First the educational need, then the technology! Dialogue, not monologue, needs to be a primary learning activity. Supporting dialogue in the classroom, then, is a real educational need. The Collabrify Suite of Apps – free, device-agnostic, and designed expressly for grades 1-8 – meet that real educational need. Read this week’s blog post, increase dialogue by collabrifying your classroom.
- By Cathie Norris, Elliot Soloway
- 03/28/16
This week’s blog post is about how CN un-traumatized ES after his professional development "experience." Without CN, he presided over a 50-minute session on how to use our Collabrify Apps in the K-12 classroom, at a one-day professional development event at a regional high school. ES thought that telling teachers how to use technology in their classrooms was a '90s strategy — not a today's strategy.
- By Cathie Norris, Elliot Soloway
- 03/21/16
This week’s blog features a fun, engaging, and intellectually stimulating (free) iPad app: The Cootie Participatory Simulation. In participating in the simulation of the spread of an infectious disease – the Cuddle germ – children learn how diseases are spread. Usable from 1st to 12th grade.
- By Cathie Norris, Elliot Soloway
- 07/09/14
By making a live online tutor available to all 72,000 students and their parents on demand, Guilford County Schools is removing barriers to achievement.
- By Lindsay Whitley
- 02/24/16
The dominant pedagogy in classrooms today is still direct instruction, the pedagogy underlying so-called computer-based, “personalized learning” environments. But, we argue in this week’s blog that truly 1-to-1 implementations, which are only now becoming feasible, are the opportunity needed to transform classrooms and support educators in moving to an inquiry pedagogy, a pedagogy that develops students’ critical thinking, creativity, communication, and collaboration.
- By Cathie Norris, Elliot Soloway
- 02/23/16
Reportedly some 30,000 Chromebooks come online in K-12 each day. There are positive and negative aspects to that, though, as far as we can tell, the Chromebook invasion is mostly a good thing for education.
- By Cathie Norris, Elliot Soloway
- 02/16/16
This blog post kicks off a new blog theme: Reinventing Curriculum. Like teacher and pedagogy, curriculum is one of the keys to a successful learning experience. Due to three trends, we will argue, curriculum – its development, its distribution, and its use — is in a state of real turbulence. The educational community, in general, and educational technology, in particular, needs to focus on the “next turn of the crank” in curriculum!
- By Cathie Norris, Elliot Soloway
- 02/02/16
Media Specialist David Olson explains how transformations in the library are helping to enhance efforts to provide blended (or hybrid) learning in the classroom.
No question: the future of educational technology is blended learning enacted in 1-to-1 classrooms. But: exactly what instruction will be delivered? In the past, textbooks played the role of providing teachers with the day-by-day, week-by-week, instructional roadmap. Current lesson marketplaces, however, provide supplemental lessons; there is a huge need for basal/comprehensive, blended learning curricula. Curriculum developers: Listen up!
- By Cathie Norris, Elliot Soloway
- 12/01/15
Unlike a previous blog post where we pooh-poohed blended learning, in this blog post we do a flip-flop and hail blended learning as the model for the future of ed tech. Now our formulation of Blended Learning may diverge from the orthodoxy, but so what: We see a future where K-12 students, with their 1-to-1 computing devices, will be engaging in lessons that are computer-based and computer-mediated. You can take that prediction to the bank!
- By Cathie Norris, Elliot Soloway
- 11/17/15