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This video will be incredibly useful for any educator ! It is really free and has got some innovative tools

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Lisa's blog is quite relevant to a University setting as well . She talks about the connection an educator should establish for their effective learning.

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As the school year launches for students across the nation, questions from passionate and innovative educators come into my networks on how to effectively support student learning. One common thread comes from innovative educators who have several classes of students and are trying to figure out how to manage all the demands placed upon them. They know that learning is not effective if you don't get to know your students. Or, as Jeff Bliss reminded us a few years back, you need to There are definitely ways technology can help with this. For example, touch a student's freakin heart before you can reach their minds.
Thrively is a terrific tool for getting to know what students care about and how they thrive. Google Classroom is becoming very popular for tracking student assignments. But it's more than the data. It's all about relationships as students reminded us in an Education Nation panel where they shared advice like:

I can't learn from you if you are not willing to connect with me.

Caring about each student is more important than teaching the class.

Every young person has a dream. Your job is to help bring us closer to our dreams.

We need more than teachers. We need life coaches.

You should be trained not just in teaching but also in counseling.

Tell me something good that I'm doing so that I can keep growing in that.

When you can feel like a family member it helps so much.

You need to love a student before you can teach a student.

Our teachers have too many students to enable them to connect with us in they way we need them to.

Advice for educators

1. Greet every student by name as they enter the class, and then remark on something about several students in the first two minutes of class.

2. Commend at least five students in each class period for their contributions to the discussion.

3. Take two minutes at the end of each class to reflect on what everyone learned today.

Roadblocks to building relationships

However, Maiers laments that she often encounters teachers who "don't have time" for such frivolity, or proclaim that it's "not their job" to be "friends" with the students.

When it comes to secondary school or teachers of subjects like technology where they see many classes, it is quite possible teachers respond this way with good reason. They literally "don't have time" or the mental capacity to do so. They are set up for failure.

Dunbar's number

That's because it is not uncommon for teachers to have a schedule of 15 - 25 different classes a week. This translates to anywhere from 450 - 750 students.

We know from science that the number of individuals with whom a stable inter-personal relationship can be maintained caps at around 150. T his limit is a direct function of relative neocortex size. This is according to anthropolo gist and psychologist Robin Dunbar , whose work refers to the average social group size.

Dunbar's number is applied to several other areas such as number of relationships you can manage on social media vs number of "friends." It also stands to reason that this number could be applied to how many students an educator could manage relationships with as well. With a load of more than 150 students, it simply becomes too complicated to manage at an optimal processing level. When applying Dunbar's number to teaching that number drops. There is a cognitive limit to the number of students a teacher can maintain and have a consistent interaction with before the edges start to fray and these lose track of students. Once you pass that number,
as one student put it, what you'll see is "the teachers focus on the top two or three who they can use to show themselves off and the bottom five who they have to keep in line or else chaos ensues."
The answer for Dave who wrote about this on AcademHack, is that 45 - 60 is the number of students teachers can realistically get to know very well.
Sure, teachers can use various strategies and harness the power of technology to try to keep track of more students, but it is difficult at best. When we know it is absolutely not necessary or in the best interest of students to give an educator more than 5 classes or 150 students the question becomes: Why do they?

Such large student loads is not a necessary evil and should not be business as usual. There are better ways to do scheduling that respect students, teachers, and the importance of knowing the whole child to reach them effectively.

The solution

If we want students and teachers to succeed, increase the time students spend with their teachers and limit the load. It's a simple solution where everyone wins.

How many students can you "really" reach? 45? 60? 150? More? Use this article to start important discussions where you work if you have a large class load. When you do, be prepared to suggest rethinking this practice with practical solutions and models that more effectively support student success and teacher effectiveness. Not sure how to do that? Read this article with 8 strategies to get your principal to say yes.

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It's Class Load, Not Just Size, That Matters

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As the school year launches for students across the nation, questions from passionate and innovative educators come into my networks on how to effectively support student learning. One common thread comes from innovative educators who have several classes of students and are trying to figure out how to manage all the demands placed upon them.

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Evidence of Technology rescuing academic year in South Africa !

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Evidence of Technology rescuing academic year in South Africa !

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This is quite interesting from a South African perspective ! I am glad to see that certain Universities in SA could lead on using technology for entire student learning.

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How technology is transforming higher education learning - CNBC Africa

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Last year, most higher education academic institutions were unable to complete the academic year.

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The Real Technology innovator champion in Africa !

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The Real Technology innovator champion in Africa !

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CILT seem to be one of the pioneers in Africa once it comes to edtech. I am so grateful and honoured to be student within CILT http://www.cilt.uct.ac.za/

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Centre for Innovation in Learning and Teaching

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The UCT MOOCs have done it again, with three courses making it onto Class Central's Top 50 MOOCs of all time in 2017. This year the MOOCs, What is a Mind? (on the 2016 list as well), Extinctions: Past & Present and Understanding Clinical Research: Behind the Statistics , all made it onto this exclusive list.

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Very inspiring indeed as it seems to make a real difference in rural Africa ! I wish schools in SA could implement such things in the near future

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Imagine a student in the rural Kenyan county of Garissa. She can be the most diligent and committed student in the classroom, powered by support at home and a willingness to learn. However, when it comes to fundamental educational elements like teachers and textbooks, statistically, her access is far from guaranteed.

"The four walls of her classroom really determine what she's able to do with her curiosity," says Nivi Mukherjee, an education technologist at the helm of Kio Kit, a tablet learning system designed for a rural African classroom and powered by BRCK, one of Kenya's first consumer electronics companies. "That was the premise for how we started thinking through what digital access meant in schools."

On a continent where 30 million children miss out on primary school education yet there is 73% mobile phone penetration, there is little question that the fusing of technology with education in Africa has the potential to expand the educational horizons of millions. The question is just how to implement that in challenging and varied local contexts.

The failings of hardware-driven initiatives such as One Laptop Per Child have proven that lofty initiatives don't always yield results. The NGO provided laptops to millions of children in developing nations, but research into the project in Peru revealed no measurable gain in language or maths scores. However, across sub-Saharan Africa, a number of projects are proving that scalable, regionally-tailored, and uniquely-integrated hardware and software solutions can help to fill the gulfs of learning on the continent.

The Kio Kit runs on BRCK, a mobile Wi-Fi and storage device designed for power and connectivity-starved environments. BRCK's creator, Erik Hersman, who's also the founder of other notable Nairobi-based startups Ushahidi and iHub, is fond of saying, "If it works in Africa, it'll work anywhere."

The tablets come pre-loaded with a mix of the Kenyan curriculum and international content, but they don't have network connection to prevent students looking at non-educational content. However, the tablets can be updated with new materials when connected to BRCK, which is equipped with Wi-Fi, a sim card and ethernet connectivity options.

While at first glance, Kio Kit may seem like a hardware-driven premise similar to One Laptop Per Child, Hersman explains that the BRCK team comes from a much more holistic and localised mindset.

"We knew if we were going to look at education seriously, we need to look at this with a solutions-based approach because a device-based approach doesn't work," Hersman said. "We spend a lot of time with teachers and the real 'aha' moment came when we started looking at the classrooms themselves and asked: 'What's not working here?' The fact that most tablets have power cables you have to plug in and out - it doesn't work for teachers. Little things [like that] make a big difference when you get to a classroom."

Hersman describes BRCK and Kio Kit as "content agnostic", meaning that while they curate content to ensure its educational quality, they don't create any themselves. Another ed-tech approach from Eneza Education, also Nairobi based, is just the opposite of that. Eneza delivers tailored and original educational content created by Kenyan school teachers to students via three platforms: regular web, mobile web via Android, or simple SMS via a basic mobile phone.

Stephen Haggard, executive chair of the company, explains that providing relevant and on-tone content on platforms that are readily available to students is key to widespread adoption.

"It's essential that if you want to get coverage and if you want big scalable operations, you have to go to the device platform where people are," Eneza said. "If you can work with ultra low-cost devices and make people bring their own device, then you remove a big piece of the problem."

Eneza, which was co-founded by Kenyan technologist Kago Kagichiri and former Teach for America educator Toni Maraviglia, had 800,000 users unique users in March across their three territories of Kenya, Ghana and Tanzania. Users pay for the service using their mobile phone credit via a payment process that is seamlessly integrated with major mobile network operators in the region. Haggard notes that having their users pay for the service themselves on a platform they already use is key.

"One of the biggest pitfalls [in ed-tech] projects is when the main revenue source is donors, philanthropy or foundations, because the product is then inevitably geared to satisfying the needs of those funders," Haggard said. "When you compare with the kinds of incentives you get in a setup like ours - where we bring our money in from charging [users] for it - you get a different set of incentives ... so that people are going to take it up in the hundreds of thousands."

Another pay-per-use model is the west African based Quick Do Book Box, founded by Cameroonian entrepreneur and IT expert Dominique Buende. Book Box offers a digital library catalogue coupled with hybrid electric and solar-powered e-readers to universities, local libraries and schools in Cameroon, Gabon, Congo and Senegal.

By offering content licensors a way into the previously untapped market of Africa - along with an assurance that the content won't be pirated thanks to proprietary e-readers - Book Box has been able to offer geographically tailored pricing. So where an article or book in Europe might cost €20, a Book Box user in Cameroon might be able to buy the same book for just €1, or even free of charge, and pay for it via their mobile phone.

One might wonder why an under-resourced African university might not attempt to fill its shelves with books before jumping all the way to a digital format. "During my studies in Cameroon, there would be one book to be shared with 100 students - how are you supposed to train and educate people that way?" Buende said. "Books are very expensive in Africa because they are produced in Europe so the end user in Africa pays more and can't sell it on afterwards. So the solution has to be numeric and digital."

While these solutions can, in theory, be scaled elsewhere, its creators are generally under no illusions that a one-size-fits-all approach will work. The delivery of content and the content itself must be tailored to its audience and problems must be solved with the end-user in mind, Hersman said. All of this must coupled with a strong emphasis on teacher training and user experience.

"What we've seen is you put these devices in the hands of students, and they figure out how to use them in three minutes - that's not a challenge," Mukherjee said. "Thinking carefully about what makes things easier and more useful and meaningful to the teacher is the key to implementing a good education technology intervention anywhere."
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Using technology to bridge the learning gap across Africa

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Imagine a student in the rural Kenyan county of Garissa. She can be the most diligent and committed student in the classroom, powered by support at home and a willingness to learn. However, when it comes to fundamental educational elements like teachers and textbooks, statistically, her access is far from guaranteed.