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Why I’m in Love With Education Elements
After a few scheduling hiccups, I had the chance to connect with Rip Empson, one of the staff writers for TechCrunch that I admire very much. Rip covers education technology news for TechCrunch, focusing on major players as well as startups in K-12 and higher education. Not only is Rip one heck of a nice ...
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Takeaways from EdTech 2013
I was extremely excited to be in attendance at the Ed Tech 2013 conference in Detroit on Friday, October 5th. Hosted by Education Week Leadership Forums and facilitated by the staff of the Education Week Digital Directions team, the event brought together a number of educators, administrators and education technophiles from across the Midwest to ...
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Edthena + BloomBoard = The Future of Teacher PD
In the aftermath of the Chicago teacher strike, teacher evaluation is front and center when it comes to education reform. Regardless of where you fall on the spectrum concerning how to measure the effectiveness of a teacher, I think everyone would agree that the current approach to teacher feedback and development is problematic. Administrators and ...
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Personalized Learning Will Set Teachers Free
I had the opportunity to listen to Richard Culatta, the Deputy Director in the Office of Educational Technology at U.S. Department of Education, speak during an Education Week webinar titled “How to Secure and Manage the Untethered Classroom”. He touched on several items during the conversation, but there were two points in particular that stuck out to me. First, ...
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The Incomplete Story of Student Clicker Technology
For the past few months, I’ve been infatuated with student clicker technology. There are many variations – such as this one, this one, or this one – but the idea is the same: every student in class is provided a remote control-like device, and when the teacher poses a question, each student presses a button ...
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Knowing the Difference Between Student Tech and Teacher Tech
This may seem obvious to some, but I find there tends to be a significant amount of confusion around particular education technologies and who these tools are designed to benefit. Sometimes this confusion is perpetuated by the marketing department of certain companies; their technology is portrayed as a “must have” in every classroom, but who ...
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I’m Scared of iPads in the Classroom
A friend recently shared with me that her school district had decided to use its technology bond funding to purchase an iPad for every student, from kindergarten through high school, to use both at school and at home. I was immediately skeptical; while the community overall was excited about the announcement, which was touted as very ...
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Teachers: Please Stop What You’re Doing and Check Out GradeCam
Ever since I found out about GradeCam from my good friend and fellow edtech entrepreneur, Gary Tsai, I’ve been telling every teacher I meet to check it out. The gist: use a webcam, document scanner or your smartphone’s camera to grade multiple-choice assessments and automatically upload the scores to any online grade book. You can create customized MC ...
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Coursera? Of Course!
After a significant amount of searching around, I just signed up for my first two Coursera courses: Fundamentals of Online Education: Planning and Application (hosted by Georgia Tech University), and Gamification (hosted by the University of Pennsylvania) If anyone else is interested in joining me, let me know! As this is my first experience with ...