I’ve been ruminating on the ideas of privacy and anonymity a little bit over the past couple of days, especially privacy of student information in schools. For some people, guarding students privacy is considered to be best achieved by keeping all information about students, or as much as possible, completely away from the web. I think this is possibly out of a sense of wanting to protect students from being identified online by a possible real life abuser. This might be a concern for some students who, for instance, are being kept away from an abusive parent or family member. For most students, however, this is not an issue – the ninja-pedophiles-dropping-out-of-the-sky myth has largely been discredited, I think. Nonetheless, some educators would see total anonymity as the best strategy for protecting students. I’ve been thinking that the issue in … Continue reading »

I’m lucky to have been provided significant funding by my school division to attend an educational technology conference sometime between now and the end of August. This is provided as an opportunity to have teachers from the school division to attend conferences that are farther away than we would normally be able to go to, giving us a chance to be exposed to new ideas and connect with educators we might not otherwise be able to meet. I’m not familiar with a lot of the conferences that are available, so I’d like your input. Here are some of the topics I’m interested in: pedagogical changes resulting from ubiquitous computer access by students (like 1:1 laptop programs or similar initiatives) supporting teachers as they change teaching methods to meet increased access to technology (especially high school teachers) some hands-on “you can … Continue reading »

I’ve been reading Tony Bates’ blog post 5 higher ed trends not to watch in 2010, his reaction to 5 higher ed tech trends to watch in 2010 at Campus Technology.  A couple of his observations has provoked a good amount of reflection on my part. A lot of my ideas are still bouncing around and recombining but here are some thoughts so far. Regarding interactive classrooms, Bates says: What next? Lecturers dressed as clowns, doing juggling? Come on, guys, the space-based lecture classroom is DEAD (actually, a zombie, as it’s really still the living dead) Here are his thoughts on technology integration in the classroom: Why? If they have this stuff, why bring it to class? YOU HAVE TO RE-DESIGN YOUR TEACHING – OR RATHER THE LEARNING ENVIRONMENT – TO BENEFIT FROM THIS, NOT CHAIN IT TO THE CLASSROOM! So … Continue reading »