Determining what kind of technology teachers should be familiar with matters less than ensuring they have skills to adapt to whatever gadgets come along.
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