School districts and the federal government are addressing the “mobility gap” between students who have 24/7 broadband access and those who don’t.
- By Christopher Piehler
- 09/21/15
The Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development just released a detailed study of the use of computers in the classrooms in 70 countries. It was no surprise that he study did not find improvement in student achievement due to computer use. It was a surprise, though, that OECD Director Andreas Schleicher named what he saw as the root cause of that failure!
- By Cathie Norris, Elliot Soloway
- 09/21/15
Charter schools, vouchers and now venture capital! Uber is the model: Squeeze out cost relentlessly, use software and everything will be wonderful! Where do teachers fit into this model?
- By Cathie Norris, Elliot Soloway
- 09/08/15
CCSS and NGSS are driving curricula and pedagogical change. Coding those new curricular materials, imbued with the best research, in HTML5 will enable those materials to run on virtually every BYOD computing device in the classroom. You read that right: every computing device!
- By Cathie Norris, Elliot Soloway
- 08/31/15
Over the past 20 years, boosters of several new technologies have promised to “revolutionize education.” In this week’s post, we review the various predictions about laptops, interactive whiteboards, iPads and Chromebooks. Ah, techies and their penchant for hyperbole....
- By Cathie Norris, Elliot Soloway
- 08/17/15
There has always been a chasm between what educational researchers do in their labs and what educational practitioners do in their classrooms. There is no well-defined path for taking an idea from research and putting it into practice. In this week’s post, we discuss the different paths across the chasm that Logo (the programming language) and the graphing calculator took.
- By Cathie Norris, Elliot Soloway
- 07/28/15
While educational start-ups are securing record amounts of investment, the percentage of computer science majors going into start-ups of any kind is actually quite small. In this week’s blog post, we argue that fixing the student loan problem would unleash innovation that would boggle the imagination.
- By Cathie Norris, Elliot Soloway
- 07/21/15
The “competency learning" movement is gaining serious momentum. But, drawing on decades of research in the psychology of learning, we will argue in this week’s blog post that competency learning appears to be based on a fundamentally flawed model of how learning takes place and how learning needs to be assessed.
- By Cathie Norris, Elliot Soloway
- 07/13/15
In this commentary, an instructional technologist compares teacher's fear of allowing students to use mobile devices in class with a parent's fear of giving teenagers the keys to a car.
“Social” as an adjective — as in social gaming, social media and social networks — is everywhere these days, and for good reason! We constantly engage in social learning: learning from and with each other. So is K-12’s current love affair with “personalized learning” a mistake? Hmmm.
- By Cathie Norris, Elliot Soloway
- 06/22/15