Musings on Technology

This week, I have reviewed one of my favourite books on educational leadership. George Couros is a Canadian educational consultant, specialising in innovation and leadership.  His work emphasises his belief that heart to heart connections are a prerequisite for meaningful change.  Couros’ popular book, The Innovator's Mindset: Empower Learning, Unleash Talent, and Lead a Culture of Creativity ( IM ) is the subject of this review.  The reviewer examined the Kindle Fire version, running to 252 pages, and published by Dave Burgess Consulting, Inc. on October 20, 2015.   IM aims to support educators and school leaders to create and encourage a culture of innovation in today’s students and schools.  However, the nature of the book means that it is equally appropriate for people in fields beyond education; for instance, business and medical leaders will gain much insight into developing a culture of innovation and IM can provide the catalyst for this....

Problem with cyberbullying at your school? Want to know evidence-based strategies to tackle this nasty nuisance? Look no further! (Please read the presenter notes as well)

Professional Learning This week’s post takes a look at professional learning- the use of technology to facilitate interactive professional learning experiences , transcending space and time. I’m fortunate to be part of a professional learning community (PLC), as I’m constantly learning from, and with, my wonderful cohort and professors in the Endicott College M. Ed. programme. Not only do my colleagues bring such a wide and varied range of experiences to our collective learning, our professors also bring decades of school, district, and accreditation leadership and wisdom. We meet in person for two thirds of the course, and for one third of the course we embrace technology and embark on online learning journeys. After reading a few articles this week, I invite you to reflect on my thoughts on the following question: As a leader, how would I like professional learning to look in my (hypothetical, idealised) school, and how will TPACK and SAMR be integrated as part of this plan...

How do you teach with tech? This week’s blog muses on this query. We'll have a gander at two different models, SAMR, and TPACK (not to be confused with the musician , RIP). We'll explore the framework of both, and think about how they can be used in practice. I'll then attempt to reflect on which one suits my philosophy best, and how this can be implemented as part of my school leadership approach. SAMR can be described as an acronym if you pronounce it “Sammer”; if you pronounce it “S-A-M-R”, then it’s an abbreviation. Anyway, in short, it's a framework to enable teachers to provide learners with ever more sophisticated and profound tech learning experiences. It stands for substitution-augmentation-modification-redefinition, and it was pioneered by Ruben Puentedura . The definitions of each part are summarised thus in Puentedura’s video: You can possibly see some similarities here with Bloom’s Taxonomy , at least in the way that applications are arranged in a h...

Am I a tech enthusiast or skeptic? I reckon I’m an enthusiast these days. Over the past twelve months, as my wife and I study for Masters degrees and work in a tech-reliant school, I have been introduced to a wide variety of exciting online tools for students: Canva , Piktochart , Screencastify , Mindmeister , and Animoto to name a few. I have introduced my students to these tools and, with some trepidation, the students are starting to leave their comfort zones and explore them. The great thing is that I don’t need to be an expert- I just tell the children to explore (something advocated by Peggy Ertmer here ).          Let’s look at a few articles exploring both sides of the tech argument. Collins and Halverson’s Rethinking Education in the Age of Technology: The Digital Revolution and Schooling in America gives an efficient summary of the advantage of tech in schools, though some of the research cited is a bit date...