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The Tech Effect |
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Johanna winds up her stint writing for Internet@Schools by revisiting some of the tech innovators she wrote about to explore what they're up to and the "tech effect" of their efforts.
Johanna continues her examination of technology infusion in global educational settings with a look at how a "retiring" educator took up a teaching challenge at the City of Knowledge in Panama.
Johanna argues for and promotes a more flexible approach to teaching and using digital media through fabulous examples from the students of Ross Wallis, head of creative arts at a school in the U.K.
Johanna reports on how Deborah Hargroves is providing "large school" media services to two separate "small school initiative" schools that could not otherwise afford them.
In the scant time allotted for professional collaboration, teachers naturally tend to nestle into their grade- and discipline-specific niches. But they would benefit from shaking loose every once in a while to walk a mile in others' Keds.
This month, Johanna describes a remarkable high school student's work to create something he calls "EduSweet," an engaging solution to keep the school-to-home connection alive and kicking that marries the traditional components of online grades, assignments, calendars, and notes with one-step social networking.
Like most educators, Johann has logged in to her fair share of webinars. These seminars, conducted through the internet, have some distinct advantages over the traditional, face-to-face group meetings. But they're "different," so Johanna has used this month's Tech Effect column to talk about how you, as a webinar instructor or presenter, can make them work well.
Teachers are entrusted to provide a broad and lasting education to their students. That means, in part, exposing them to both many forms and many formats of literature. If we can help them to see the connections between those formats, then all the better. When we can lead them to see, understand, and thoughtfully combine print and nonprint formats as tools for their own expression of ideas and mastery, then we have begun to arm them with the tools necessary for lifelong learning. The faculty and staff of Chets Creek Elementary School in Jacksonville, Fla., have managed to do just that, as Johanna Riddle demonstrates in this month's Tech Effect column.
Most of today's teachers are comfortable with the notion of technology inclusion. On nearly every campus today, you will see students using online or software programs to supplement and extend learning. Infusion is another paradigm altogether, one that emphasizes technology as an essential partner—and many times, as the creative element—in traditional learning. Technology applications become one of many parts that contribute to the everyday education of students. Learning remains curriculum-based, but those tech apps—research, digital storytelling, websites—are now embedded into the disciplines.
Podcasting, a morph of the words "iPod" and "broadcast," was first coined by U.K. journalist Ben Hammersley. (In fact, it was declared to be 2005's Word of the Year by The New Oxford American Dictionary, edging out both "Sudoku" and "trans fat" for the philological nod.) The digital medium quickly found its way into the classroom, and why not? After all, it's free, easy, and accessible, and it has the ability to power up education for students from kindergarten to college.
Samsula School has been a successful institution since its inception in 1912, in no small part due to the commitment and involvement of the Samsula, Fla., community. But the school community had to think on its feet in February 2008 when the public school district announced its intention to close the doors of the small, rural campus, along with those of several other rural and minority schools across the county. Johanna Riddle recounts how that thinking led to action … and the hammering out of an alliance with a successful charter school that kept Samsula's doors open.
A 9-year-old girl is poised on the surface of the moon, a spaceship and stars in the background. Her fellow voyager, in the form of an orange, cylindrically shaped robot, responds to her conversation with an unintelligible mechanized beep. These two space pioneers are engaged in a lively discourse about the nature and origin of constellations. Is it a Nickelodeon special? The latest remix of Lost in Space? A juvenile version of 2001: A Space Odyssey? Nope. Just business as usual as an elementary school class Johanna Riddle reports on produces another Pawprint Production educational video.
Collaboration is certainly the way that today's learners prefer to work. Technology-savvy students are creating a demand for learning and communicating collaboratively at school, just as they do at home. This trend is not only creating a new kind of learner but a new kind of educator as well—one who specializes in developing and sustaining a nexus for cooperative learning and who has the skills, knowledge, and contacts to connect students with resources. Enter Roxana Hadad—"The Collaborator."
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