All Blog Posts Tagged 'EdTech' (23)

Through my PLN, specifically, through New Milford High School's tech trailblazing principal Eric Sheninger, I came across this news feature from CBS 2 New York on NMHS' success at integrating mobile learning devices into the classroom. They have a policy they call BYOT (Bring…

Flash Back:

Technology is not meant to be the end, but to be the means. Technology is a tool to engage our students. Web 2.0 has introduced us to new ways of creating and defining community. Just as the chalk board created new ways to create relationships between the student and the teacher and the nature of education itself, the digital universe we are entering is opening up new doors that will lead to a different learning and teaching…

Whew! Was I tired! It was hard to believe that I could have been suffering from post conference exhaustion when I spent the day sitting at my dining room table, but it’s true. Last Wednesday, I spent the day conversing with 400+ people from around the world and expanding my mind at Edmodocon. The online conference, run by and about the education social network platform Edmodo, was really quite the marathon…

My religious school  5^th grade teacher and I met the other day.  We are exploring how to revamp our t’filla curriculum using digital technology.  There are a lot of cool tools out there. Our challenge is to find one that appropriately meets our goals.  We want our students to be able to decode t’fillot fluently and to understand what they are all about – to be able to articulate what the kavannah is in their own words. When we looked at…

(Cross-Posted on AviChai's EdTech Blog, and dovemerson.wordpress.com)

"Technology in schools should be like oxygen: ubiquitous, necessary, and invisible" 

- @chrislehmann

AKA Chris Lehmann

Principal, Science…

Back in the 70s and 80s, the educational concept of Cooperative Learning developed and was implemented in classrooms around the world.  According to this idea, students are encouraged to work together to achieve a common goal (something akin to what we call Problem Based Learning).  The role of the teacher morphs into more of a facilitator, enabling the students to learn and understand the material on their own. Wikis…

About two years ago I first discovered Second Life.  I just sort of dived in and explored.  It was interesting learning to walk, touch, sit; and really fun to fly.  I traveled hither and yon, exploring strange new worlds. After awhile I got bored and stopped visiting. Also, it got kind of weird, especially after some entity in a hospitality venue for SL newbies propositioned me.  Sort of creepy when I think about it.

Anyway, I’ve just started to visit again, partially as a result of a…

I’ve been on vacation for the past week. While we basked in the sun and surf of Florida’s west coast, I was reading a biography of the musician, Jerry Garcia. Every few pages I would come upon a reference to a song or concert and would immediately grab my smartphone to go online and look for any recordings or, even better, video of early concerts…

I love VoiceThread. It’s a great platform that allows students to collaborate and create something akin to a pod/video cast. I learned about it this past fall and began utilizing it first with my congregational school’s 5^th grade class. Our first foray was into tweeting t’fillot -    rewriting Ahavat Olam.  Each student typed a personal 140-character interpretation and then recorded it on the VoiceThread platform. Then all the…

Recently, I have been thinking a lot about the Khan Academy, and specifically, Salman Khan's TED talk where he outlines the way his video tutorials in math can be integrated into a larger program of 'flipping' the classroom. The basic idea is that the students watch the video lecture that outlines the underlying mathematical concepts…

Thanks to Rabbi Green of Bnot Torah for passing this article on to me...

http://techcrunch.com/2011/02/21/phones-at-dinner/

It's an interesting article about a practice that is often frowned upon, that of using a cell phone (not to talk, but to text/email/tweet etc) during dinner. The author notices the increasing amounts of (often younger) diners at…

I saw this blog post today on Free Tech 4 Teachers (an absolotutely essential EdTech blog, by the way). 

It contains a very straightforward tutorial on how to create a google doc form that can be easily accessed using an iPod/iPhone/iPad, and the data can then be collected and analyzed in an easy to understand way.

If anyone is doing something like this in their…

Thanks to R'Tzvi Pittinsky for (as usual!) bringing a great EdTech article to my attention.

The NY Times piece, entitled "Math That Moves: Schools Embrace the iPad," focuses on a variety of schools and districts that have made substantial financial investments to…

Thanks to Leslie Salley, who tweeted about this...apparently, in Memphis, a place very near and dear to my heart and my hometown :) , the city (public) schools are putting place graduation requirements which include taking a certain amount of online courses. (See HERE for the article,…

In an excellent blog post by Brian Kuhn, entitled "Technology is a Game Changer for Learning," several different ideas about the necessity of using technology in education are introduced. What i found particularly powerful was a video embedded in the post, utilized to hammer home the importance of recognizing…