Education is Technology

Mahara / ePortfolios: Case Studies

Long on conclusion, short on evidence. This doesn’t negate this page’s powerful ideas for putting Mahara to work for teaching and learning.

bcuhashtag:

MIT Pioneers Free Open Source Education Online, With MITx

A week after Youtube Education initiative was announced, MIT announced that they plan on launching “MITx” an open platform for free online courses, with the opportunity to receive a certificate for those students who display mastery of their topics.

MITx will be an open-source scalable software that will continuously improve and be readily available to anyone across the globe . Along with course material students will also be able to have student-to-student communication through online laboratories.

“It’s very clear that five years from now, on the web, for free…you will be able to find the greatest lectures in the world.” Bill Gates argued at 2010’s Techonomy. His point is coming true as TED, Khan Academy, Youtube & MIT are brining digestible classroom material to the web and evening out the playing field for those with a thirst for knowledge.

(via aghoulistmike)

On Monday, all but one student came into first period with a tablet. For students with or without executive function challenges, effective notetaking seems to be an epic struggle. New tools, tablets and smart phones, can’t immediately become powerful assets in this struggle if students still struggle differentiating main ideas from support, identifying types of support - reasoning vs. concrete details, etc.

—Unless there’s something inherent in the structure of the tool that is novel and exercises these skills.

That’s what I’d like to learn about Evernote, available for Android and iOS devices, as well as Macs and PCs. Evernote users can take notes on their devices in a variety of formats, with or without attachments, and sync them to cloud storage. The notes can then be recalled and reviewed on any system on which the client has been installed and internet access is available.

As I was teaching the students with Android tablets this strategy for using their tools productively, it caught on. The remaining student installed Evernote on a laptop running Ubuntu Linux using Wine. That was a positive sign, and the results by the end of class were encouraging: pithy, economically efficient notes were taken by all.

What surprised me is that word clearly got to other students, because by 4th students had their smart phones out and Evernote already installed. Their thumbs poked and prodded at the material as we discovered and constructed an understanding of it.

I’ll sum up my observations at the end of two weeks. In the meantime I intend to introduce some strategies to use with Evernote: Make PDFs of handouts with cam/scanner and attaching them to Evernote entries; scanning QR codes to make data entry quicker, etc.

A Day in the Life of the iPad Classroom

girlwithalessonplan:

stevekinney:

Jeannetta Mitchell, a veteran teacher of 20 years, is encouraged by what she sees so far. “This is not a magic wand,” she says. “This just makes it more fun for them to learn. Nobody’s just sitting there writing down the answer, saying I don’t know how I got there. They know how they got there.”

Even—if at the very least—all a given tool does is making learning more engaging, is that such a bad thing?

It’s a bad thing if you put them in the hands of half the school without training the teachers or giving them time to begin adapting lessons.