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On Digital Information

With the arrival of digital electronic computers late in the 20th century, the stability and predictability of necessary literacy and numeracy skills and knowledge evaporated. The ability to know information and to be able to recall it on demand is a skill that is losing importance as online encyclopedias become available on handheld computers. Calculators Read More

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IT Skills & Educators

In the first decade desktop computers were in schools, most teachers had little experience with computer technology, so dedicating professional development resources to train teachers in the basic operation of systems (tasks such launching applications, creating and editing documents, and saving and printing) was appropriate and necessary. Soon thereafter, the local area networks and the Read More

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Elevator Pitch: Leveraging #edtech

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

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It Isn’t Your Parents’ #edtech

22: This Isn’t You Parents’ Educational Technology | RSS.com 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 Read More

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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