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• Edublog award winners 2008

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  The 2008 winners of the Edublogs community-based awards provide examples of excellence in the educational use of social software.

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  edna education news

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  • Title: edna education news
  • Link: http://api.edna.edu.au/headline.rss
  • Description: Cross-sectoral education news aggregated by Education Network Australia (edna)
  • Copyright: 1996-2004 by Commonwealth of Australia. Permission is granted to copy and distribute this document in whole or in part, provided it is done for educational and non-commercial purposes only and that this entire copyright notice remains attached.
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  • RSS 0.91: http://api.edna.edu.au/headline.rss

  
  

• Yesterday

  Morphing Media

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  • Author: Conn McQuinn
  • Category: Technology Trends

  My big Christmas gift this year was getting to go out and purchase myself a flat-panel television.  I was able to get a pretty good deal in the post-holiday, depressed-economy sale, and by getting a last-year model to boot.  (I may be a techie and love gadgets, but I’m also pretty cheap when it comes to buying doodads.)  I chose a 42-inch model, and paid about what I was considering for a 37-inch model a few months ago. I am ridiculously pleased with it.

  Last night we had planned on going out to the movies, but yet another round of snow hit us and we had to stay home.  Not a problem, my daughter says - she’d purchased WALL-E from the iTunes store, and had a new cable for her iPhone to hook it to the TV.  In two minutes’ time, she has her iPhone hooked into the TV, and we’re watching the opening credits to the movie in full-screen resolution.  It wasn’t HD sharp, but it was DVD quality, and very, very good.  From her iPhone!

  This is not intended to be an advertisement for Apple products.  You can also access films from other online vendors, and there are other devices that can be hooked to your television.  But it’s just another illustration of the shift of media away from any sort of traditional storage or viewing.  There were no tapes or discs involved in watching the film; if I’d had the right device hooked up to the television, there wouldn’t even have been a cable involved - it could have been wireless.

  We’re so close to being there in schools.  We need to get there as quickly as possible, because the rich visual media available now can be such a powerful aid to student learning, particularly for our visually-attuned students.  Many classrooms have the projectors now, which is a huge leap forward.   Some schools actually have the full setup for digital video completely in place, but many more are missing just one or two elements, such as good sound system, sufficient network capacity or access to a streaming video service.  But even when a classroom has the entire setup,  there’s still the need for time to preview media, figure out how to integrate it into instruction, and a place in the daily schedule to actually show it.  Back in the dark ages when I was in school, there were very few choices of 16 mm films that my teachers had to ponder (Hemo the Magnificent for human biology and The Restless Sea for oceanography seemed to be the ONLY choices in those content areas, based on how many times I saw them). Now teachers are faced with thousands of options, all correlated to state standards in one way or another.

  Somebody told me recently that making changes is often just substituting a new set of problems for an old one.  I suppose having an embarrassment of  media riches is a good problem to have, but it wouldn’t even be a problem if we didn’t have the underlying problem of teachers simply not having enough time to plan and learn.  I think many of our issues of technology integration and improving instruction would largely vanish if we simply provided enough time for teachers to continuously develop their skills.  When people such as me can’t keep up with the change, and I work with technology full time, is it any wonder that our teachers struggle to be able to take full advantage of it.

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  Lightning in a Bottle

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  • Title: Lightning in a Bottle
  • Link: http://psesd.org/weblogs/edtech
  • Description: Lightning in a Bottle is an educational technology weblog generated by Conn McQuinn at the Educational Technology Support Center of the Puget Sound ESD, and focuses on news and topics around education, technology, and the connections (or lack thereof!) between the two.
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• 01/03/09

  Michigan High Schools Seek Waivers for Online Learning

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  More Michigan students may earn their high school diplomas online if school districts have their way. A growing number of districts and charter schools have recently applied for waivers, allowing...

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  About Distance Learning

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  • Title: About Distance Learning
  • Link: http://distancelearn.about.com/
  • Description: Get the latest headlines from the About.com Distance Learning GuideSite.
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