aws

AI Generated Post: The Challenge of Integrating Technology

Generative AI arrived in our schools a few years ago with ChatGPT and our collective concern about its future for our work. In the time since, we have been negotiating its place in education. We seem to be narrowing in on several applications that are useful in making people “smart.” One activity that has focused Read More

aws

Don’t be the Department of “No”

39: Don’t Be The Department of “No” | RSS.com It is conference season for educators. It comes three times per year: In the middle of fall, after the semester has gotten started, but before the end of the term crunch starts. Again, in the middle of the spring semester and finally (to a lesser degree) Read More

aws

IT Skills & Educators

In the first decade desktop computers were in schools, most teachers had little experience with computer technology, so dedicating professional development resources to train teachers in the basic operation of systems (tasks such launching applications, creating and editing documents, and saving and printing) was appropriate and necessary. Soon thereafter, the local area networks and the Read More

aws

Elevator Pitch: Leveraging #edtech

I used to recoil when the term “leverage” was applied to computers in educational settings; I had heard too many administrators and vendors describe how some tool could be “leveraged to improve student outcomes.” As we chatted while waiting for a meeting to begin, an English-teaching colleague pointed out that the word really does apply Read More

aws

It Isn’t Your Parents’ #edtech

For generations, a fundamental purpose of schools has been to give students experience using the dominant information technology and data sources. When the dominant data type was printed and scripted on paper, education took a very familiar format. Reading, writing, performing calculations on paper, and drawing on paper became the fundamental skills practiced as one Read More

aws

File Formats

We have been teaching in online classrooms for decades now, and I still see faculty–many faculty–who take the files they create with their productivity suites and upload them for students. When they do this, they impose an unnecessary level of complexity on students. In some cases, they cannot open the files as they lack the Read More