The End of Life for Windows XP. Each week, Educating Modern Learners will pick one interesting current event – whether it’s news about education, technology, politics, business, science, or culture – and help put it in context for school leaders, explaining why the news matters and how it might affect teaching and learning (in the …
A fair amount of the writing that high school students do is framed as “preparing them for college”: reviews, essays, research papers. But college instructors have long complained that students, upon arrival at university, are not adequately prepared. And now many are beginning to argue too that the essay may no longer be really relevant …
Social media and youth researcher danah boyd has just published her first book: It’s Complicated that examines how teens use Internet technologies in their social lives. It’s an accessible, thoughtful book, important for school leaders to read in no small part because it’s grounded in interviews with teens. In this book, we hear their voices, …
The debate over devices for students is heating up, and as more and more companies enter the market, the choices will become even more difficult to make. More often than not, what gets lost in the discussion are the most fundamental questions about what students need to learn. Audrey Watters looks at some of the …
Tablets vs Laptops: Why This Is (Often) The Wrong Debate Read More »
How might new digital technologies prompt us to reconfigure our notions of literacy? And if literacy is changing, how must schools change as well? The Mozilla Foundation’s Doug Belshaw examines the ways in which the World Wide Web changes the ways we think about reading and writing.
Learning on our own has never been easier and potentially more powerful than it is today given our access to the people, information, and tools on the Internet. It begs the question, should the only learning that “counts” be that which occurs in a classroom? Will Richardson takes a look at new attempts to give …
What Counts? How Informal Learning is Challenging Formal Education Read More »
There are technology trends, and then there are learning with technology trends. Too often, the two fail to overlap. Audrey Watters fills us in on what’s trending now in terms of technologies to help our students develop into the agile, self-directed learners they need to be in the new, globally connected world.
Facebook Buys a Virtual Reality Company. Each week, Educating Modern Learners will pick one interesting current event — whether it’s news about education, technology, politics, business, science, or culture — and help put it in context for school leaders, explaining why the news matters and how it might affect teaching and learning (in the short …
I came across an apt metaphor for change in schools a few months ago. An administrator told me excitedly that they had been giving students some say in ways in which their classrooms were outfitted, and that one class had chosen to use yoga balls to sit on instead of the traditional hard plastic (or …
