Matthew Daniel's Profile

Effective tech integration must happen across the curriculum in ways that research shows deepen and enhance the learning process. In particular, it must support four key components of learning: active engagement, participation in groups, frequent interaction and feedback, and connection to real-world experts

And, as an added benefit, with technology tools and a project-learning approach, students are more likely to stay engaged and on task, reducing behavioral problems in the classroom.

Lynne Adrian (University of Alabama) started off investigating the role of personal response systems (“clickers”) in a large enrollment Humanities course to see if the use of concept questions would increase student engagement, but was soon led to reflect much more interestingly on the purpose of questions in class and the very nature of the questions she had been asking for more than twenty years. Similarly, Joe Ugoretz (Borough of Manhattan Community College), in an early inquiry, hoped to study the benefits of a free-form discussion space in an online literature course, but got frustrated because the students would frequently digress and stray off topic; finally it occurred to him that the really interesting inquiry lay in learning more about the nature of digressions themselves, considering which were productive and which were not.

We
need, in short, to merge a culture of inquiry into teaching and
learning with a culture of experimentation around new media technologies

Our ability to make the best use of any technologies to improve education
hinges ultimately on the reciprocal capacities to bring our powers of
inquiry to bear on educational technologies, as well as to bring the
power of new technologies to bear on our methods of inquiry and our
representation of knowledge about teaching practice.

Important Note: The ICT curriculum is not intended to stand alone, but rather to be infused within core courses and programs.

the power of every desktop computer or smart phone to function as a worldwide printing press, broadcasting station, market, community center, political organizing tool. Students will develop skills that are directly relevant to their personal development and their place in the world after graduation, but the price for learning to use the Social Media Collaboratory for collaborative inquiry is a serious committment of time and attention by every member of the learning group.

That’s because schools have done what every organization does when it sees an innovation. Its natural instinct is to cram the innovation into its existing model,

Note-taking on a laptop encourages verbatim transcription

Laptops also create a temptation to the many other things one can do there — surf the Web, check e-mail, shop for shoes, play solitaire, or instant-message friends

Most or all of these advantages accrue not from Web 2.0 in particular, but from its collaborative nature, and from the fact that students have a significant voice in selecting and shaping the project.

As Hargadon notes, the advantages are “significantly enhanced, if not dependent on, devoted adults helping to mentor and guide students

’d like to suggest that for the sake of our discussions around education that Web 2.0 is simply the use of the Internet as a two-way medium- - -that it is a platform upon which content is not only consumed but also created. For my generation, our use of the Web largely mirrored our experiences with print and broadcast media: we were the audience, and a select few were the creators (this would be Web 1.0, if you will).

For my children and our students today, their use of the Web often entirely revolves around content that they and their friends have created, and within Web frameworks or scaffolding that facilitate that creativity rather than providing the content for them. They build profile pages, upload photos and videos, and interact with each other and that content through active commenting systems.