Five Steps for a Successful Classroom Technology Implementation

Posted on June 7, 2012 by karen mahon

Today we have the good fortune to have a guest blogger, Ms. Erin Hommeland, who is a Professional Development and Classroom Technology Implementation Consultant.  She also has the advantage of being an amazing person.  Here she is…. –KM

For the past 7 years, I have designed and delivered professional development and training in the Educational Technology sector, more specifically, on the implementation of interactive whiteboards (IWBs). Getting teachers and administrators interested in the technology was the easy part. Talking with the decision makers about the implementation of and training with said technology was often where most of the discussion occurred. There was almost always a struggle with how much training was “enough” — and how much of their budget could be set aside to pay for it. I can’t tell you how many times I got a request that went something like this: Continue reading →

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Carrots and StickKs…Achieving Behavior Change Goals

Posted on June 1, 2012 by karen mahon

Last week I attended the 2012 Annual Meeting of the Association for Behavior Analysis International in Seattle, Washington.  It’s a meeting that I have attended nearly every year for the past 20 years.  As the years go by I find myself less and less interested in most of the presentations there.  But this year, a really compelling guy was invited to give the Presidential Scholar’s Address. Continue reading →

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Sharing Between Teacher and Student Devices: Nearpod!

Posted on May 25, 2012 by karen mahon

I wanted to share a super cool app that I just started using.  It’s called Nearpod and it allows teachers to create interactive content that runs on their iPads and share that content with students on student-controlled devices.  In the picture here I’m showing the teacher app installed on my iPad and the student app installed on my iPhone.  The teacher app has pushed the image shown to the student app. Continue reading →

Posted in App Reviews & Recs, Technology | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | 3 Comments

Posted on May 23, 2012 by karen mahon

Love this blog post!! Let’s keep fighting the mythology and insist upon science-based approaches to education!

Pedro's avatarFrom experience to meaning...

I love people discussing education. It means they are concerned. It means they care about how children and youngsters are being thaught. Sad thing is that quite often you still hear things that are in fact popular myths. These myths have been debunked by science for years. Even more sad is that while I can understand this from someone who hasn’t studied educational sciences or who isn’t a teacher, I often read this kind of myths even in textbooks used in teacher training!

Ok, just to help out, some examples of myths that I have heard over and over again. Sometimes they make me feel I just want to start throwing things:

  • The Learning Pyramid

    To me this is the Loch Ness monster of education. Sometimes this pyramid is quoted as the Glasser pyramid, but this a first mistake, as Glasser has nothing to with it. More correct sources are Edgar…

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With Analytics, Don’t be a Sheep!

Posted on May 16, 2012 by karen mahon

In this brave new world of big data and analytics in education, we have a lot of thinking to do.  Having a ton of data to inform what we do and analytics to help customize our instruction has the potential to be very powerful.  But massive amounts of data and clever algorithms won’t mean much if we aren’t asking the right questions and carefully thinking through what the answers mean.

A few days ago I reposted a post from eLearning Development News called “Tracking isn’t Learning.”  Gary Hegenbart, the author, makes some great points, differentiating “tracking metrics” from “performance metrics.”  The overall point is that all data are not the same and you have to think about what the data really mean. Continue reading →

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Posted on May 13, 2012 by karen mahon

This is a great post addressing measurement and instructional design….check it out and see what you think!

Gary Hegenbart's avatareLearning Development News

SCORM and the LMS are the Achilles Heel of training. Tracking data has become synonymous with measurement. This week I got an email from a vendor promoting the tracking capabilities of the product. It made realize how often tracking data is used to misrepresent training success.

Many people think that metrics pulled out of an LMS indicate the success of training programs. They see tracking metrics as “performance measurement”. Tracking is not measurement and is no indication that learning took place, or that learning will transfer to job performance. Relying on tracking data shows our collective weakness in measuring training effectiveness.

Reliance on tracking data also means we aren’t asking the right questions about our training programs. How many times are you asked the following questions about training:

  • How many learners completed the eLearning course?
  • How many people attended training?

These are important stats, but they have little, if any, correlation to job…

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What Do Austin Powers and My Mom Have in Common?

Posted on May 13, 2012 by karen mahon

“Oh, Behave!”

My post today is in honor of my mom, Jane Mahon, and other mothers out there who do an awesome job parenting, just based on their natural intuition.  They didn’t need any of that fancy book-learnin’ that I got.  Just plain, old-fashioned, common sense got the job done, and done well.

When I was a kid growing up, my mom was a fierce wielder of contingencies.  She knew what behavior she expected of us kids and she knew how to get it.  She told us clearly what she expected, and then, through a delicate balance of privileges, both earned and removed, she used principles of reinforcement like an art form.  No punishment in our house…no spankings or the like…just good old reinforcement, both positive and negative, did the trick. Continue reading →

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Low-Tech is Still Okay!!

Posted on May 8, 2012 by karen mahon

ImageI’ve talked with a bunch of teachers and administrators out there who are grappling with adding technology into their classrooms and schools.  It’s not an easy thing to do, as we all know, and I find that oftentimes teachers think that once they have technology in their classrooms that it means that EVERYTHING they do with kids needs to use the technology products.

It just isn’t so. Continue reading →

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Do Kids Really Need to READ??

Posted on April 25, 2012 by karen mahon

Niklas reads

Niklas reads (Photo credit: whgrad)

I was chatting to a colleague in the publishing industry recently.  We were talking about the Headsprout Reading programs….Early Reading and Reading Comprehension.  My colleague shall go nameless (to protect the innocent and not-so-innocent!), but he told me that publishers find Headsprout  “very controversial.” Continue reading →

Posted in Academics | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , | 18 Comments

Temple Run is Educational!! (What??)

Posted on April 20, 2012 by karen mahon

I have to confess that, as an educator, it’s kind of hard for me to think outside the box when it comes to the “educational” benefits of some of the game apps that are available for kids today.  So I decided to accept the suggestion of a colleague…my mission (and I chose to accept it): to examine the game Temple Run.  Does it develop skills in kids…skills that they might actually need for, you know, LIFE? Continue reading →

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