iPads, MakerEd and More in Education

Look up from this screen right now. Take a look around. On a bus. In a cafe. Even at a stoplight. Chances are, most of the other people in your line of sight are staring at their phones or other devices. And if they don't happen to have one out, it is certainly tucked away in a pocket or bag.

But are we truly addicted to technology? And what about our kids? It's a scary question, and a big one for scientists right now. Still, while the debate rages on, some doctors and technologists are focusing on solutions.

"There is a fairly even split in the scientific community about whether 'tech addiction' is a real thing," says Dr. Michael Bishop. He runs Summerland, which he calls "a summer camp for screen overuse," for teens.

Do you want to celebrate the end of another year by relaxing in front of a great informative documentary? Nobody would blame you! Fortunately, 2018 was a great year for tech- and science-focused factual filmmaking.
Here are our choices for the best science and technology documentaries 2018 had to offer.

It appears that the trend of incorporating digital devices and edtech products into the classroom is here to stay. Learning how to use technology in the classroom is quite a process for many educators, and they make some mistakes along the way. Without the proper training on how to handle their new devices and incorporate them into the classroom, teachers might be guilty of making these five common mistakes with their technology.

Stan Lee, Jack Kirby, Bill Finger, Bob Kane, Joe Simon, Steve Ditko, Jerry Siegel, Joe Shuster, and dozens of other Golden and Silver Age visionaries produced superhero, romance, western, horror, and crime comics using the craftsman's tools of their day: paper, typewriters, pencils, brushes, inks, and dyes. From the 1930s until roughly the mid-1990s, comic books were produced almost entirely in this fashion, with a few digital blips along the way.

But as electronic tools became increasingly affordable and powerful, the comic book creation process shifted from an analog process to a digital one. In contemporary times, there's a good chance that no aspect of your favorite title is physical until finished pages start rolling off a printing press.

Gather ‘round! Let me tell you the story of Droney Appleseed.

You see, in the 21st century, bee populations were dying off because everyone was using too many toxic pesticides. Farmers were starting to notice that the fuzzy little workers were starting to vanish because their crops weren’t getting pollinated. Boy, was everyone in a real pickle then! Thankfully, Droney Appleseed came to the rescue, flying over the farmland and spraying pollen wherever it went.

OK, so, we’re probably not ready to make children’s books about this stuff quite yet. But! An apple orchard was just pollinated by a drone for the first time.

Look up from this screen right now. Take a look around. On a bus. In a cafe. Even at a stoplight. Chances are, most of the other people in your line of sight are staring at their phones or other devices. And if they don’t happen to have one out, it is certainly tucked away in a pocket or bag.

But are we truly addicted to technology? And what about our kids? It’s a scary question, and a big one for scientists right now. Still, while the debate rages on, some doctors and technologists are focusing on solutions.

“There is a fairly even split in the scientific community about whether ‘tech addiction’ is a real thing,” says Dr. Michael Bishop. He runs Summerland, which he calls “a summer camp for screen overuse,” for teens.

One way for your school to grow the digital learning capacity of its students, teachers and community is to have a student leadership group, often called ‘The Tech Team’ or even, ‘Digital Ninjas.’ These are teams of students passionate about digital learning who are coordinated to run initiatives in the school.

Here are 5 ways that your student tech teams can supercharge the use of digital learning in your school.

I can’t count the number of technological tools that were marketed directly to me during my 14-year teaching career. I could probably count the number of tools I tried out and tested—that number would be in the double-digits. And the number of education-specific apps, services, and software I actually used consistently? Those I could easily count on one hand.

Do you ever wonder how a toddler can pick up a cell phone, or another mobile device, and easily navigate the device without ever having to be instructed on how to use it? Or how students can multi-task with technology by texting, social media surfing, and watching television all at the same time? Our children are digital natives, and we are digital immigrants.

My belief is that we should all be “Digital Explorers”.

We live in a technology-driven society that provides us with quick and easy access to just about anything at anytime. Teachers can no longer use the, “I’m too old to learn tech” excuse, because technology is here to stay. As teachers, it is our job to protect our children from the dangers that exist, and help them develop healthy tech habits, and become responsible digital citizens. Not sure how? Try these:

Even as schools continue to invest heavily in technology on campus, we are still staring down what experts call the “device gap,” where students from lower-income backgrounds don’t have the same digital access as their middle class peers. For students and classrooms, that divide can have real impact. In a recent survey, 67 percent of teachers in transitional kindergarten through third grade say they have at least on one occasion not assigned homework that requires technology or digital media because they think their students do not have access at home—a percentage that increases in schools serving more low-income students.

Preparing students to be “college and career ready” is a catch phrase in many schools, but those same institutions often block large swaths of the internet in an attempt to protect students from acting inappropriately online. While well-intentioned, blocking useful digital tools prevents educators from guiding students through appropriate online behavior while still in the relative safety of school. College and job recruiters are seeking students who are creative problem solvers, collaborative workers and independent thinkers, but in many cases, rules prevent students from practicing those skills online.

‘If we trust them to engage with the content then we have the power to teach them the digital citizenship.’
“When you try to use a computer in a school, it’s shocking what is blocked,” said Michelle Luhtala, head librarian at New Caanan High School in Connecticut during an edWeb webinar. “That is not 21st century learning.” Luhtala doesn’t believe schools can make good on their promise to prepare kids for the world that awaits them outside school walls if they don’t first prepare them to use the tools to operate online in safe ways. She acknowledges that letting students direct their own learning in virtual spaces can be scary and that it takes a lot of trust.

This month, millions of children returned to school. This year, an unprecedented number of them will learn to code.

Computer science courses for children have proliferated rapidly in the past few years. A 2016 Gallup report found that 40% of American schools now offer coding classes – up from only 25% a few years ago. New York, with the largest public school system in the country, has pledged to offer computer science to all 1.1 million students by 2025. Los Angeles, with the second largest, plans to do the same by 2020. And Chicago, the fourth largest, has gone further, promising to make computer science a high school graduation requirement by 2018.

The rationale for this rapid curricular renovation is economic. Teaching kids how to code will help them land good jobs, the argument goes. In an era of flat and falling incomes, programming provides a new path to the middle class – a skill so widely demanded that anyone who acquires it can command a livable, even lucrative, wage.


Forget Wall Street – Silicon Valley is the new political power in Washington
Read more
This narrative pervades policymaking at every level, from school boards to the government. Yet it rests on a fundamentally flawed premise. Contrary to public perception, the economy doesn’t actually need that many more programmers. As a result, teaching millions of kids to code won’t make them all middle-class. Rather, it will proletarianize the profession by flooding the market and forcing wages down – and that’s precisely the point.

At its root, the campaign for code education isn’t about giving the next generation a shot at earning the salary of a Facebook engineer. It’s about ensuring those salaries no longer exist, by creating a source of cheap labor for the tech industry.

In technology (and in life!), sometimes you’re the teacher and sometimes you’re the student - and it’s completely normal to always be a bit of both. One day, you help a colleague learn the joys of the copy and paste keyboard shortcut, and the next day you’re learning how to create and edit a YouTube video or a Gabsee 3D animated Avatar!

So, whether you’re teaching or learning, or a bit of both, here are a few practical tips to make it a little easier for the reluctant tech user.