Educational Technology Weblog

bubbl.us is a free online brainstorming and mind mapping tool that lets you easily create a graphic organizer, concept map, mind map or organizational chart and then share your ideas with colleagues or classmates. The Flash & AJAX based interface make it really simple to use with only a browser – no downloads and all you need to create an account is an email address! You can save your sheets, print them as images or save them to your computer.

The Web 2.0 features provide you with either a link or the html embed code so you can post your work on a web page (Edline) or email a link. In the embedded example shown here, you can pan and zoom using the controls or the scroll wheel on your mouse.

There are many obvious uses in the classroom:

• Identify existing knowledge
• Identify relationships between concepts
• Record facts & details as a pre-writing strategy
• Brainstorming – collecting and connecting ideas
• Timelines
• Student collaboration
• Sharing ideas with communities of users

Check it out and look for me on bubbl.us

In this time of elections and monumental decisions you might find yourself evaluating your stances on any number of topics. If you would like to revisit some of the things that may have crossed your mind in the past, you might want to check out the poll archive at www.teachermagazine.org. This archive encompasses many subjects of interest to teachers and dates back to June 2006. Please comment on any of the results that you find intersting, or suggest other topics that we might want to explore ourselves!

As you strive to educate today’s students in a way that will prepare them for an unknown future, it might be clear to you that the responsible and effective use of technology should be of utmost importance. Nearly every facet of our student’s lives has been affected by technology. I hope in mostly positive ways. So it should follow that their educations should also be positively impacted.

To those of us active in understanding the trends of education in the 21^st century, the use of new tools and media afforded by new technology is a forgone conclusion. Also, it seems very clear to me that we want our teachers and students to become familiar with the technologies faced and embraced in today’s society. But how do we stress the importance, and model these behaviors so that others might share in this vision.

I recently sent an open ended email to some of my colleagues with a question about a recurring theme I keep running into.  I often see it stated that: “Technology is most effective when it is transparent”.  To me this is both obvious and perplexing at the same time.  As we look to engage our students and bring the content they need in the formats they desire, how do we make the need for new skill sets and tools obvious if they are “supposed” to be unseen?

Many of the responses I received recommended video or other similar examples of “best practice” and peer or community development. I quickly realized we wouldn’t have to look very far to find these things. Luckily, we have many dedicated and forward thinking educators right here that have been doing just this for a long time, and getting results that validate their efforts. Many teachers have been leading the way for years by exploring new delivery methods and developing strategies that encourage collaboration and produce amazing results.

I invite your comments to discuss some of our successes and the challenges that have been laid out in front of us as we move further into this unknown future.

At the close of the last school year we conducted a poll of our teachers asking them about their general attitude about the use of technology in their classroom, as well as the impact that certain specific programs and services have on instruction and learning. Nearly 1,000 teachers responded to our survey and the feedback was terrific!

Personally, the chart below is my favorite of all of them as it demonstrates just how critical our teachers find technology to be.

 We asked other questions too of course, including this one that asked teachers how technology impacts student interest and attention.

You can see the full results of the survey at the two links below. While these results are specific to Palm Beach County Schools they are well inline with the results that other surveys produce.

The Impact of Technology in the Classroom

The Impact of Specific Programs and Services in the Classroom

Have a comment about these results? We’d love to hear from you!

Scholarly Research on Student Blogging

We have our share of skeptics around here when it comes to Web 2.0 tools and their value in the classroom. Believe if or not, I’m one of them! There has been an ongoing conversation for a few years now about how these simple publishing and collaboration tools might be used to impact instruction. From the “This is amazing!” to the “This is bunk!”, there has been a healthy mix of agreements and disagreements about how a teacher might use Web 2.0 tools in their classrooms.

Now comes a new study from Jeff Felix, Superintendent of Bonsall Union School District in Bonsall, CA. Mr. Felix’s scholarly, peer-reviewed article can be found here as a direct download of a PDF file, or you can visit Classroom 2.0 where he discusses his findings a bit.

Some of the conclusions from the article are interesting on their face and worth a little more study and reflection. In no order of importance here are a few statements that jumped out at me:

• There were four communication patterns teachers perceived as a result of blogging: (a) increased peer interaction among students, (b) increased teacher interaction with the students, (c) students exhibiting more positive emotions about learning, and (d) an increased sharing of ideas among students and with the teacher.
• The data from responding edubloggers describe student learners who have been a part of a blogging classroom as engaged in four types of learning: (a) students increasing their understanding of topics, making sense of what they learn, and developing their own understanding of the subject matter, (b) students cultivating deeper thought processes; creating meaning and new ideas from the subject, (c) students exploring the subject beyond the immediate requirements, and (d) students connecting with previous experiences learned in or out of the classroom.
• Blogging by its very nature gives students a vehicle for sharing their ideas with one another, a contemporary way to gain additional knowledge or understanding that resonates with students being raised in the digital age.

In the immortal(?) words of wikipedia:

“Educational technology is most simply and comfortably defined as an array of tools that might prove helpful in advancing student learning.”

Thankfully, students have been “learning” for far longer than we have even recorded history. SO…. some things have been working, and undoubtedtly there have been tools employed to aid in the process! So in some sense, working in Educational Technology may well be as longstanding a tradition as some other “oldest professions”. As educators it is imperative that we understand, appreciate, and build on the ideas and strategies that have come before. I think that any discussion of the status of Educational Technology in the classrooms of today and tomorrow must reflect on the successes and failures of the past. To illustrate, I will use examples of much more recent happenings. I ask the following:

Aside from computers and the Internet in general, of the following: what has been the most important technological classroom advance in the past 20 years?

Please select 1 answer:

Document Cameras/Projectors

Blogs/Wiki’s

Cellular Phones

School computer networks

Interactive Clicker Systems/interactive whiteboards

Regardless of what you might choose, I would say that each of these tools is ultimately just an extension of the succeessful practices that have been going on in effective classrooms for years. The recent (past hundred years or so) acceleration of technological tools and the ability to collect, store and distribute information have only made the need for efficiency and technology literacy all that more crucial. I look forward to building on the experiences of the past and collaborating with the great minds of today to provide a wider base of knowledge for those yet to come.