Reinventing Curriculum | Blog
Here you'll find analysis and views on technology, policy and curriculum in elementary and secondary education by two outspoken technology advocates, Elliot Soloway and Cathie Norris. Reinventing Curriculum is published twice per month. Below you will also find the archive for Elliot and Cathie's previous blog, Being Mobile.
While computer technology can be used to drill information into students’ heads, we have to ask whether that is indeed an appropriate pedagogical strategy for the 21st century. We present an argument against drilling; join into the conversation, please!
- By Cathie Norris, Elliot Soloway
- 01/26/15
A study looking at the use of a collabrified text editor by fourth- and fifth-graders showed a small but positive effect in favor of the group using the collabrified text editor, with an interesting condition: The low SES students benefited more from working collaboratively than did the high SES students. VERY suggestive, indeed!
- By Cathie Norris, Elliot Soloway
- 01/13/15
In this week’s blog we take ourselves to task for what we have criticized “personalized learning” about: not integrating the classroom teacher into the design of educational software. A sobering reflection!
- By Cathie Norris, Elliot Soloway
- 01/05/15
“Personalized learning” is rapidly gaining popularity in the United States. In our blog we cast a critical eye on this specific use of technology in education. Cutting to the chase — and answering the question in the blog’s title — no.
- By Cathie Norris, Elliot Soloway
- 12/04/14
In this blog we introduce two new, free, collabrified apps for iPads: WeWrite+ (a collabrified text editor) and WeSketch+ (a collabrified drawing and animating app). The collabrification of educational apps continues! That’s good news: making collaborative learning apps ubiquitous means that a learner never has to learn alone again!
- By Cathie Norris, Elliot Soloway
- 11/12/14
In this second installment of our “Learnings from Singapore” blog post mini-series, we focus on the critically important role that “Ivory Tower” university researchers can play in improving classroom practice.
- By Cathie Norris, Elliot Soloway
- 11/04/14
In this week’s blog, we reflect on our 2010 prediction: By 2015 "every student in every grade in every school in the U.S. will be a using a mobile computing device, 24/7." Oops. We revise that prediction slightly and add in predictions about the Trinity of Educational Technology: hardware, software, and network.
- By Cathie Norris, Elliot Soloway
- 10/27/14
Students have definite opinions about what they want from education and from technology in education. In this week's blog post we review two recent surveys of students and discuss their "requests" to include more mobile technology and more coding instruction in their lessons.
- By Cathie Norris, Elliot Soloway
- 10/14/14
They say a picture is worth 1,000 words. Okay, instead of writing a diatribe on blended learning, in this week’s blog we will let four pictures from blended learning classrooms "speak for themselves."
- By Cathie Norris, Elliot Soloway
- 10/06/14
While sales to the general public of 10 inch-screened tablets (e.g., iPads) are dropping quickly, K-12 schools will continue to buy them. The challenge, then, is how to use these devices to support inquiry – 24/7, all-the-time, everywhere learning?
- By Cathie Norris, Elliot Soloway
- 10/01/14