Expert Perspectives


Is Your District Future Ready?

Encouraging school leaders to think deeply about equity, agency and leadership when actualizing or revisioning technology integration plans.

Blended Learning: A Common Sense, Teacher-Friendly Definition

The term “blended learning” accurately describes the pedagogical practices that are taking place in 1-to-1 classrooms. This week’s screed (aka blog post) describes the following unfortunate fact: the term “blended learning” is being used by some to mean “adaptive, personalized learning.” Grrr! Join us in keeping “blended learning” to mean the teacher-friendly, common-sense definition.

Evaluating the Privacy and Security of Ed Tech

When working with educational technology, responsible decision makers in schools recognize the need for solid security and privacy practice in software applications.

So, When During the School Day Should Teachers Create Curriculum?

OER – Open Education Resources – are being touted by the Department of Education as the key to future of K-12 curriculum. While there is no question that OER are a component of the new digital curriculum, in this blog, we answer the question raised in the blog post’s title.

8 Skills for Future-Proofed Teachers

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

Learning is in the Conversation: From Monologue to Dialog in the K-12 Classroom

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.

Learnings from a Traumatic Professional Development Experience

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.

Who Made Me Sick? Do You Have Cooties? A Participatory Simulation for iPads

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.

Free Online Tutoring Supports Guilford County Families

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.

Only Truly 1-to-1 is Truly Transformative

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.

Whitepapers