A friend reminded me of the site Spurious Correlations, which shows absurd “relationships” between data that couldn’t possibly be related– though it’s fun to think that it is.
T...
When we ask “why offer Mozilla Open Badges in education?”, the answer often comes back “to motivate students”. When we ask “how exactly does that work?” – well, uh, it seems people have differing ideas.
I think that many people take it as an article of faith that giving badges will magically mot...
I’m excited to announce that this post is now featured in the curriculum of the eCampus Ontario Canada teacher micro‐credentialing program! So glad that this content is valuable to a new generation of teachers!
In the 21st Century world of abundant free educational content, teachers are challe...
I religiously read Audrey Watters’ Hack Education blog, often finding that I agree with her in principle and then disagree about the details of how to put a plan in...
This past year has brought a massive amount of attention to Massive Open Online Courses, and much speculation about what they mean for traditional institutions of learning. The education and technology blogosphere have been breathlessly predicting the end of the world for traditional, brick‐an...
I may be a zealot proponent for open source software, but I don’t think that clouds my judgement when I say that Android is a great platform for education. Whether you’re using it for simple reading, writing, and multimedia or digging into the more...
Promoting Interaction in Your Assignments – Broadband from Samuel Merritt U Academic Tech on Vimeo.
Do you wish you could make one change in your course that would increase student engagement and boost your course evaluations? Research shows that courses with high rates of in...
I just attended the Flipped Classroom conference yesterday and it gave me a chance to think carefully about how we might approach flipping instruction at SMU. Most of the attendees were K‑12 teachers using free tools to flip their own classroom, so it’s a different proposition to try and recommend...
With the news that Google Apps for Education will be integrated with Google+ in a few days, it’s time to start thinking about how social media and collaboration can be a reality for schools. Many universities and K‑12 schools have already adopted Google Apps for Education because of its powerfu...
Until I saw this TED talk, I didn’t care much that free Web 2.0 tools like Google and Facebook were collecting massive dossiers of information about my online habits. I thought they were just using it to serve me more relevant ads and improve my user experience. It seemed like a small price to pay f...