I’ve been doing a lot of reading lately about kids and devices. It’s mostly as market research for my new business (more about that later) and, luckily for me, it’s also really interesting. I knew that devices were big with kids, but honestly, I didn’t know just HOW big. So I thought I’d share a bit about what I’ve been learning, in case, like me, you haven’t been keeping up-to-date on the trends… Continue reading
The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2012 annual report for this blog.
Here’s an excerpt:
4,329 films were submitted to the 2012 Cannes Film Festival. This blog had 16,000 views in 2012. If each view were a film, this blog would power 4 Film Festivals
It seems like everyone has a “Best of” list going right now as we wrap up 2012…so why not me too? Here is some of what I’ve really enjoyed this year…
Blogs:
GigaOm: I love this blog. It is just chock full of interesting info. The posts are often short blurbs, so easy to skim through a bunch of info quickly. Mostly focuses on tech. Continue reading
I remember when I first heard the description of Newtown shooter Adam Lanza on the radio. “Quiet student, kept to himself, carried a briefcase at school.” “Oh no,” I thought to myself, “Asperger’s.” Nobody was talking about a potential developmental disability diagnosis at that point. But from that short description I knew what would be confirmed in the hours and days that followed. It was the briefcase that sealed the deal. And why the “oh no?” Because I knew that there would be those who blamed Adam Lanza’s violent acts on the disorder with which he had been diagnosed. Continue reading
This image originally published by the Coalition to Stop Gun Violence
Today I had another post planned. But anything else that I could have written about seems so trivial now.
I’m sure none of us could have imagined the horror of what happened at Sandy Hook Elementary school in Newtown, CT today. We all send our kids to school, believing it to be a safe place where kids can learn and grow. Now, so many families’ children and the adults who worked to teach them are dead. Our thoughts are with those families. What a terrible day.
Eight children die from gun violence every day in America. We must come together to do more to protect each other and our children.
So hug your kids. And a teacher. We talk an awful lot about teacher effectiveness. But leaving that aside, most teachers teach because they really love kids. And I don’t personally know a single teacher who wouldn’t have done exactly what those heroes at Sandy Hook Elementary did….try to tackle an armed gunman, shield their students’ bodies with their own, hide their students and sacrifice their own lives instead. So hug a teacher too, won’t you?
From time to time we all question how much of a difference we, as individuals, can really make. I’ve been experiencing those moments of self-doubt as I move down this entrepreneurial road. Most of the time I think, shaking my fist in the air, “I’m gonna change the world!” Other times I think, “What hubris I have to think that I can change the status quo in education technology.” Continue reading
I haven’t been nearly as good as I should have been lately with blogging. But I have a good excuse. Honest.
Most of you have seen my other posts where I do product reviews and give feedback about what I like and don’t like, mostly from an instructional design and usability design perspective. And I think I’ve told you about how frustrated I am by the educational app review sites out there that focus pretty much on whether kids like the apps or think they’re fun, not on the real instructional value of them. And finally, that those other sites don’t use a standardized approach to their reviews. Continue reading
I’m sure I’ll live to regret this, but I have the itch to write about free will today. What the heck, it’s Friday, right? I was reading The Desire for Autonomy on one of my favorite blogs, The Creativity Post. In that article, the author, Alex Lickerman, argues that we all like to feel like we are making choices according to our own free will. And I agree with him. I think we all do like that. He also points out that it doesn’t matter whether or not we are actually free in making those choices; it is the feeling of being free that matters. Again, I think he’s probably right. Continue reading
This is fascinating….do you think a big ed publisher like Pearson has a chance of being the EA for education? Or does EA have a better chance of addressing education in its already-established infrastructure?
What does publishing giant Pearson (s PSO) have in common with the giants of the video game industry? Not enough, apparently.
In a conversation at the SIIA Ed Tech Business Forum, Luyen Chou, chief product officer for Pearson’s K-12 technology group, said that as new technology upends the textbook publishing industry, his company needs to become an “Electronic Arts (s EA) for education.”
Clearly, Pearson and its rivals in education publishing need to reimagine their role as the rise of digital content cripples their business model. But look to Electronic Arts as a model?
Speaking with me later, Chou said that to keep up with the changing environment, traditional publishers can’t just digitize the static textbooks of the past, they need to excel at producing high-quality, interactive digital learning experiences and get them into the hands of students.
“[That includes] digital studios, animators, illustrators, producers, 3-D artists – we…
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This image originally appeared at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attention
I don’t know how I managed to miss this story, but did you all see the piece in the NY Times a few weeks ago, Technology Changing How Students Learn, Teachers Say? If you didn’t, you should check it out. The article describes some teacher survey results showing that teachers believe that “students’ constant use of digital technology is hampering their attention spans and ability to persevere in the face of challenging tasks.”
This is the kind of “research” that makes me crazy, because these are absolutely not scientific findings. These are surveys of teachers’ opinions. And I think it’s fine for all of us to have opinions, of course, but one of the problems with these kinds of surveys is that there’s all kinds of room for subjective interpretation of what “attention” is. But that’s all well and good…discussing the relative merit of surveys isn’t what I wanted to talk about today anyway. Continue reading
disrupt learning! 