Classroom Tech: A History of Hype and Disappointment

Great post! My favorite quote from it: “I believe that the motion picture is destined to revolutionize our education system”.  Well, it is true, bu the coolest thing is that this quote from T. Edison is 94 years old… and it goes further like this: “and that in a few years it will supplant largely, if not entirely, the use of textbooks.”  But we still use textbooks…

This very post has also the interactive timeline of classroom technology. Take a trip down the memory lane…

Do you have concerns about online learning?

Some are pretty typical: easier than the f2f one,  too expensive (and all that technology costs $$$), might replace instructors… Read this blog post and decide for yourself. I am a proponent of distance learning and truly believe that if done right, it could provide great learning opportunities to students, transform education, and make it more professionally rewarding for faculty!

Google: good, bad, and the ugly

Google had quite an eventful month: releasing new way of running the apps, announcing a new LMS (called Classroom; which might be more suitable for secondary education), and getting a court decision requiring Googe to “remove links that might be damaging to someone’s reputation (effectively allowing people to erase their records), unless there’s a compelling reason not to — even if the pages the links point to are perfectly legal, and need not themselves be removed.”

More in this post.

Peer instruction: old method, new award!

Peer instruction developed and described by a physicist Eric Mazur has been in use for at least 20 years: “The method aims to engage students by devoting class time to active discussions. Rather than starting a class with regular lecture, the professor poses a series of questions about an assigned reading or video, and gives the students time to discuss and come to a consensus.” See this post for more details. Dr. Mazur will be honored with a Minerva Prize for Advancements in Higher Education for his pioneering his work.

100 tech in education blogs

Summer is fast approaching (by the calendar, it is, not by the weather forecast…). If you are looking into enhancing your teaching with technology and would like your students to produce digital content and use technologies for learning, you might want to browse 100 blogs related to using technologies in education.