Teachers teach. What exactly they should teach, what they actually do teach, and the degree of consensus about what they teach and the degree to which they are doing it are very contentious issues today. Most would agree some of the curriculum belongs in the Most educational practitioners are content if students demonstrate new learning Read More
Author: Gary Ackerman
Yeah… All Curriculum… It’s Political
Educators know there is no possibility that education can be politically neutral. Sure, we generally avoid taking an explicit side in any election—in one’s role as a public school educator, they cannot even advocate for passing the local school budget. All knowledge is, however, useful in either supporting or rejecting a conclusion; all decisions can Read More
#edtech for #edleaders: End of Life
Several factors make it impossible for commercial software developers to update operating systems and applications indefinitely. Even open-source operating systems and applications that are developed by communities of programmers rather than businesses are usually retired. When software is retired, the publishers no longer release security updates. At that point, responsible IT professionals will upgrade the Read More
Elevator Pitch on Data Security
Hackers are individuals or groups who try to gain access to others’ computers. Phishers are individuals and groups who try to trick users into giving them access to a computer system. Both hackers and phishers are generally after either computing capacity or data. In some cases, they want to use our computers for nefarious purposes, Read More
Technology for Educators: Internet Gateways
When you subscribe to your local internet service provider, you will receive a device that you can easily carry under your arm that is called a gateway. While a technician may arrive to install it, a reasonably tech-savvy individual can install and configure it using the directions they provide and the automated scripts programmed into Read More
Research. Practice. And the Gap Between the Two.
In education (as in other fields) we hear leaders who proclaim they are “data-driven” and they “use evidence.” Despite this, there tends to be agreement within the education research community and within the practitioner community that research is not a factor that affects decisions I the manner we would all hope. (In New England the Read More
On Collaboration in Decision making
To minimize the threats of incomplete or inaccurate understanding of the work done by others, effective IT decision-making in schools requires the collaboration of individuals who approach them from very different perspectives, and it is unusual to find single individuals who have expertise in more than one of these perspectives. When designing and redesigning IT Read More
Ethics are Active
Stephanie Moore and Heather Tillberg-Webb’s Ethics and Educational Technology: Reflection, Interrogation, and Design as a Framework for Practice by Stephanie L. Moore and Heather K. Tillberg-Webb (9780415895088) continues to deliver on the promise summarized on the cover. Ethics, we have seen, should be approached from a design perspective. As designers, we are encouraged to be Read More
School Users of IT
Compared to IT users in business, school populations are different. They bring different skills to the IT they use, they need more flexibility more often than business users, and their needs change over time (only to return to the original need). These characteristics arise from the facts that students have emerging literacies; it is not Read More
Elevator Pitch: Firewalls
Even before computer viruses and network security became a concern, the idea of a firewall was familiar. We construct them to prevent certain unwanted “things” from passing through. The firewall in your car prevents an engine fire from passing into the passenger compartment. In IT systems, firewalls enhance network security by ensuring only certain types Read More