Introduction to Education: Looking Forward and Looking Back on Education

Week #8

Topics

• Schooling America and Current Events

Activity

• Produce a 10 minute online experience in groups of 3–4, with a roughly even mix of instruction/content and practice/activity. You can use (assemble) existing materials or make from scratch, but the final product should be unique. This should target a topic for the class that one of you is observing.
• Some examples of things you might use
  • Khan Academy
  • MIT BLOSSOMS
  • Waker
  • MIT OpenCourseWare Highlights for High School
  • PhET

Readings

• [Learn] = Chapter 3: Learning and Transfer and Chapter 9: Technology to Support Learning
• [Schooling] = Chapter 3
• Thompson, Clive. “How Khan Academy is Changing the Rules of Education.” Wired, July 15, 2011.
• Sparks, Sarah D. “Lectures are Homework in Schools Following Khan Academy Lead.” Education Week, September 28, 2011.
• Roschelle, Jeremy M., et al. “Changing How and What Children Learn in School with Computer-Based Technologies.” Children and Computer Technology 10, no. 2 (2000): 76.
• Collins, Alan, and Richard Halverson. Rethinking Education in the Age of Technology: The Digital Revolution and Schooling in America. Teachers College Press, 2009. ISBN: 9780807750025.

Assignments

• Technology Centered Environments paper (Draft due Week #9; Final due Week #12) 

  • Based on your in-class experiences with educational technologies, what you have learned from your research and what you have read about educational technologies, you will individually write a 5 page paper on whether (or not) creating technology-centered environments should be considered as a broad educational goal. Your paper will be graded on the following criteria:
  • Ability to integrate your experiences with educational theory and research.
  • Evidence to support your perspective on technology-centered environments.
  • Coherence and consistency writing.

• Technology in Education Poster (Due Week #9) (PDF)

• Blog focus-Student observation (Due Week #9) 

  • Based on classroom observations. Focus on one or two students. What do you think they are learning in the class? How do you figure this out? How does the teacher appear to be assessing what and how the students are learning?