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What is learning? What is technology?
This week, I started teaching the first year cohort of MSU’s Master’s in Educational Technology program in Dublin, Ireland. My colleague, Kristen Kereluik and I, asked our students two questions on the first day: What is learning? and What is technology? Always trying to embed an opportunity to explore the affordances and constraints of different…
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33 Skills for Teachers in the Digital Age — A List I Like
I’m not usually one for “Top 10 Lists of Tech Tools” or “21 Things every 21 Century Teacher should know”. It’s not that I don’t think that these lists offer useful tips — they most certainly do. I just find that these lists (a) quickly become outdated and (b) seldom generate the kinds of…
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Spreecasting: A new frontier in online learning?
Two months ago, I didn’t know anything about spreecast.com. My indefatigable ed tech mentor, Leigh Graves Wolf (who is generally awesome and knows a lot of stuff about a lot of things) sent me a tweet from the SXSWEdu Conference in Austin, TX in March. It went something like this: @mshagerman check out spreecast.com Use…
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Wallwisher: How Would You Use it in Your Teaching?
One of the reasons I love to teach teachers is that they’re always introducing me to new tools that support learning and instruction. My student Katy Jain just introduced me to WallWisher. I love it. It’s an interactive post-it board for ideas. Free. No login required. And it works. Here’s how Katy used it. She…
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Online Learning, Educational Transformations and Me?
One of my students, Brent Zeise, shared this infographic with me (originally published at OnlineEducation.net). I found it incredibly compelling and so I’m sharing it here. I’m currently teaching CEP 820 — Teaching Students Online, in the Master’s of Educational Technology Program at Michigan State University. For me, this infographic is a reminder of the…
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The Simple View of Online Reading — It’s Time to Push Back
Reading comprehension researchers will know that the simple view of reading (Gough & Tunmer, 1986) presents reading (and reading comprehension) as a function of two factors: (a) decoding ability (D) and (b) language comprehension (LC), a composite skill that is not well articulated by the model, but that is generally understood to include vocabulary knowledge…
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Annotum Anyone?
I’m working with some colleagues to think about the design of a unique summer learning institute for 6th graders. One of the ideas on the table is to structure the institute around scientific thinking. The kids would spend the summer investigating “how to do things” and reporting in various ways on what they’ve learned to…
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What does authentic learning look like? A Lego man in space, that’s what.
For an example of what real, authentic learning looks like, I share this article from the Toronto Star about two teenage boys who designed, from scratch, a weather balloon that a) transported a Lego man into space b) was equipped with Canon cameras that took photos of the Lego man’s voyage every 20 seconds and…
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The Skills of Document Use: My New Favourite Book
This week, I’ve been reading The Skills of Document Use: From Text Comprehension to Web-Based Learning by Jean-François Rouet (link to publications) and it has catapulted to the top of my list of favourite professional resources. In a nutshell, it’s brilliant. For starters, Rouet’s summary of current theories of comprehension — including, Kintsch’s Construction-Integration theory…
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Rand Reading Study Group Introduction for CEP 891
My colleague Paul Morsink and I had some fun recording this video that introduces our Master’s of Educational Technology students at MSU to the Rand Reading Study Group (2002) report. Paul kindly invited me to co-teach a course this semester that he developed with Rand Spiro last year. It’s called Online Literacy and Reading to…