I used to recoil when the term “leverage” was applied to computers in educational settings; I had heard too many administrators and vendors describe how some tool could be “leveraged to improve student outcomes.” As we chatted while waiting for a meeting to begin, an English-teaching colleague pointed out that the word really does apply Read More
Author: Gary Ackerman
An Old Guy’s Story of Media
The need to train and retrain teachers has taken on increased importance as digital computers have arrived in schools. As an undergraduate student enrolled in a course on teaching methods, I made an appointment with the staff at a small media office and had them sign a sheet confirming that I successfully threaded a film Read More
Elevator Pitch on Zone of Proxial Development
Like all Vygotskian ideas, the zone of proximal development (ZPD) is a complex theory, but it can be reduced to a few simple principles that are quite easy to understand. First, within any domain of human knowledge, there are problems that an individual can solve easily and there are others that are too complex to Read More
It Isn’t Your Parents’ #edtech
For generations, a fundamental purpose of schools has been to give students experience using the dominant information technology and data sources. When the dominant data type was printed and scripted on paper, education took a very familiar format. Reading, writing, performing calculations on paper, and drawing on paper became the fundamental skills practiced as one Read More
Elevator Pitch: IT Leadership
When the leadership team comprises individuals who admit they are not “technology people,” they will often defer to the technology leader on all decisions other than budgets. They reason, “as long as they have the budget, I trust them to keep stuff up and running.” This makes sense as education leaders lack the expertise to Read More
AI Can Help Learners
For generations, students returning home from school were met with the question “what did you learn in school today?” The answer, of course, has been “nothing” for just as long. What was lost on all those generations is just how useful that question could be to our learning. We know that reconstructing what we have Read More
File Formats
We have been teaching in online classrooms for decades now, and I still see faculty–many faculty–who take the files they create with their productivity suites and upload them for students. When they do this, they impose an unnecessary level of complexity on students. In some cases, they cannot open the files as they lack the Read More
Defining Intelligence
The arrival of ChatGPT brought new questions to the forefront of our thought. Perhaps it is more accurate to observe it reminded us of questions we have been unable to answer; some of these have been unanswered for a long time. The hard problem of consciousness is one that I have been thinking about. We Read More
Another Look at TPCK
Several years ago, I posted on TPCK. This post further develops my understanding of it. In 2006, scholars Punya Mishra and Matthew J. Koehler from Michigan State University detailed the TPACK framework. According to this model, three types of knowledge affect educator’s use of technology. These three define seven independent and combined domains of knowledge. Read More
Whom We Find in Schools
The composition of the leaders who set school agendas, policies, and procedures is an interesting aspect of these public institutions. In general, we recognize two groups of people who participate in schooling as adults. There are those who liked school or were successful in school; individuals in this group tend to advocate schools that reflect Read More