Summer Institute on Digital Literacy

It’s just six weeks until the Summer Institute on Digital Literacy at the University of Rhode Island. Institute organizer, Renée Hobbs, Professor at the University of Rhode Island and Founder of the Media Education Lab just issued an invitation that provides additional information about the week’s activities. You can see a screen shot here — but click on the image to visit the URI page where you can also find registration info. 

Come, contribute, connect, collaborate, create and be ready to change the way you think about digital literacies.

[click the image to visit the message]

Invitation to the URI Digital Literacy Summer Institute

Top 10 Ways to Ensure Teachers Will Never Integrate Technology

Sometimes, when I’m trying to figure out what TO do, it helps to first think about what NOT to do. I’ve found this to be a particularly helpful strategy when I’m designing professional development or thinking about a particularly difficult problem. Setting up the antithetical somehow helps to sharpen my focus on what I’d like the solution to look like. So, when I introduced the idea of tech leadership in schools to my Master’s of Educational Technology Students in Rouen, France, I asked them to think about what NOT to do. Group 1 crafted a Top 10 List of Ways to Ensure Teachers would NEVER Integrate Technology. Group 2 crafted a Top 10 List of Tech PD Fails that would surely turn teachers off the notion of tech integration. I thought their ideas were pretty clever — and spot on!

 

How do I use Hootcourse to support participation in my classroom?

http://hootcourse.com/course/1437/g6i2tuhtirin4h6/?type=mini

Yesterday, I helped to lead a professional development day with teachers at Ruth Fox Elementary School in North Branch, MI. The MSU PD Team, lead by Doug Hartman, has been working with the teachers at Ruth Fox for a year and a half to support their strategic integration of technology in their pedagogical practice. In that time, the teachers have moved SO far in their thinking about and with technology.

We always try to push their thinking when we meet so yesterday, I introduced the idea of using HootCourse in the classroom. All day, teachers tweeted their thoughts and, in the end, I think the backchannel permitted teachers to voice questions that might otherwise have been lost in the structure of the day. I also used it as a place to re-state what had happened — a sort of running archive of the major ideas from the day. Having just reviewed the ad-hoc transcript now, it was more edifying than I thought it might have been. How great to have those “in-the-moment” thoughts captured and available for review so readily.

I also introduced the idea of the Personal Learning Network as a way for teachers to sustain the amazing learning they’ve done. Check out the web resources I created for these topics.

HootCourse
Personal Learning Networks

Thanks to Paul Morsink, Doug Hartman, Penny Thompson, Anne Wood and Amber White — it’s such an honour to work with each of you.