Bloom's Sixth

Using technology to help students take risks Rather than use technology to make education more efficient, why not use it to help students take more risks in learning? That’s the question that Greg Toppo poses in an article for The Hechinger Report. “Good teaching is not about playing it safe,” Toppo writes. “It’s about getting kids to ask questions, argue a point, confront failure and try again.” He’s exactly right. By helping students push…

Whenever I give workshops about teaching with technology, I try to provide a handout of resources. This is one I distributed after workshops I led at the Best Practices Institute at CTE last week and at the School of Education. It’s a relatively modest list, but it includes sites for visualizing text; for editing images; for creating maps, charts, infographics; and for combining elements into a multimedia mélange. My goal in creating lists like this is to help instructors think about ways to incorporate multimedia elements and technology into their teaching. I never insist that instructors…

Several faculty members and graduate students from KU attended this year’s conference of the International Society for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning. I wasn’t able to go, though I did listen in on a few of the sessions remotely. I’ve collected tweets and videos into a Storify presentation that shows some of the thinking, conversations and approaches of the convention and the society.

An organization called Reclaim Open Learning held its first symposium last week. The organization promotes innovation in higher education through the use of technology, online resources and open learning in unconventional ways. The approach and goals of Reclaim Open Learning aren’t for everyone, though …

Before you ban cellphones and laptops from your classroom, consider this: Students want to use those devices for learning and are looking to their instructors for guidance. That’s one of the takeaway points of the latest study by the Educause Center for Analysis and Research on students and information technology. The center, known as ECAR, has conducted an annual survey of undergraduates since 2004, accumulating a wealth of data on students and…