If all teachers were like Sir Ken Robinson, I wouldn’t have started studying educational technology.
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05Feb
Author: Katherine Pisana Categories: Education, Technology Comments Off on Education = inspiration (?)
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04Feb
The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 may be the catalyst for real growth in the educational technology community.
Good News for Ed Tech in the Economic Stimulus Bills
“Enhancing Education Through Technology (EETT), is slated to receive $1 billion new dollars in addition to the existing $267 million in the program.”
“Good News for Ed Tech in the Economic Stimulus Bills,” T.H.E. Journal, 2/2/2009
Part of the allocation of these funds is meant to go toward the ‘modernization, renovation and repair’ of schools in order to ‘improve teachers’ ability to teach and students’ ability to learn’, such as installing educational technology infrastructure, the acquisition of hardware and software, etc.
Ding! Ding! Ding! Who else is hearing bells ringing?? While reading the outline of spending, I’m picking up on the distinct assumption that teachers and students will know how to use all this new fancy shmancy kit. To be fair, “25 percent of the money a school district receives must be used for professional development.” Though I wonder, how will schools define professional development in 2009-11 when these new budgets will have to be spent?
~ Learning technologists of the world, this is our chance to swoop in! ~
If we don’t, you KNOW people are going to start blaming the technology again when all this stimulus money seemingly goes to waste because of a lack of measurable improvements in the education system.
So, that’s what the US plans to do. What about your country? What sort of stimulus packages are being considered in your part of the world?
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03Feb
As I’ve just started studying (online) again, my mind is tuning back into things it normally only focuses on when I’m in hard-core academic mode. ThisĀ morning, for example, (well, actually, for the last two mornings) I’ve been reading through the introductory materials on both of my course websites, and I ended up going through a lot of information related to library resources and referencing tools. The most common bibliographic and bookmarking tools that we’re being recommended are RefWorks and Furl, respectively.
RefWorks is only available to us while we’re registered students. After that, unless we’re affiliated with an organization that pays for access OR unless we want to pay for an annual subscription ourselves, we loose all of our research collections at the end of the academic term. Basic translation: if you want to be able to access the information you collect and store using RefWorks over then next 6-8 months, this might not be your best choice.
Furl, on the other hand, is a social bookmarking service with many features, accessible from anywhere and free to all. Although they’re not direct substitutes, if I hadn’t already been hooked on Zotero when I first learned about Furl, I probably would have given Furl more of a chance.
Now we get to the reason for this post! I wanted to share a bibliographic management tool with you that I have found to be invaluable during my courses of study (and tangential resource endeavors). Zotero is a free, open source Firefox plugin that allows you to capture resources as you come across them and organise them into neat research collections. I find it thoroughly enjoyable and intuitive to use
Zotero allows me to make sense of the piles of information I collect each time I brave the plethora of resources available within just a few clicks of a mouse. To help bring my point home, imagine that if all the files and links I collected were stacks of random pieces of paper covering every square inch of my inevitably invisible imaginary desk, then Zotero would be like the magical fairy that instantly organises all the information into a beautifully systematic filing system that I structure and that is completely aligned with my thought processes. Essentially, it allows me to know where to find stuff when I need it – whether I’m on or off line.
It also lets me summarise reference collections almost instantly. Let me show you… I’ll share a report I generated from a collection of resources I built relating to online language learning. It generates the report in html format, so I just saved that page as a pdf file which is now available to you simply by clicking here.
Now that I’ve got you hooked ( š ), let’s watch the video intro together (the video below opens in a new tab/window):
Zotero even has a social feature called Zotz that allows you to share your reference collections with communities. More info below:
Here’s an exhibit I just generated. The Zotz add-on still needs a little ironing out, but it’s an exciting new development of an already exceptionally functional information management tool.
There’s even a WordPress plugin available that helps Zotero better recognise the information in your blog entries which makes for more seamless referencing of this type of information as well. From the screenshot below, you can see the little additional icon that is displayed in your address bar once this plugin is activated. When you’re viewing a WordPress blog, once you click on this icon, a window pops up (as seen below) asking you which of the entries available on the page you’re on you would like to add to your Zotero collections.
Lots of other screencast tutorials are available for those interested in exploring the tool further.
