Technology in Education

TiE

Summary of New Developments in Education & Technology

by

Carol Holzberg, Director of Technology for Greenfield Public Schools, wrote a short summary of recent developments in education & technology. These developments are:
  • draft of the proposed Massachusetts Digital Literacy & Computer Science standards (DL&CS)
  • newly released National Education Technology Plan (NETP16)
  • newly accepted Federal Every Child Achieves Act (ECA)
We thought this might be useful to everyone, not just those of you on the TiE PLC listserv*.
(*If you are not on the TiE PLC listserv and are interested in joining the conversation and/or attending monthly meetings, please contact technology@collaborative.org)
Here is the summary from Carol.

… [Read More]

Connected Learning Supports Digital Citizenship

by

I have engaged in many interesting classroom discussions about what young people need to learn in order to be active and engaged participants in a diverse democracy. While technology can sometimes make the world seem bigger and more overwhelming, social networking and other media technologies are actually bringing humans closer together. For me, this means that we have the important opportunity to develop ways to support young people and adults to be thoughtful digital citizens who use technology in the service of equity, justice, growth, learning, health, and community…. [Read More]

Code.org Review

by

Ryan Butler of Swift River Elementary School in the Belchertown Public School District wrote a Code.org review in follow-up to a LEGO Robotics session at TiE2015.

The TiE2015 Session “Introduction to Teaching Robotics” was led by Carmen Ferrara and used the LEGO Mindstorms robotics systems to demonstrate the ways teaching robotics can excite young people about STEM topics and can provide teachers an avenue for using hands-on, project-based lessons to introduce or reinforce many math, science, and applied physics concepts.  During the session, the discussion of programming with LEGO and Code.org prompted Ryan to  revisit the site and try the Hour of Code: Code with Anna and Elsa activity.

Code.org Review activity thumbnail

Thumbnail from Code.org Code Studio’s Hour of Code Frozen activity.

Here is an excerpt from Ryan’s insightful Code.org review:… [Read More]

Power Tools for Google Sheets

by

Technology doesn’t always make our lives easier, so when it saves you a full day of work, that is blog-worthy. The Power Tools Add-on for Google Sheets had me doing cartwheels around the office.

We used Power Tools to prepare some Sheets for our billing office. In years past, we have suffered through hours and sometimes days of tedious formatting in Sheets. Back then, I took the time to learn a few formulas that helped speed things up, but nothing made the process feel easy. Until Power Tools for Google Sheets.

… [Read More]