97: Diversity of Computing In recent years, education (especially K-12 schools) have adopted Google Suite and Chromebooks is serious way. I understand that… these devices are inexpensive and easy to manage and allow the difficult work of managing network operating systems to be “outsourced.” I do think this is being adopted with little skepticism, reflection, Read More
Author: Gary Ackerman
Context and Curriculum
For 20th century purposes, de-contextualized curriculum created independent from students’ interests and experiences that has been stripped of complicating factors and designed to create products and performances for teachers alone may have been sufficient. Advocates of flat classrooms are among those who argued that more complex and sophisticated problems were appropriate for student tasks, especially Read More
“You are not being a team player.”
Another in my series of terms education leaders use and the real meaning behind the well-intentioned term. Usage: uttered by one (who either is more powerful or who believes they are more powerful) towards another in an attempt to get the less powerful to go along with a bad idea. Ostensible meaning: we value teamwork Read More
Becoming Knowledgeable and Reasonable
Cognitive and learning scientist are finding evidence that brains process the information that is stored in memories. The processing allows the learner to find connections and organize the memories. As a result, what one “knows” is not a collection of discrete facts, but it is integrated and one’s knowledge can be used to create new Read More
Types of Learning
While it may seem unnecessary to observe “there are many different kinds of learning,” the importance of those differences and the effects that a failure to recognize those differences can have on learning experiences are often overlooked even by experiences teachers. While these types of learning are presented as different, most learning environments are places Read More
Types of Memories
Three types of memories are stored so they can be used later. Procedural memories are largely unconscious and are developed through procedural or statistical learning. Episodic memories encode the details of what happened on particular instances. Important, stressful, or traumatic life events are typically stored in episodic memory, but these memories are not reliable. Semantic Read More
Brain Development
Perhaps one of the most important discoveries of cognitive and learning sciences, and one that contradicts a long-held belief, is that the brain is much more adaptive that was previously thought. When I was a student in the 1980’s, it was believed that brains developed through one’s youth, but that developed slowed in adolescence and Read More
Descriptions of Courses Never Taught
School Technology: A Wicked Problem Description: Schools are becoming technology-rich places, but that technology does not always translate into meaningful experiences for students. This course approaches school technology as a problem that is too poorly understood with blurred boundaries and inaccurate assumptions. Leaders will be introduced to strategies that recognize multiple perspectives on technology, teaching, Read More
On Portfolios
The central feature of every portfolio are the artifacts which are those examples and fragments of work that illustrate the learners’ skills, knowledge, and habits. It is important to note that with some exceptions, artifacts are fragments of work. Rather than including the entire paper, one will include only the abstract or the conclusion, or Read More
Someone Please Call These People and Tell Them it is 2019.
More than 25 years ago, when I first started working with computers in schools in a serious way, we were all trying to learn how these new devices were going to work out. We did not know that we were going to be carrying around the Internet (we didn’t even know about the Internet!) in Read More