Digital Directions

Education Week Digital Directions "Smart Strategies for Ed Tech Leaders"

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Tip: You can click on a topic area of the cover image to access that page/article.

"The Massive Open Online Professor" (Carson & Schmidt)

"The challenges faced by higher education around the world are daunting and cannot be met by the traditional institution-based education system. For the current model to meet the needs of future generations, we would need to build and fund thousands of new universities. And yet the past ten years have demonstrated that there is another way. Scalable education on the web is increasingly possible, largely through the use of commodity software that is easy to use and available freely or at low cost to anyone.

"Consider: Stanford and MIT recently started offering free online courses, and both universities enrolled more than 100,000 users. In one Stanford course, on artificial intelligence, 25,000 users completed all required homework assignments and received a certificate for their participation."

Read the full article by Stephen Carson and Jan Philipp Schmidt on Academic matters here...

Online Collaboration Tools (Robin Good)

Check out Robin Good's cool Scoop.it on this topic...

"Letting Go of Boolean Operators: Rethinking How Research Is Taught in Schools" (Sarah Ludwig)

Sarah Ludwig on ALA TechSource writes: 

I am constantly struggling with the sense that I’m doing a lot of talking for nothing. I painstakingly teach kids how to use a database and they go straight back to Wikipedia as soon as I turn them loose. I show them how to use keywords and operators and they always fall back on their “ask Google a question” method.
I get frustrated. I’ve considered asking their teachers to require the use of databases. But lately I’ve been admitting to myself the deep, dark truth: I’ve got it backwards. I’m forcing students to use tools and search methods that are more cumbersome, more frustrating, and less successful simply because I, the librarian, think it’s the best thing to do. 

She concludes the introduction:

Obviously, it’s our job to teach students how to find the best information they can. But I think there is a better way.

And then goes on to share some valuable ideas.  Click here to read her full piece, followed by some interesting comments...   

50,000 (And Counting) Education Apps Worth Knowing About

A tantalizing post from Edudemic.  You can check out the post here...
A partnership between Edudemic and FindTheBest results in a robust directory of "about 56,000 education apps."

The Edudemic post explains How It Works: 

• Head over to apps.edudemic.com and start exploring
• Use the powerful search engine to find new and exciting education apps
• Narrow down your results by age and content rating
• Sort results based on which product you have (iPad 1, iPod Touch 3rd Generation, etc)
• Adjust results based on price with the simple slider
• Filter results based on the size of each app download
• Write a review and read other reviews
• Add a listing! You don’t need to be the creator of an app if you see it’s missing. Just add it in so others can see and hear about it.
• View related apps you may also like.
• Login with Facebook to get personalized results (sorta like Apple’s Genius tool)
• Embed the directory in your own blog or website with a simple embed code
• More features coming soon!

Note: there are literally tens of thousands of apps in this directory and some are better than others. Be sure to use the filtering tools to find what you’re looking for!

40 Open Education Resources You Should Know About

From Edudemic. Check out this article...

http://edudemic.com/2012/07/40-open-education-
resources-you-should-know-about/

Check out 'The Future of Education' (dot com)

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As Steve notes on the welcome page --

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