Google and Schools
I recently had a series of conversations with educators about Google. I was anable to point these folks to the specific artcile I read a few years ago in which scholars challenged some of the assumptions we made how Google uses student data. I promised a blog post pointing to it. Here it is! In Read More
IT Working Conditions in Schools
One of the biggest differences between working in schools and working in business and industry is the lack of a clear and unambiguous measure of success; in the vernacular, we can say, “schools lack a clear bottom line.” In education, they attempt to use test scores as a bottom line comparable to financial measures in business, but many educators find those to Read More
A Librarian and A Tech Guy Take a Stand
I once took a stand with a colleague against a program intended to encourage reading. I was responsible for managing the IT in the school along with my teaching duties and she was the school librarian. In this program, students read books, then took computer-based tests on the contents; students were expected to earn a specific number of points by passing tests each marking period. The librarian was frustrated by students asking for books Read More
AI Completeness
Today, we’re tackling a big question: What does it mean to be human in an increasingly computerized world? We’ll explore the concept of “AI-Complete” and its impact on society. The term “AI-Complete” refers to problems that are as hard as any problem that AI can solve. In other words, if you can solve an AI-Complete problem, you can theoretically solve Read More
Strategy and Execution
One of my LinkedIn connections liked a post recently. The post can be summarized as “community colleges don’t have a strategy problem; they have an execution problem.” The author details how many of the goals that have been integrated into community college plans in the last decade or so have not resulted in the expected Read More
Are You Being Scientific?
If you have read recent posts, you will know I have connected with a book written before I was born about the nature of science. In this final post, I continue to reflect on the fact that science depends on two types of knowledge, but that is often ignored in most descriptions of science. Nash Read More
A More Accurate View of Science
Science is a relatively recent human endeavor. I will state I am unequivocally a fan of science. I studied it seriously as an undergraduate student and investigated various methods of doing it as graduate student. I am ashamed that we have political leaders who bash science, the people who do it, and the lessons we Read More
Threshold of Impressionability
I’m always interested in the idea of becoming educated. What exactly happens when we have truly learned something? This idea is opposed by other things that we conflate with learning. Inert learning is the opposite of what is learning to me, and we are all familiar with this as we forget what was on the Read More