Edustructional Technology

I am a fan of formative assessment, but it is usually difficult to grade the assessment quickly enough to give the student timely feedback.  With Plickers, grading simple formative questions is as easy as grabbing your smartphone and launching an app. What Is It? Plickers is an app for Android and iOS that lets a user activate the camera on her device and gather results from a question.  Students in the class hold up a card with a visual code (similar to a QR) in one of 4 orientations.  Then, the teacher scans the room using the Plickers app, and it gathers the answers and grades them. Plickers "Card" How To Use It 1.  Go to  www.plickers.com  and sign up for a teacher account 2.  Go to the "Cards" tab and choose the size card that you would like and print them.  I suggest printing and laminating the cards. 3.  From the "Classes" tab, add a class.  You may have up to 65 students in one class 4.  Enter student names and Plickers wil...

Introduction Technology in education can be easily classified by purpose.  A technology is either intended for consumption or creation.  While technologies do not neatly fit these categories and can easily overlap, the distinction between consumption and creation is very important for choosing a school-based technology.  We need to choose technologies that allow our students to create.  The process of creation is a learning activity that reaches beyond memorization and into application. Unfortunately, in education, we have focused on knowledge acquisition too heavily for too long.  Only recently has education began to focus on skill acquisition and knowledge application.  As a result of this, the technology in education is still evaluated and used primarily for knowledge acquisition. Consumption Technology As the name implies, consumption technology encompasses devices and technologies that present information for consumption by the user.  The informat...

Late last year or early this year, you probably read an article like this one:  Google’s Chromebook wins over classrooms; ousts Apple’s iPad  from PBS.  In terms of sheer volume, Google shipped 715,000 Chromebooks to Apple's 702,000 iPads in the education market according to IDC . While that is impressive data, an analysis of why this shift is occurring from the school district level perspective is useful.  Most articles focus on items like cost, but there are a multitude of reasons that Chromebooks are displacing iPads in school, and there are many considerations to take when deciding what to purchase for a school district. Why the Shift? I will discuss several reasons that Chromebooks are replacing iPads as the device of choice for the education market, but I'll tackle the most obvious first: 1.  Cost Chromebooks' initial cost is cheaper than iPads.  Even with management licenses and peripherals needed for deployment, Chromebooks hover around $300.  ...