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Weekly News Roundup: ISTE 2011 Edition

July 1, 2011 | 10:19 AM | By
 

Audrey Watters

Another ISTE attendee.

 

The International Society for Technology in Education held its annual conference and exhibition this week in Philadelphia. While the official headcount has yet to be released, early estimates pegged the number of attendees at over 20,000.

In lieu of our typical weekly review of ed-tech news, we’ve opted to focus instead on some of the announcements that came out of ISTE 2011.

  • Educational animation site BrainPOP launched GameUp, a free resource that integrates educational games into the BrainPOP platform. The game titles include “Battleship Numberline” and “Microbes” and come from organizations like iCivics, Filament Games, and Nobelprize.org. The games focus on topics like science, math, and social studies, and like the rest of the BrainPOP materials include supplemental information for teachers such as how to use the game in a lesson, which curriculum standards the game is aligned to, as well as a link to one related BrainPOP topic.
  • PBS launched PBS Learning Media, an online resource with over 14,000 pieces of digital content, including video, audio, photos, and more. The content comes from various local public broadcasting stations, as well as other public agencies, such as the National Archives, the Library of Congress, and NASA. The site is available to teachers and parents, and the material is all tagged and searchable, so that information can be found by content type, age type or topic. See our full story here.
  • ISTE itself released a white paper this week that offers a first look at ISTE’s new standards for technology coaching. The proposed NETS*C won’t be finalized until this fall, but the white paper discusses ISTE’s latest set of standards and the organization’s recommendations for helping integrate technology more fully into professional development. Continue reading →
FILED UNDER: blackboard, BrainPop, ISTE, ISTE11, McGraw-Hill, PBS, PBS LearningMedia, project tomorrow, Promethean

How to Address “Yeah, But” Objections From Resisters

June 30, 2011 | 11:44 AM | By

Getty

What’s stopping you or your peers from making a meaningful change in your teaching practice? What are the “yeah, but” arguments you hear when you propose a new idea, a way to do something differently?

Rob Mancabelli and Will Richardson, authors of Personal Learning Networks: Using the Power of Connections to Transform Education, asked a few hundred teachers to list the “yeah-buts” they hear from other teachers, administrators, and parents.

The audience attending the packed ISTE Conference yesterday had a long list of complaints and objections they’ve heard along the way.

Here are just a few:

Yeah, but:

  • It’s not safe to let kids experiment on the Internet.
  • We need to block and filter sites.
  • It’s always been this way.
  • Is it standards-based?
  • We don’t have this technology in our school.
  • We don’t know how to use this technology
  • It’s disruptive to the classroom.
  • Will it help our assessment scores?
  • It’s not rigorous enough.
    Continue reading →
FILED UNDER: Culture, ISTE11, Rob Mancabelli, Will Richardson

Four New Initiatives from the Department of Education

June 28, 2011 | 2:48 PM | By

data.ed.gov

Interactive map on data.ed.gov

“Now is the time,” said Karen Cator, director of education technology at the Department of Education. “We’re at this incredible inflection point as we go from print to digital.”

Cator enumerated the ways in which the D.O.E. is helping to make the shift between the print and digital world at the ISTE conference yesterday.

1. TRANSPARENCY. Data.Ed.Gov is an interactive map that pintpoints which schools in the U.S. have broadband. It’s a collaboration with the Federal Communications Commission and the National Telecommunications and Inofrmation Administration. “If we can build those kinds of maps that we can layer on what’s happening in all these schools around country, that provides transparency and something that people can aspire to, follow,” Cator told me late last year.

2. DIGITAL LITERACY. DigitalLiteracy.gov was recently launched by a group of federal government agencies to help build computer and Internet skills, a free resource for anyone. A description from the site: “To provide librarians, teachers, workforce trainers, and others a central location to share digital literacy content and best practices. These trusted groups can, in turn, better reach out to their communities in providing them the skills today’s employers need.” Educators have their own dedicated link.

3. BRING YOUR OWN DEVICE ADVICE. For educators who want to find the best way to leverage their students’ devices, whether it’s their mobile phones or home laptops, CoSN’s newly launched Access4ed provides a host of resources about working experiments. From the site: “It will include conversations around key issues, case studies from districts addressing them, discussion of policy issues and how to address them, and opportunities to connect with education leaders in districts similar to and different from yours.”

4. CLEARING HOUSE FOR PROFESSIONAL NETWORKS. Cator described it to me this way: “If I’m a teacher, I maintain a profile, I let others into my professional learning network to see the conversations and the communities I’m a part of. I can follow fellow educators that might be involved in interesting projects and trying new projects in the classroom. So it goes beyond just following people on Twitter, but creating a profile for professional educators.” The idea of this “persistent online profile” is the Continue reading →

FILED UNDER: Teaching With Tech, CoSN, Department of Education, ISTE, ISTE11, Karen-Cator