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A couple of weeks ago I was asked what I thought the future of technology in education was. It is a really interesting question and one that I am required to think about all the time. By its very nature, technology changes at a fast pace and making it accessible to pupils, teachers and other stakeholders is an ongoing challenge.

So what is the future? Is it the iPad?

No, I don't think it is. For me, the future is not about one specific device. Don't get me wrong, I love the iPad. In fact, I have just finished a trial to see if using them really does support teaching and learning - and they have proved effective. I've written about the trial in more detail on my blog.

iPads and other mobile technology are the 'now'. Although, they will play a part in the future, four years ago the iPad didn't even exist. We don't know what will be the current technology in another four. Perhaps it will be wearable devices such as Google Glass, although I suspect that tablets will still be used in education.

The future is about access, anywhere learning and collaboration, both locally and globally. Teaching and learning is going to be social. Schools of the future could have a traditional cohort of students, as well as online only students who live across the country or even the world. Things are already starting to move this way with the emergence of massive open online courses (MOOCs).

For me the future of technology in education is the cloud.

Technology can often be a barrier to teaching and learning. I think the cloud will go a long way to removing this barrier. Why? By removing the number of things that can go wrong.

Schools, will only need one major thing to be prepared for the future. They will not need software installed, servers or local file storage. Schools will need a fast robust internet connection. Infrastructure is paramount to the the future of technology in education.

We don't know what the new 'in' device will be in the future. What we do know, is that it will need the cloud. Schools and other educational institutions will need to futureproof their infrastructure the best they can.

This should be happening now. If you want to start to use mobile technology in your school, whether it is an iPad program or a bring your own device (BYOD) program your connectivity must be fast and reliable. Student and teacher buy in, is so important. If the network is slow and things are not working properly students and teachers will not want to use the devices. Make the sure the infrastructure is there before the devices.

Teachers can use the cloud to set, collect and grade work online. Students will have instant access to grades, comments and work via a computer, smartphone or tablet. Many schools are already doing this. Plus, services such as the educational social network Edmodo offer this for free.

This is where devices come in. All devices, not matter which ones we will use in the future will need to access the cloud. Each student will have their own. Either a device specified by the school or one they have chosen to bring in themselves.

School classrooms are going to change. Thanks to the cloud and mobile devices, technology will be integrated into every part of school. In fact, it won't just be the classrooms that will change. Games fields, gyms and school trips will all change. Whether offsite or on site the school, teachers, students and support staff will all be connected. In my ideal world, all classrooms will be paperless.

With the cloud, the world will be our classroom. E-learning will change teaching and learning. Students can learn from anywhere and teachers can teach from anywhere.

The cloud can also encourage independent learning. Teachers could adopt a flipped classroom approach more often. Students will take ownership of their own learning. Teachers can put resources for students online for students to use. These could be videos, documents, audio podcasts or interactive images. All of these resources can be accessed via a student's computer, smartphone or tablet. As long as they have an internet connection either via Wifi, 3G or 4G they are good to go.

Rather than being 'taught' students can learn independently and in their own way. There is also a massive amount of resources online that students can find and use themselves, without the help of the teacher.

This of course means the role of the teacher will change.

Shared applications and documents on the cloud, such as Google Apps will allow for more social lessons. How often do students get an opportunity to collaborate productively using technology in the classroom? It isn't always easy. However, students working on documents together using Google Apps is easy. They could be in the same room or in different countries. These are all good skills for students to have. Of course, these collaborative tools are also very useful for teachers. I for one have worked on several projects where these tools have lets me work with people across the country. Some of which I have never met.

What we must remember is that when schools adopt new technology and services, they must be evaluated. This way, as a school, you know if they are successful and what improvements are needed. Staff will also need training, you can't expect staff to use new technology if it they are not confident users or creators. Any initiative is doomed to failure without well trained, confident staff who can see how technology can support and benefit teaching and learning.

Plenty of schools have already embraced this, but there's still a way to go to ensure all schools are ready for the future of technology. It is time for all schools to embrace the cloud.
Matt is head of ICT at Kingston Grammar School and the director of education consultancy Realise Learning. He blogs here and you can follow him on Twitter: @mattbritland.
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What is the future of technology in education?

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A couple of weeks ago I was asked what I thought the future of technology in education was. It is a really interesting question and one that I am required to think about all the time. By its very nature, technology changes at a fast pace and making it accessible to pupils, teachers and other stakeholders is an ongoing challenge.

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Technology in Schools - Chapter 6: Professional Development, Technology in Schools: Suggestions, Tools, and Guidelines for Assessing Technology in Elementary and Secondary Education

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Chapter 6: Professional Development, Technology in Schools: Suggestions, Tools, and Guidelines for Assessing Technology in Elementary and Secondary Education

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Technology in Schools - Chapter 5: Maintenance and Support, Technology in Schools: Suggestions, Tools, and Guidelines for Assessing Technology in Elementary and Secondary Education

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Chapter 5: Maintenance and Support, Technology in Schools: Suggestions, Tools, and Guidelines for Assessing Technology in Elementary and Secondary Education

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In the winter of 2011, a handful of software engineers landed in Boston just ahead of a crippling snowstorm. They were there as part of Code for America, a program that places idealistic young coders and designers in city halls across the country for a year. They'd planned to spend it building a new website for Boston's public schools, but within days of their arrival, the city all but shut down and the coders were stuck fielding calls in the city's snow emergency center.

In such snowstorms, firefighters can waste precious minutes finding and digging out hydrants. A city employee told the CFA team that the planning department had a list of street addresses for Boston's 13,000 hydrants. "We figured, 'Surely someone on the block with a shovel would volunteer if they knew where to look,'" says Erik Michaels-Ober, one of the CFA coders. So they got out their laptops.

Now, Boston has adoptahydrant.org, a simple website that lets residents "adopt" hydrants across the city. The site displays a map of little hydrant icons. Green ones have been claimed by someone willing to dig them out after a storm, red ones are still available-500 hydrants were adopted last winter.

Maybe that doesn't seem like a lot, but consider what the city pays to keep it running: $9 a month in hosting costs. "I figured that even if it only led to a few fire hydrants being shoveled out, that could be the difference between life or death in a fire, so it was worth doing," Michaels-Ober says. And because the CFA team open-sourced the code, meaning they made it freely available for anyone to copy and modify, other cities can adapt it for practically pennies. It has been deployed in Providence, Anchorage, and Chicago. A Honolulu city employee heard about Adopt-a-Hydrant after cutbacks slashed his budget, and now Honolulu has Adopt-a-Siren, where volunteers can sign up to check for dead batteries in tsunami sirens across the city. In Oakland, it's Adopt-a-Drain.

Sounds great, right? These simple software solutions could save lives, and they were cheap and quick to build. Unfortunately, most cities will never get a CFA team, and most can't afford to keep a stable of sophisticated programmers in their employ, either. For that matter, neither can many software companies in Silicon Valley; the talent wars have gotten so bad that even brand-name tech firms have been forced to offer employees a bonus of upwards of $10,000 if they help recruit an engineer.

In fact, even as the Department of Labor predicts the nation will add 1.2 million new computer-science-related jobs by 2022, we're graduating proportionately fewer computer science majors than we did in the 1980s, and the number of students signing up for Advanced Placement computer science has flatlined.

There's a whole host of complicated reasons why, from boring curricula to a lack of qualified teachers to the fact that in most states computer science doesn't count toward graduation requirements. But should we worry? After all, anyone can learn to code after taking a few fun, interactive lessons at sites like Codecademy, as a flurry of articles in everything from TechCrunch to Slate have claimed. (Michael Bloomberg pledged to enroll at Codecademy in 2012.) Twelve million people have watched a video from Code.org in which celebrities like NBA All-Star Chris Bosh and will.i.am pledged to spend an hour learning code, a notion endorsed by President Obama, who urged the nation: "Don't just play on your phone-program it."

So you might be forgiven for thinking that learning code is a short, breezy ride to a lush startup job with a foosball table and free kombucha, especially given all the hype about billion-dollar companies launched by self-taught wunderkinds (with nary a mention of the private tutors and coding camps that helped some of them get there). The truth is, code-if what we're talking about is the chops you'd need to qualify for a programmer job-is hard, and lots of people would find those jobs tedious and boring.

But let's back up a step: What if learning to code weren't actually the most important thing? It turns out that rather than increasing the number of kids who can crank out thousands of lines of JavaScript, we first need to boost the number who understand what code can do. As the cities that have hosted Code for America teams will tell you, the greatest contribution the young programmers bring isn't the software they write. It's the way they think. It's a principle called "computational thinking," and knowing all of the Java syntax in the world won't help if you can't think of good ways to apply it.

Unfortunately, the way computer science is currently taught in high school tends to throw students into the programming deep end, reinforcing the notion that code is just for coders, not artists or doctors or librarians. But there is good news: Researchers have been experimenting with new ways of teaching computer science, with intriguing results. For one thing, they've seen that leading with computational thinking instead of code itself, and helping students imagine how being computer savvy could help them in any career, boosts the number of girls and kids of color taking-and sticking with-computer science. Upending our notions of what it means to interface with computers could help democratize the biggest engine of wealth since the Industrial Revolution.

So what is computational thinking? If you've ever improvised dinner, pat yourself on the back: You've engaged in some light CT.

There are those who open the pantry to find a dusty bag of legumes and some sad-looking onions and think, "Lentil soup!" and those who think, "Chinese takeout." A practiced home cook can mentally sketch the path from raw ingredients to a hot meal, imagining how to substitute, divide, merge, apply external processes (heat, stirring), and so on until she achieves her end. Where the rest of us see a dead end, she sees the potential for something new.

If seeing the culinary potential in raw ingredients is like computational thinking, you might think of a software algorithm as a kind of recipe: a step-by-step guide on how to take a bunch of random ingredients and start layering them together in certain quantities, for certain amounts of time, until they produce the outcome you had in mind.

Like a good algorithm, a good recipe follows some basic principles. Ingredients are listed first, so you can collect them before you start, and there's some logic in the way they are listed: olive oil before cumin because it goes in the pan first. Steps are presented in order, not a random jumble, with staggered tasks so that you're chopping veggies while waiting for water to boil. A good recipe spells out precisely what size of dice or temperature you're aiming for. It tells you to look for signs that things are working correctly at each stage-the custard should coat the back of a spoon. Opportunities for customization are marked-use twice the milk for a creamier texture-but if any ingredients are absolutely crucial, the recipe makes sure you know it. If you need to do something over and over-add four eggs, one at a time, beating after each-those tasks are boiled down to one simple instruction.

Much like cooking, computational thinking begins with a feat of imagination, the ability to envision how digitized information-ticket sales, customer addresses, the temperature in your fridge, the sequence of events to start a car engine, anything that can be sorted, counted, or tracked-could be combined and changed into something new by applying various computational techniques. From there, it's all about "decomposing" big tasks into a logical series of smaller steps, just like a recipe.

Those techniques include a lot of testing along the way to make sure things are working. The culinary principle of mise en place is akin to the computational principle of sorting: organize your data first, and you'll cut down on search time later. Abstraction is like the concept of "mother sauces" in French cooking (béchamel, tomato, hollandaise), building blocks to develop and reuse in hundreds of dishes. There's iteration: running a process over and over until you get a desired result. The principle of parallel processing makes use of all available downtime (think: making the salad while the roast is cooking). Like a good recipe, good software is really clear about what you can tweak and what you can't. It's explicit. Computers don't get nuance; they need everything spelled out for them.

Put another way: Not every cook is a David Chang, not every writer is a Jane Austen, and not every computational thinker is a Guido van Rossum, the inventor of the influential Python programming language. But just as knowing how to scramble an egg or write an email makes life easier, so too will a grasp of computational thinking. Yet the "learn to code!" camp may have set people on the uphill path of mastering C++ syntax instead of encouraging all of us to think a little more computationally.

The happy truth is, if you get the fundamentals about how computers think, and how humans can talk to them in a language the machines understand, you can imagine a project that a computer could do, and discuss it in a way that will make sense to an actual programmer. Because as programmers will tell you, the building part is often not the hardest part: It's figuring out what to build. "Unless you can think about the ways computers can solve problems, you can't even know how to ask the questions that need to be answered," says Annette Vee, a University of Pittsburgh professor who studies the spread of computer science literacy.

Indeed, some powerful computational solutions take just a few lines of code-or no code at all. Consider this lo-fi example: In 1854, a London physician named John Snow helped squelch a cholera outbreak that had killed 616 residents. Brushing aside the prevailing theory of the disease-deadly miasma-he surveyed relatives of the dead about their daily routines. A map he made connected the disease to drinking habits: tall stacks of black lines, each representing a death, grew around a water pump on Broad Street in Soho that happened to be near a leaking cesspool. His theory: The disease was in the water. Classic principles of computational thinking came into play here, including merging two datasets to reveal something new (locations of deaths plus locations of water pumps), running the same process over and over and testing the results, and pattern recognition. The pump was closed, and the outbreak subsided.

Or take Adopt-a-Hydrant. Under the hood, it isn't a terribly sophisticated piece of software. What's ingenious is simply that someone knew enough to say: Here's a database of hydrant locations, here is a universe of people willing to help, let's match them up. The computational approach is rooted in seeing the world as a series of puzzles, ones you can break down into smaller chunks and solve bit by bit through logic and deductive reasoning. That's why Jeannette Wing, a VP of research at Microsoft who popularized the term "computational thinking," says it's a shame to think CT is just for programmers. "Computational thinking involves solving problems, designing systems, and understanding human behavior," she writes in a publication of the Association for Computing Machinery. Those are handy skills for everybody, not just computer scientists.

In other words, computational thinking opens doors. For while it may seem premature to claim that today every kid needs to code, it's clear that they're increasingly surrounded by opportunities to code-opportunities that the children of the privileged are already seizing. The parents of Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg got him a private computer tutor when he was in middle school. Last year, 13,000 people chipped in more than $600,000 via Kickstarter for their own limited-edition copy of Robot Turtles, a board game that teaches programming basics to kids as young as three. There are plenty of free, kid-oriented code-learning sites-like Scratch, a programming language for children developed at MIT-but parents and kids in places like San Francisco or Austin are more likely to know they exist.

Computer scientists have been warning for decades that understanding code will one day be as essential as reading and writing. If they're right, understanding the importance of computational thinking can't be limited to the elite, not if we want some semblance of a democratic society. Self-taught auteurs will always be part of the equation, but to produce tech-savvy citizens "at scale," to borrow an industry term, the heavy lifting will happen in public school classrooms. Increasingly, to have a good shot at a good job, you'll need to be code literate.
Upending our notions of what it means to interface with computers could help democratize the biggest engine of wealth since the Industrial Revolution.
"Code literate." Sounds nice, but what does it mean? And where does literacy end and fluency begin? The best way to think about that is to look to the history of literacy itself.

Reading and writing have become what researchers have called "interiorized" or "infrastructural," a technology baked so deeply into everyday human life that we're never surprised to encounter it. It's the main medium through which we connect, via not only books and papers, but text messages and the voting booth, medical forms and shopping sites. If a child makes it to adulthood without being able to read or write, we call that a societal failure.

Yet for thousands of years writing was the preserve of the professional scribes employed by the elite. So what moved it to the masses? In Europe at least, writes literacy researcher Vee, the tipping point was the Domesday Book, an 11th-century survey of landowners that's been called the oldest public record in England.

Commissioned by William the Conqueror to take stock of what his new subjects held in terms of acreage, tenants, and livestock so as to better tax them, royal scribes fanned across the countryside taking detailed notes during in-person interviews. It was like a hands-on demo on the efficiencies of writing, and it proved contagious. Despite skepticism-writing was hard, and maybe involved black magic-other institutions started putting it to use. Landowners and vendors required patrons and clients to sign deeds and receipts, with an "X" if nothing else. Written records became admissible in court. Especially once Johannes Gutenberg invented the printing press, writing seeped into more and more aspects of life, no longer a rarefied skill restricted to a cloistered class of aloof scribes but a function of everyday society.

Fast forward to 19th-century America, and it'd be impossible to walk down a street without being bombarded with written information, from newspapers to street signs to store displays; in the homes of everyday people, personal letters and account ledgers could be found. "The technology of writing became infrastructural," Vee writes in her paper "Understanding Computer Programming As a Literacy." "Those who could not read text began to be recast as 'illiterate' and power began to shift towards those who could." Teaching children how to read became a civic and moral imperative. Literacy rates soared over the next century, fostered through religious campaigns, the nascent public school system, and the at-home labor of many mothers.

Of course, not everyone was invited in immediately: Illiteracy among women, slaves, and people of color was often outright encouraged, sometimes even legally mandated. But today, while only some consider themselves to be "writers," practically everybody reads and writes every day. It's hard to imagine there was ever widespread resistance to universal literacy.

So how does the history of computing compare? Once again, says Vee, it starts with a census. In 1880, a Census Bureau statistician, Herman Hollerith, saw that the system of collecting and sorting surveys by hand was buckling under the weight of a growing population. He devised an electric tabulating machine, and generations of these " Hollerith machines" were used by the bureau until the 1950s, when the first commercial mainframe, the UNIVAC, was developed with a government research grant. "The first successful civilian computer," it was a revolution in computing technology: Unlike the "dumb" Hollerith machine and its cousins, which ran on punch cards, vacuum tubes, and other mechanical inputs that had to be manually entered over and over again, the UNIVAC had memory. It could store instructions, in the form of programs, and remember earlier calculations for later use. ¹

Once the UNIVAC was unveiled, research institutions and the private sector began clamoring for mainframes of their own. The scribes of the computer age, the early programmers who had worked on the first large-scale computing projects for the government during the war, took jobs at places like Bell Labs, the airline industry, banks, and research universities. "The spread of the texts from the central government to the provinces is echoed in the way that the programmers who cut their teeth on major government-funded software projects then circulated out into smaller industries, disseminating their knowledge of code writing further," Vee writes. Just as England had gone from oral tradition to written record after the Domesday Book, the United States in the 1960s and '70s shifted from written to computational record.

The 1980s made computers personal, and today it's impossible not to engage in conversations powered by code, albeit code that's hidden beneath the interfaces of our devices. But therein lies a new problem: The easy interface creates confusion around what it means to be "computer literate." Interacting with an app is very different from making or tweaking or understanding one, and opportunities to do the latter remain the province of a specialized elite. In many ways, we're still in the "scribal stage" of the computer age.

But the tricky thing about literacy, Vee says, is that it begets more literacy. It happened with writing: At first, laypeople could get by signing their names with an "X." But the more people used reading and writing, the more was required of them.

We can already see code leaking into seemingly far-removed fields. Hospital specialists collect data from the heartbeat monitors of day-old infants, and run algorithms to spot babies likely to have respiratory failure. Netflix is a gigantic experiment in statistical machine learning. Legislators are being challenged to understand encryption and relational databases during hearings on the NSA.

The most exciting advances in most scientific and technical fields already involve big datasets, powerful algorithms, and people who know how to work with both. But that's increasingly true in almost any profession. English literature and computer science researchers fed Agatha Christie's oeuvre into a computer, ran a textual-analysis program, and discovered that her vocabulary shrank significantly in her final books. They drew from the work of brain researchers and put forth a new hypothesis: Christie suffered from Alzheimer's. "More and more, no matter what you're interested in, being computationally savvy will allow you to do a better job," says Jan Cuny, a leading CS researcher at the National Science Foundation (NSF).

It may be hard to swallow the idea that coding could ever be an everyday activity on par with reading and writing in part because it looks so foreign (what's with all the semicolons and carets)? But remember that it took hundreds of years to settle on the writing conventions we take for granted today: Early spellings of words-Whan that Aprille with his shoures soote-can seem as foreign to modern readers as today's code snippets do to nonprogrammers. Compared to the thousands of years writing has had to go from notched sticks to glossy magazines, digital technology has, in 60 years, evolved exponentially faster.

Our elementary-school language arts teachers didn't drill the alphabet into our brains anticipating Facebook or WhatsApp or any of the new ways we now interact with written material. Similarly, exposing today's third-graders to a dose of code may mean that at 30 they retain enough to ask the right questions of a programmer, working in a language they've never seen on a project they could never have imagined.
To produce tech-savvy citizens "at scale," to borrow an industry term, the heavy lifting will happen in public school classrooms
One day last year, Neil Fraser, a young software engineer at Google, showed up unannounced at a primary school in the coastal Vietnamese city of Da Nang. Did the school have computer classes, he wanted to know, and could he sit in? A school official glanced at Fraser's Google business card and led him into a classroom of fifth-graders paired up at PCs while a teacher looked on. What Fraser saw on their screens came as a bit of a shock.

Fraser, who was in Da Nang visiting his girlfriend's family, works in Google's education department in Mountain View, teaching JavaScript to new recruits. His interest in computer science education often takes him to high schools around the Bay Area, where he tells students that code is fun and interesting, and learning it can open doors after graduation.

The fifth-graders in Da Nang were doing exercises in Logo, a simple program developed at MIT in the 1970s to introduce children to programming. A turtle-shaped avatar blinked on their screens and the kids fed it simple commands in Logo 's language, making it move around, leaving a colored trail behind. Stars, hexagons, and ovals bloomed on the monitors.

Fraser, who learned Logo when the program was briefly popular in American elementary schools, recognized the exercise. It was a lesson in loops, a bedrock programming concept in which you tell the machine to do the same thing over and over again, until you get a desired result. "A quick comparison with the United States is in order," Fraser wrote later in a blog post. At Galileo Academy, San Francisco's magnet school for science and technology, he'd found juniors in a computer science class struggling with the concept of loops. The fifth-graders in Da Nang had outpaced upperclassmen at one of the Bay Area's most tech-savvy high schools.

Another visit to an 11th-grade classroom in Ho Chi Minh City revealed students coding their way through a logic puzzle embedded in a digital maze. "After returning to the US, I asked a senior engineer how he'd rank this question on a Google interview," Fraser wrote. "Without knowing the source of the question, he judged that this would be in the top third."

Early code education isn't just happening in Vietnamese schools. Estonia, the birthplace of Skype, rolled out a countrywide programming-centric curriculum for students as young as six in 2012. In September, the United Kingdom will launch a mandatory computing syllabus for all students ages 5 to 16.

Meanwhile, even as US enrollment in almost all other STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) fields has grown over the last 20 years, computer science has actually lost students, dropping from 25 percent of high school students earning credits in computer science to only 19 percent by 2009, according to the National Center for Education Statistics.

"Our kids are competing with kids from countries that have made computer science education a No. 1 priority," says Chris Stephenson, the former head of the Computer Science Teachers Association (CSTA). Unlike countries with federally mandated curricula, in the United States computer lesson plans can vary widely between states and even between schools in the same district. "It's almost like you have to go one school at a time," Stephenson says. In fact, currently only 20 states and Washington, DC, allow computer science to count toward core graduation requirements in math or science, and not one requires students to take a computer science course to graduate. Nor do the new Common Core standards, a push to make K-12 curricula more uniform across states, include computer science requirements.

It's no surprise, then, that the AP computer science course is among the College Board's least popular offerings; last year, almost four times more students tested in geography ( 114,000) than computer science ( 31,000). And most kids don't even get to make that choice; only 17 percent of US high schools that have advanced placement courses do so in CS. It was 20 percent in 2005.

For those who do take an AP computer science class- a yearlong course in Java, which is sort of like teaching cooking by showing how to assemble a KitchenAid-it won't count toward core graduation requirements in most states. What's more, many counselors see AP CS as a potential GPA ding, and urge students to load up on known quantities like AP English or US history. "High school kids are overloaded already," says Joanna Goode, a leading researcher at the University of Oregon's education department, and making time for courses that don't count toward anything is a hard sell.

In any case, it's hard to find anyone to teach these classes. Unlike fields such as English and chemistry, there isn't a standard path for aspiring CS teachers in grad school or continuing education programs. And thanks to wildly inconsistent certification rules between states, certified CS teachers can get stuck teaching math or library sciences if they move. Meanwhile, software whizzes often find the lure of the startup salary much stronger than the call of the classroom, and anyone who tires of Silicon Valley might find that its "move fast and break things" mantra doesn't transfer neatly to pedagogy.

And while many kids have mad skills in movie editing or Photoshopping, such talents can lull parents into thinking they're learning real computing. "We teach our kids how to be consumers of technology, not creators of technology," notes the NSF's Cuny.

Or, as Cory Doctorow, an editor of the technology-focused blog Boing Boing, put it in a manifesto titled "Why I Won't Buy an iPad": "Buying an iPad for your kids isn't a means of jump-starting the realization that the world is yours to take apart and reassemble; it's a way of telling your offspring that even changing the batteries is something you have to leave to the professionals."

But school administrators know that gleaming banks of shiny new machines go a long way in impressing parents and school boards. Last summer, the Los Angeles Unified School District set aside a billion dollars to buy an iPad for all 640,000 children in the district. To pay for the program, the district dipped into school construction bonds. Still, some parents and principals told the Los Angeles Times they were thrilled about it. "It gives us the sense of hope that these kids are being looked after," said one parent. ²

Sure, some schools are woefully behind on the hardware equation, but according to a 2010 federal study, only 3 percent of teachers nationwide lacked daily access to a computer in their classroom, and the nationwide ratio of students to school computers was a little more than 5-to-1. As to whether kids have computers at home-that doesn't seem to make much difference in overall performance, either. A study from the National Bureau of Economic Research reviewed the grades, test scores, homework, and attendance of California 6th- to 10th-graders who were randomly given computers to use at home for the first time. A year later, the study found, nothing happened. Test scores, grades, disciplinary actions, time spent on homework: None of it went up or down-except the kids did log a lot more time playing games.
We're still in the "scribal stage" of the computer age, where skills are in the hands of an elite.
One sunny morning last summer, 40 Los Angeles teachers sat in a warm classroom at UCLA playing with crayons, flash cards, and Legos. They were students again for a week, at a workshop on how to teach computer science. Which meant that first they had to learn computer science.

The lesson was in binary numbers, or how to write any number using just two digits. "Computers can only talk in ones and zeros," explained the instructor, a fellow teacher who'd taken the same course. The course is funded by the National Science Foundation, and so is the experimental new blueprint it trains teachers to use, called Exploring Computer Science (ECS). "You gotta talk to them in their language."

Made sense at first, but when it came to turning the number 1,250 into binary, the class started falling apart. At one table, two female teachers politely endured a long, wrong explanation from an older male colleague. A teacher behind them mumbled, "I don't get it," pushed his flash cards away, and counted the minutes to lunchtime. A table of guys in their 30s was loudly sprinting toward an answer, and a minute later the bearded white guy at the head of their table, i.e., the one most resembling a classic programmer, shot his hand up with the answer and an explanation of how he got there: "Basically what you do is, you just turn it into an algorithm." Blank stares suggested few colleagues knew what an algorithm was-in this case a simple, step-by-step process for turning a number into binary. (The answer, if you're curious, is 010011100010.)

This lesson-which by the end of the day clicked for most in the class-might seem like most people's image of CS, but the course these teachers are learning to teach couldn't look more different from classic AP computer science. Much of what's taught in ECS is about the why of computer science, not just the how. There are discussions and writing assignments on everything from personal privacy in the age of Big Data to the ethics of robot labor to how data analysis could help curb problems like school bullying. Instead of rote Java learning, it offers lots of logic games and puzzles that put the focus on computing, not computers. In fact, students hardly touch a computer for the first 12 weeks.

"Our curriculum doesn't lead with programming or code," says Jane Margolis, a senior researcher at UCLA who helped design the ECS curriculum and whose book Stuck in the Shallow End: Education, Race, and Computing provides much of the theory behind the lesson plans. "There are so many stereotypes associated with coding, and often it doesn't give the broader picture of what the field is about. The research shows you want to contextualize, show how computer science is relevant to their lives." ECS lessons ask students to imagine how they'd make use of various algorithms as a chef, or a carpenter, or a teacher, how they could analyze their own snack habits to eat better, and how their city council could use data to create cleaner, safer streets.

The ECS curriculum is now offered to 2,400 students at 31 Los Angeles public high schools and a smattering of schools in other cities, notably Chicago and Washington, DC. Before writing it, Margolis and fellow researchers spent three years visiting schools across the Los Angeles area-overcrowded urban ones and plush suburban ones-to understand why few girls and students of color were taking computer science. At a tony school in West LA that the researchers dubbed "Canyon Charter High," they noticed students of color traveling long distances to get to school, meaning they couldn't stick around for techie extracurriculars or to simply hang out with like-minded students.

Equally daunting were the stereotypes. Take Janet, the sole black girl in Canyon's AP computer science class, who told the researchers she signed up for the course in part "because we [African American females] were so limited in the world, you know, and just being able to be in a class where I can represent who I am and my culture was really important to me." When she had a hard time keeping up-like most kids in the class-the teacher, a former software developer who, researchers noted, tended to let a few white boys monopolize her attention, pulled Janet aside and suggested she drop the class, explaining that when it comes to computational skills, you either "have it or don't have it."

Research shows that girls tend to pull away from STEM subjects-including computer science-around middle school, while rates of boys in these classes stay steady. Fortunately, says Margolis, there's evidence that tweaking the way computer science is introduced can make a difference. A 2009 study tested various messages about computer science with college-bound teens. It found that explaining how programming skills can be used to "do good"-connect with one's community, make a difference on big social problems like pollution and health care-reverberated strongly with girls. Far less successful were messages about getting a good job or being "in the driver's seat" of technological innovation-i.e., the dominant cultural narratives about why anyone would learn to code.

"For me, computer science can be used to implement social change," says Kim Merino, a self-described "social-justice-obsessed queer Latina nerd history teacher" who decided to take the ECS training a couple of years ago. Now, she teaches the class to middle and high schoolers at the UCLA Community School, an experimental new public K-12 school. "I saw this as a new frontier in the social-justice fight," she says. "I tell my students, 'I don't necessarily want to teach you how to get rich. I want to teach you to be a good citizen.'"

Merino's father was an aerospace engineer for Lockheed Martin. So you might think adapting to CS would be easy for her. Not quite. Most of the teachers she trained with were men. "Out of seven women, there were two of color. Honestly, I was so scared. But now, I take that to my classroom. At this point my class is half girls, mostly Latina and Korean, and they still come into my class all nervous and intimidated. My job is to get them past all of that, get them excited about all the things they could do in their lives with programming."

Merino has spent the last four years teaching kids of color growing up in inner cities to imagine what they could do with programming-not as a replacement for, but as part of their dreams of growing up to be doctors or painters or social workers. But Merino's partner's gentle ribbings about how they'd ever start a family on a teacher's salary eventually became less gentle. She just took a job as director of professional development at CodeHS, an educational startup in San Francisco.
"We teach our kids how to be consumers of technology, not creators of technology."
It was a little more than a century ago that literacy became universal in Western Europe and the United States. If computational skills are on the same trajectory, how much are we hurting our economy-and our democracy-by not moving faster to make them universal?

There's the talent squeeze, for one thing. Going by the number of computer science majors graduating each year, we're producing less than half of the talent needed to fill the Labor Department's job projections. Women currently make up 20 percent of the software workforce, blacks and Latinos around 5 percent each. Getting more of them in the computing pipeline is simply good business sense.

It would also create a future for computing that more accurately reflects its past. A female mathematician named Ada Lovelace wrote the first algorithm ever intended to be executed on a machine in 1843. The term "programmer" was used during World War II to describe the women who worked on the world's first large-scale electronic computer, the ENIAC machine, which used calculus to come up with tables to improve artillery accuracy 3. In 1949, Rear Adm. Grace Hopper helped develop the UNIVAC, the first general-purpose computer, a.k.a. a mainframe, and in 1959 her work led to the development of COBOL, the first programming language written for commercial use.

Excluding huge swaths of the population also means prematurely killing off untold ideas and innovations that could make everyone's lives better. Because while the rash of meal delivery and dating apps designed by today's mostly young, male, urban programmers are no doubt useful, a broader base of talent might produce more for society than a frictionless Saturday night. 4

And there's evidence that diverse teams produce better products. A study of 200,000 IT patents found that "patents invented by mixed-gender teams are cited [by other inventors] more often than patents invented by female-only or male-only" teams. The authors suggest one possibility for this finding may be "that gender diversity leads to more innovative research and discovery." (Similarly, research papers across the sciences that are coauthored by racially diverse teams are more likely to be cited by other researchers than those of all-white teams.)

Fortunately, there's evidence that girls exposed to very basic programming concepts early in life are more likely to major in computer science in college. That's why approaches like Margolis' ECS course, steeped in research on how to get and keep girls and other underrepresented minorities in computer science class, as well as groups like Black Girls Code, which offers affordable code boot camps to school-age girls in places like Detroit and Memphis, may prove appealing to the industry at large.

"Computer science innovation is changing our entire lives, from the professional to the personal, even our free time," Margolis says. "I want a whole diversity of people sitting at the design table, bringing different sensibilities and values and experiences to this innovation. Asking, 'Is this good for this world? Not good for the world? What are the implications going to be?'"

We make kids learn about biology, literature, history, and geometry with the promise that navigating the wider world will be easier for their efforts. It'll be harder and harder not to include computing on that list. Decisions made by a narrow demographic of technocrat elites are already shaping their lives, from privacy and social currency, to career choices and how they spend their free time.

Margolis' program and others like it are a good start toward spreading computational literacy, but they need a tremendous amount of help to scale up to the point where it's not such a notable loss when a teacher like Kim Merino leaves the profession. What's needed to make that happen is for people who may never learn a lick of code themselves to help shape the tech revolution the old-fashioned way, through educational reform and funding for schools and volunteer literacy crusades. Otherwise, we're all doomed-well, most of us, anyway-to be stuck in the Dark Ages.

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In the winter of 2011, a handful of software engineers landed in Boston just ahead of a crippling snowstorm. They were there as part of Code for America, a program that places idealistic young coders and designers in city halls across the country for a year.

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Young programmers -- think playgrounds, not playpens | Marina Bers | TEDxJackson

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After all, our kids aren't Facebook's customers; they're the product. The real customers are the advertisers and market researchers paying for their attention and user data. But it's difficult for them or us to see any of this and respond appropriately if we don't know anything about the digital environment in which all this is taking place. That's why -- as an educator, media theorist and parent -- I have become dedicated to getting kids code literate.

Digital World Ownership

As I see it, code literacy is a requirement for participation in a digital world. When we acquired language, we didn't just learn how to listen, but also how to speak. When we acquired text, we didn't just learn how to read, but also how to write. Now that we have computers, we are learning to use them but not how to program them. When we are not code literate, we must accept the devices and software we use with whatever limitations and agendas their creators have built into them. How many times have you altered the content of a lesson or a presentation because you couldn't figure out how to make the technology work the way you wanted? And have you ever considered that the software's limitations may be less a function of the underlying technology than that of the corporation that developed it? Would you even know where to begin distinguishing between the two?

This puts us and our kids -- who will be living in a more digital world than our own -- at a terrible disadvantage. They are spending an increasing amount of their time in digital environments where the rules have been written by others. Just being familiar with how code works would help them navigate this terrain, understand its limitations and determine whether those limits are there because the technology demands it -- or simply because some company wants it that way. Code literate kids stop accepting the applications and websites they use at face value, and begin to engage critically and purposefully with them instead.

Otherwise, they may as well be at the circus or a magic show.

More generally, knowing something about programming makes us competitive as individuals, companies and a nation. The rest of the world is learning code. Their schools teach it, their companies are filled with employees who get it, and their militaries are staffed by programmers -- not just gamers with joysticks. According to the generals I've spoken with, we are less than a generation away from losing our technological superiority on the cyber battlefield, which should concern a nation depending so heavily on drones for security and electronic trading as an industry.

Finally, learning code -- and doing so in a social context -- familiarizes people with the values of a digital society: the commons, collaboration and sharing. These are replacing the industrial age values of secrecy or the hoarding of knowledge. Learning how software is developed and how the ecosystem of computer technology really works helps us understand the new models through which we'll be working and living as a society. It's a new kind of teamwork, and one that's under-emphasized in our testing-based school systems.

Codeacademy

To build my own code literacy, I decided to take free classes through the online website Codecademy.com, and ended up liking it so much that I'm now working with them to provide free courses for kids to learn to code. The lessons I've learned along the way are of value to parents and teachers looking to grow more code literate young people.

1. Learning by Doing

One of Codecademy's key insights was that programming is best taught by doing. Where literature might best be taught through books, coding is best taught in an interactive environment. So instead of just giving students text to read or videos to watch, Codecademy invites them to learn to code by actually making code. Every online lesson involves writing lines of code in an interactive window within the web browser, and then hitting the "run" button and watching those lines actually work. Instant payoff, and an "intrinsic reward."

2. A Stake in the Outcome

Code also makes much more sense to people when it is tied to a real project. People need reasons for learning one skill or another. When students are working to devise a computer adventure game, all of a sudden abstract mathematical functions become immediately relevant.

3. Benefits of Interaction

Finally, while badges and point scores are great for motivating students in the short run, social connections to a real group of cohorts probably matter more for the long haul. Codecademy's first strides in that direction, simple forums, allow users to seek out help from others when they're stuck in a lesson. Meanwhile, those who are mastering a skill find it really sinks in when they have the opportunity to explain things to someone encountering it for the first time. Just as research has shown a heterogeneous classroom benefits those on both ends of the aptitude spectrum, interaction between more and less experienced code learners benefits both.

After-School Adventures

The greatest challenge so far, at least from my end, has been figuring out ways to get these interactive lessons into the schools that need them. Between curriculum standards, overworked faculty and legal restrictions on inviting minors to use websites, it's an uphill battle. To help with these challenges, Codecademy has unveiled an after-school program through which any parent or teacher can teach code to a self-selecting group of interested students.

Codecademy.com/afterschool is basically "Codecademy in a box." It's a year of interactive lesson tracks, specially assembled for an after-school group or club run by an adult with no programming experience. In the fall semester, kids make a website by learning HTML and CSS. In the spring, they build an adventure game by learning Javascript. The beauty of the model is that the adult supervising all this needn't know anything about code in advance. The course materials let you know everything you need to stay a week ahead of the kids, and the rest of the online community is there to help you out if you get stuck.

When I learned about the after-school program, I was compelled to tweet, "No Excuses." That's about the best I can say it. The obstacles to code literacy are getting smaller every day, while the liabilities for ignorance are only getting more profound.

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Code Literacy: A 21st-Century Requirement | Edutopia

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After all, our kids aren't Facebook's customers; they're the product. The real customers are the advertisers and market researchers paying for their attention and user data. But it's difficult for them or us to see any of this and respond appropriately if we don't know anything about the digital environment in which all this is taking place.

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Five Ways Teachers Can Use Technology to Help Students

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Darrell West and Joshua Bleiberg explore the American education system's stubborn resistance to innovation and advancement in information technology. They supply five ways for teachers to use technology to help students in the future.

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Do you ever just feel a little left behind when it comes to technology?

Just when you think you've got it down, something else comes along and you have to keep learning. Darn, I hate it when that happens. That whole "continuing education" thing really gets in the way sometimes, doesn't it?

I say this tongue-in-cheek of course.

As educators (and people for that matter), we're always learning and growing. So sometimes, I think that assessment is a little silly. After all, are we ever really a "master" at something? Don't we always have more to learn? I mean, I've studied, performed, written and taught music for over 25 years at this point and I still wouldn't consider myself a master. Not even close. So perhaps the true meaning of assessment is really in measuring where we are in comparison to others. Or maybe it's just to see if we have the basic skill set down. Either way, I'm not too thrilled about what this means for our students or our teachers.

Actually, after all this reflection this week on assessments, I think their core purpose is to tell us how we are doing in comparison to ourselves. That is, seeing how far we've come as a guide to tell us where we are headed. It's kind of like when you are peddling up a mountain (or a hill, in my case) and stopping about half-way there to look back and give yourself a pat on the back for coming so far. And then turning your face front and figuring out what route you're going to take to get to the summit. You want to learn from the sweat you've already put into the journey to make the next part more satisfying and perhaps, a little easier.

This is where technology comes into play in assessments.

We have makers for students, so we need to have an assessment for makers. We need to get out of the 20th century mindset and re-envision what assessment can look like for the future. That HAS to include technology. It just does. Our students are using sophisticated technology every day and to try and test them without it makes absolutely no sense. We need to embrace technology (flaws and all) and use it to help us with that core purpose for measuring individual student growth.

Of course, we also need to keep in mind the limitations of technology - and yes, there are some very big limits currently. Just ask the folks at Pearson who had their servers go down while a whole population of 5th graders in Maryland were taking part of their State Science test online. All of the information was lost and the students needed to start again. Not a shining moment in technology's favor. Technology is still limited by bandwidth, access, knowledge, and server space. Yet, improvements are being made all the time. So let's take a big collective breath and step out past our comfort zone for just a minute.

Ways to Use Technology for Assessment

These are just a few of the ways that I have seen or used technology to help me measure student growth:

Creating digital portfolios online.

I like these because in essence, this is a blog/webpage that showcases student work from the whole year. It's easy to update and easy to access. It allows the students to experiment with graphic design (which uses measurement principals) and writing source code. Depending on the subject, it can be fairly simple and straightforward as a way to present classroom work, or as a way to get them ready for the world of interviewing and job-seeking. Most companies nowadays expect you to have a web-presence. This is teaching our students how to develop that in a safe and secure way. Never allow students to use their full names or put any personal information on there (including pictures of themselves or others in their classroom) unless it is through a private access. Teaching safety online is a huge topic, but you can address this and still have some awesome portfolios.

Create assessments using YouTube videos.

Again, make them secure, but after that - let them go wild! I've had students create videos for interviews with dead composers, for creating dramatic scenes that connect with a story they are reading, and for teaching their peers choreography using geometry. This teaches students the art of editing, recording, being prepared, and self-reflection. Once my students watch their pieces, they all create a list for how to improve it and go back and do it again. This reflection piece is one of the biggest ways our students can learn from their own assessment.

Recording a song through Garageband or Audacity.

Students can create their own podcasts, karaoke song or poetry set to a beat structure using these two programs. Again, the self-reflection piece here is vital. I like to have students write their own songs using chords learned in class and writing their own lyrics about a topic from a social studies unit. Students then record them, add beats and instruments through the editing process and we upload them to iTunes for them to upload at home.

Students create a band name, album art and even pseudonyms to post. It's a project they remember year after year and it is a great way for me to assess if they understand and can manipulate beat, chords, rhythm and make it into a statement based on history. I've seen other teachers use this as a podcasting tool where students teach others by creating their own podcasts on a subject that they just researched.

Wikis, blackboard, discussion threads.

Setting up a discussion thread that students can contribute to through one of these platforms has powerful consequences in and out of your classroom. I like to pose questions to my students like "What if...." and then give them a scenario to solve using information they have learned in various contents. Students enjoy reading the logic/opinions of their peers and can better flesh out their own ideas to add. I've heard from parents that this adds to a lively dinner table conversation some evenings during the week. And what teacher doesn't want their students talking about their class in such an animated way?

These are just the tip of the iceburg, by the way.

There's also , creating comics through ComicLife, and much more! I encourage you to explore the technology in your own district and see how creatively you can use it in assessing your own students. What I find most interesting, by the way, is that these very same methods could also be used to assess teachers. We could have digital portfolios of our work, contribute to a discussion thread, create a podcast about a classroom management technique, or create a YouTube video of a lesson to share with colleagues in our districts. These can all be used to show our growth as educators and our commitment to continued learning experiences.

Technology is here to stay - we can either embrace its possibilities or scorn its acceptance out of fear. One thing is for certain: I know which side of that coin my students are going to take. As their teacher, I want to be on that side with them.

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Using Technology to Creatively Assess Students and Teachers

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Do you ever just feel a little left behind when it comes to technology? Just when you think you've got it down, something else comes along and you have to keep learning. Darn, I hate it when that happens. That whole "continuing education" thing really gets in the way sometimes, doesn't it?

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Using Assessment and Evaluation Strategies to Support Students

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How to Use Animoto in the Classroom: Create Stunning Student Slideshows

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Using Animoto in the classroom is a popular way for teachers to create slick photo and video slideshows. This in-depth user guide will show you all the steps you need to take to create your first online slideshows, while also giving you some ideas on how to use Animoto for Education as part of your everyday curriculum.

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Technology and the Changing Roles of Teachers

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Tove Johannesen ¹ & Else Margrethe Eide 2
¹Høgskolen i Nord-Trøndelag / State institution in higher education, Faculty of nursing, St.Olavs.gt. 24. 7600 Levanger NORWAY, phone: +47 74 01 29 46 / +47 74 11 20 00, fax: +47 74 01 29 01
² Høgskolen i Bodø (Bodoe)/ State institution in higher education, Faculty of nursing, 8002 Bodø (Bodoe) NORWAY, phone: +47 75 51 75 73 / +47 75 51 72 00, fax: +47 75 51 75 70

© EURODL 2000

Abstract
Introduction
The changing role of the teacher
What prevents the teacher from using new technology?
Elements of the teacher's competence building
From teacher-directed teaching to student-directed learning
How can the teacher make the best arrangements for student -directed learning?
Flexible learning through ICT: conclusions
References

This article is a following up article to "Videoconferencing technology in lectures and tutoring" and "The role of the students in the age of technology". With the rapid technological developments during the last few years, new methods and areas of utilisation have emerged in the field of higher education. As a result of this, new knowledge and experience can be disseminated and can contribute to an overall increase in quality and general level of knowledge. The authors of this article have substantial experience as lecturers and academic tutoring in various professions from the foundation level up to post-qualifying education. In the article, the focus is based upon the role of the teacher under the new regime of information- and communications technology in education.

The use of this technology in academic education puts high demands on the technology due to the complex nature of the communication, and the authors maintain that the content and goals of the teaching and tutoring must decide the choice of technology. It must also be considered whether different technological methods should be used exclusively or combined with one another or with teaching or tutoring in the same room. The methods demand both pedagogical and didactical knowledge in order to ensure quality in the various areas where the technology is applied, and furthermore, a basic understanding of technical possibilities and limitations of the technology. This is essential in order to ensure that the whole spectrum of perception (senses) is activated when this is important in a dialogue. The paper presentation will be based upon reports from different projects, experience, field trips, discussions and reviews of literature concerning the use of video-conferencing, computer- and video-based learning. It is not possible to offer a complete picture of all the various media and methods in this portrayal, but we aim to provide some input about what we see as being important elements in this debate.

Key words: Information and communications technology, the role of the teacher, teaching by using technology, distance learning. flexible learning.

In this presentation we will focus on the role of the teacher in the use of new methods in the field of Information and Communications Technology (ICT); we will look at what demands and expectations are put forward, and whether this role is changed by the use of these new methods. The authors have for several years tried out various forms of technical aids in various projects as well as teaching and tutoring. In this presentation we will base our approach on the project In-service training in the field of distance learning, in which the target group was teachers at the colleges of Bodø, Gjøvik and Nord-Trøndelag in Norway. We have also contacted environments working on more or less the same type of technology and through this, entered a discussion with many people. We also have available various literature on the subject.

We will look at the teacher's role in connection with data-based learning and video-conferencing and will assess whether this is changed by the use of technical aids as opposed to more traditional teaching. Experience has shown that good methods for distance learning are also good methods for ordinary teaching. We think that this is mainly due to the fact that the distance learning student has achieved or assumed more responsibility for own learning and therefore glided into a more active student role. We neither wish to focus on distance education nor ordinary education, but rather look at the whole matter as one problem complex. We will talk about flexible learning and have wanted to focus on how the teacher can intervene in order to bring about a good learning process directed by the students. In a presentation like this it will not be possible to offer a comprehensive picture, but we have attempted to highlight some points we think important in the debate.

The educational system is constantly being challenged to offer better education to more people, at the same time as technological development continually opens up new possibilities and methods of learning.

Education and tutoring can be described as complicated relationships in which many factors affect the whole. Some of these factors are the students' learning preconditions and which framework factors apply at any given time. By framework factors we mean: "given factors enhancing or preventing learning", and in this context associated with ICT. The framework factors will be different in relation to various methods. The students' preconditions for learning concern their working habits, attitudes, motivation and knowledge which are all central factors in teaching and learning. It is important that the teacher is conscious of this, and intervenes in the processes when it is desirable or natural to do so. Methods in the field of ICT often require different things of the teacher at the same time demanding more student activity.

We have in a previous presentation focused on the student role and looked at which demands and expectations technological methods put to this (12). We will this time, therefore, not look as much at the student role, but concentrate on the teacher. By using the studio and technology, one puts forward demands and expectations of other study habits and ways of solving learning tasks than the more traditional teaching and learning methods. The teacher is continually meeting new expectations and this can for many people feel like an extra burden. One should be a professional practitioner of one's chosen subject area by disseminating this further, whether this is a profession or more or less separate subject areas.

As a professional practitioner, the teacher is likely to become a role model or standard for his or her students. The teacher should also be a subject developer. By this one means that the teacher should, through continual work, bring new knowledge to the subject through his/her own experience, and research and development work. The teacher's role as a subject disseminator is also emphasised by focusing on the "good teacher", who in an inspiring and lively manner, awakens the desire, and therefore also the motivation for learning. Some teachers feel threatened by new technology and experience - that this may make the teacher superfluous. The way we see it, however, technology will never be able to make the teacher redundant, but it may make the teacher's role different.

The teacher's daily plan is often full of countless challenges and the time constraints are very tight. However, it is expected that creativity should be given space at work in an active search for new knowledge and new methods. In this connection it is important that the teacher feels competent to move forward with the new tasks in hand. Motivation and competence are closely connected. Increased competence leads to increased motivation to develop what one is doing, and this in turn leads to one wanting to try something new. In this the interplay between teachers, teacher and student and between students becomes very important. Positive interplay and commitment increases the motivation and the learning effect.

In distance education, as in all types of teaching, teaching material is presented and a structure for dialogue between teacher and student is established. Here the teacher and students meet as part of the learning process. The students are fellow members and must to a larger degree than in traditional teaching, be made responsible for their own learning and faith in their own ability to master the learning situation. The teacher has a responsibility to help promote learning preconditions such as working habits, attitudes, knowledge and motivation.

Thinking through various teaching methods and assessing which possibilities they offer for learning is, in our opinion, not just important, but also challenging for the teacher. New technology is continually opening up new applications, and without the urge to try out new methods the teacher's work can seem monotonous, and the students can miss out on good and varied teaching set-ups. The importance of variation in teaching is often overlooked, although this is closely connected to the students' motivation and activity. The use of ICT must be carefully planned and put into a pedagogical framework. It must, in other words, have a subject context and never be slung about in a careless way. It requires the teacher to possess good pedagogical and didactical knowledge and be able to apply this in such a way as to promote learning processes.

Use of new technology in teaching and tutoring engages teachers but it also creates a certain scepticism. From a teacher's point of view it may be quite tiring to get involved in new methods, not least of the technical sort. A feeling of not being able to master the technology or being competent to combine this with the subject matter can prevent the teacher from taking the step necessary to get started. A teacher who has enough getting through a normal day's work, with the challenges continually coming up, will feel an antipathy towards trying something new - at any rate something requiring one's own learning before being put into practice. Technical aids often become a victim of reluctance to learn. This is due to many different factors. Not least that technical aids have been so complicated that one more or less had to have technical know-how in order to use these aids, let alone understand them. The development in this field has, however, moved so fast that it is today possible to get access to equipment which is relatively easy to use. Previous experience has shown that good and precise planning is especially important when the use of technology is necessary or desirable in order to carry out a programme. Technology which does not function often leads to dissatisfaction and frustration and often becomes a barrier for further trials. When, on the other hand, it functions as it should, it becomes part of the learning experience and provides increased motivation for further research. Most teachers today use a computer as a natural instrument, and the barriers for moving this into the classroom, or indeed for moving the classroom out in the district area will be reduced. Financing can also prevent a minimum of equipment being procured, both for teaching, tutoring and the students' own work, whether it be individual or group work. Here one needs long-term planning and goal-related work. It will often, however, be possible to apply for special funding for such things and the development can quickly prove that it leads to savings and new sources of income.

One way to increase the teacher's motivation and ability to master is to arrange courses. The project in question here is based on just such a course in which we decided to actively use the equipment we were to learn about on the course. In this way we wished to give the teachers sufficient knowledge to be able to assess, choose, plan and carry out measures for competence development using information and communications technology. The course was carried out in the form of 3 hour meetings every 14th day during the space of 5 months. The set-up was based on lectures, training, discussions and group work in which individual activity was given a high priority. Communication occurred using 1-2 hours multipoint-videoconferences during each meeting in addition to communication via Internet. During the video conferences PCs, document camera and video were used. After and between the video conferences the work continued in two groups.

A co-ordinator was chosen at each school in addition to a responsible group being appointed for each module consisting of minimum one person from each of the co-operating institutions. These groups were responsible for planning, adapting written material, designing exercises and group work as well as presentations of group work and directing the following discussion.

During the broadcasts minimum 5 and maximum 8 studios were connected simultaneously. The programme was built up on the basis of four modules who are described in the article: "Videoconferencing technology in lectures and tutoring". There were 60 participants altogether on the course and it was received a good evaluation.

Previously we have looked at the teacher's role and put forward some thoughts as to why we so easily get stuck in the traditional way of doing things. Today's society is complex. Demands and expectations for more education have become the basis for negotiations between employee and employer in the same way as wages negotiations. The future challenge in higher education is, as we see it, to focus on the learning process and what the teacher can do to enhance this. We have previously seen that an active student role promotes learning and we think that the student must take a great responsibility for his/her own learning. The teacher's task becomes more a question of making the right arrangements for learning, reflecting on things together and offering tutoring instead of purely concentrating on lectures. In this way the students get more of a sense of responsibility for their own learning and the teacher can use his/her subject, pedagogical and didactic expertise to enhance the students' learning process in a varied and inspiring manner.

In this connection we are going to take a look at data-based learning, which embraces all technical aids which can be associated with a computer and used to promote a learning process. The students can, either alone or in groups, be in a dialogue with the teaching material whenever they wish and in this way develop new knowledge. The teacher can adapt the teaching material and put in links to other bases when desirable. Data conferences can be set up in which students and teachers, with the use of a net reader, can be connected to a server and read a piece of work, put in documents or files, answer questions or put in new questions or comments.

If it is desirable to use a data conference as a method, one must use a leader or moderator. This will usually be the teacher's task. The students must be active in finding subject material or discussion arenas by connecting themselves up to the conference and finding input, extra material and video connections. The conferences may be open or closed. In closed conferences the teacher can follow the students' activities and intervene if necessary. By using such conferences, the communication will work out alright whether it be from one to many people and from many people to many.

In most conference systems one can also choose to send pieces of work as mail to individuals. One such piece of work to a communication can also occur with the help of electronic mail. The methods are usually combined using Internet and Intranet. Here the individual can distribute or seek information in the form of text, pictures or hyper links to other places on the same machine or to other machines. This means that the teacher can distribute instructions, documents, pictures, sketches, sound, video and much more on a machine. On a starting page one will be able to distribute instructions for a lecture with references to more subject literature, tasks, examples amongst other things. These references will then appear as underlined text which the user sends directly to the desired place by clicking on the text. The return message to the teacher can occur by a prepared link starting a mail system in which the teacher's address is already included.

This can again be combined with the use of CD-room and DVD. Software for such use can be built up in many different ways, ranging from the simplest way to the complex. Links can be established to other bases, in order to add to the subject material and offer new ways of looking at it. Such programs can be used in lectures, in groups or for individual learning for the student.

These methods can also be combined by using video-conferencing or two-way television. The videoconferencing technology can be used for lectures, conferences and tutoring amongst other things. It is suitable for connecting several groups together and presenting knowledge to people who otherwise would not have had access to this.
One can ask oneself whether there is any difference between the classroom and the videoconference.

Teachers vary enormously. Some are lectures and swear to one-way communication, whether they are standing in a classroom, an auditorium or sitting in front of the camera during a videoconference. Others again are more the dialogue- type of people, preferring to have conversations, tutor and discuss. Videoconferencing works well in both these cases. Everything will ultimately depend on the teacher`s pedagogical expertise, technical competence and ability. Broadly speaking we can say that a teacher who functions well in the classroom, will also function in the videoconferencing room.

Even if a videoconference is, technically speaking, different, the pedagog`s ability to communicate will be the decisive factor. To create variation in videoconferencing studio classroom teaching it is fully possible to for example use:

Several cameras

Documental camera

Projected picture on picture

Screen picture downloaded from PC or Internet

Video playback

By doing this the videoconferencing teacher acquires large possibilities to provide varied education. When the person in question knows what he/she is doing and prepares his/herself accordingly, new technology is a door opener to good quality teaching and can be just as valuable - or even better than in the classroom. In decentralised set-ups video-conferencing will along with data-based learning often make up the very lifeline of the whole set-up.

The authors presented a "paper" at the European Distance Education Network 1998. Annual Conference in Bologna, Italy on: Video-conferencing technology in lectures and tutoring in Educational Programmes in the Health and Welfare professions. Here it was amongst other things based on the same internal training programme as in this paper, but the focus was put more on the general teaching and tutoring situation through the use of video-conferencing technology. People especially interested in this can find more information about this and other projects in the reference list.

We think that tomorrow's students to a greater extent than today, will pick " their college" through the Internet. They will orientate themselves about possibilities and limitations and find study models that suit their particular needs. Many are in a family situation, meaning they wish to be distance students, others may wish to be part of a lively student environment. Whatever the choice, we think that flexibility in the provision of education and methods will be a good thing for students.

It may be that one can connect a decentralised class up to a class at the academic institution. There may be a co-operation between different schools in order to get a bigger reservoir of expertise or other adapted teaching set-ups. With such methods it will be possible to meet society's requirements for a much better way of learning than we have been able to provide previously.

We also know that people learn in different ways. By combining the possibilities available today, one will be able to provide education which will reach more students and stimulate more of the senses, in order that learning can be a self-motivating process for the students.

The technology will never render the teacher superfluous, but it can change the teacher's role. By using ICT the teacher can arrange things so that the student, can, through active searching, find and go through relevant subject matter before coming to their classes or tutoring. In this way, technology can help time being better spent when teacher and student are together. It can also lead to having to travel less, by having video-conferencing meetings instead of ordinary meetings, and it can also be easier to adapt and tailor further education courses and studies which are in demand from the public and private sector.

Ostendorf, W.: The two-way video classroom, W. Ostendorf inc., 1996

Pedagogiske utfordringer i forbindelse med fjernundervisning i helseprofesjonsutdanninger. 1994-95. Et samarbeid mellom høgskolene i Bodø, Nord-Trøndelag og Tromsø.

Innslag av fjernundervisning i sykepleierutdanningen - utvikling av pedagogiske tilnærmingsmåter. 1995-97. Et samarbeid mellom høgskolene i Bodø, Nord-Trøndelag og Tromsø.

Veiledning av studenter i profesjonsutdanning - tilnærming og interaksjon ved bruk av toveis lyd/bildemediet. 1995-97. Et prosjekt gjennomført ved høgskolen i Nord-Trøndelag

Internopplæring i fjernundervisning. 1996-97. Et samarbeidsprosjekt mellom høgskolene i Bodø, Gjøvik og Nord-Trøndelag

Veiledning på veiledning ved hjelp av videokonferanseteknologi. 1997.98. Et multipunkt veiledningsprosjekt i sykepleiefaglig veiledning ved Høgskolen i Bodø.

Eide, Else Margrethe and Johannesen, Tove: Tutoring and education of nurses and nursing students, using videoconferencing technology. Paper from Cohehere conference 1998 Education Health Professionals in the age of technology. Oslo, 26.-28. feb. 98

Eide, Else Margrethe and Johannesen, Tove: Videoconferencing Technology in Lectures and Tutoring in Educational Programs in the Health and Welfare Professions. Paper from Eutopean Distance Education Network 1998, Annual Conference in Bologna, Italy 24. - 26. June. Published in : Universities in a Digital Era. 1998. Eden Conference Vol. 2. side 407–411, ISBN 963 556 9 Ø / ISBN 963 558 5 II

Eide, Else Margrethe and Johannesen, Tove: Structured Education and Tutoring of Nurses and Nursing students, using Videoconferencing Technology. Paper from Managing Knowledge Transfer. International Conference by Pacific & Middleast Centre for Research in London, England 1998. Published in: Knowledge Transfer - An International Journal, ISSN 143-936X Summer 1998. Side 63 - 69.

24/11/00 (paper submitted September 1999)

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The role of the teacher in the age of technology: Will the role change with use of Information- and communication technology in education?

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Tove Johannesen 1 & Else Margrethe Eide 2 1Høgskolen i Nord-Trøndelag / State institution in higher education, Faculty of nursing, St.Olavs.gt. 24.

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Students aren't consumers of facts. They are active creators of knowledge. Schools aren't just brick-and-mortar structures -- they're centers of lifelong learning. And, most important, teaching is recognized as one of the most challenging and respected career choices, absolutely vital to the social, cultural, and economic health of our nation.

Today, the seeds of such a dramatic transformation in education are being planted. Prompted by massive revolutions in knowledge, information technology, and public demand for better learning, schools nationwide are slowly but surely restructuring themselves.

Leading the way are thousands of teachers who are rethinking every part of their jobs -- their relationship with students, colleagues, and the community; the tools and techniques they employ; their rights and responsibilities; the form and content of curriculum; what standards to set and how to assess whether they are being met; their preparation as teachers and their ongoing professional development; and the very structure of the schools in which they work. In short, teachers are reinventing themselves and their occupation to better serve schools and students.

New Relationships and Practices

Traditionally, teaching was a combination of information-dispensing, custodial child care and sorting out academically inclined students from others. The underlying model for schools was an education factory in which adults, paid hourly or daily wages, kept like-aged youngsters sitting still for standardized lessons and tests.

Teachers were told what, when, and how to teach. They were required to educate every student in exactly the same way and were not held responsible when many failed to learn. They were expected to teach using the same methods as past generations, and any deviation from traditional practices was discouraged by supervisors or prohibited by myriad education laws and regulations. Thus, many teachers simply stood in front of the class and delivered the same lessons year after year, growing gray and weary of not being allowed to change what they were doing.

Many teachers today, however, are encouraged to adapt and adopt new practices that acknowledge both the art and science of learning. They understand that the essence of education is a close relationship between a knowledgeable, caring adult and a secure, motivated child. They grasp that their most important role is to get to know each student as an individual in order to comprehend his or her unique needs, learning style, social and cultural background, interests, and abilities.

This attention to personal qualities is all the more important as America continues to become the most pluralistic nation on Earth. Teachers have to be committed to relating to youngsters of many cultures, including those young people who, with traditional teaching, might have dropped out -- or have been forced out -- of the education system.

Their job is to counsel students as they grow and mature -- helping them integrate their social, emotional, and intellectual growth -- so the union of these sometimes separate dimensions yields the abilities to seek, understand, and use knowledge; to make better decisions in their personal lives; and to value contributing to society.

They must be prepared and permitted to intervene at any time and in any way to make sure learning occurs. Rather than see themselves solely as masters of subject matter such as history, math, or science, teachers increasingly understand that they must also inspire a love of learning.

In practice, this new relationship between teachers and students takes the form of a different concept of instruction. Tuning in to how students really learn prompts many teachers to reject teaching that is primarily lecture based in favor of instruction that challenges students to take an active role in learning.

They no longer see their primary role as being the king or queen of the classroom, a benevolent dictator deciding what's best for the powerless underlings in their care. They've found they accomplish more if they adopt the role of educational guides, facilitators, and co-learners.

The most respected teachers have discovered how to make students passionate participants in the instructional process by providing project-based, participatory, educational adventures. They know that in order to get students to truly take responsibility for their own education, the curriculum must relate to their lives, learning activities must engage their natural curiosity, and assessments must measure real accomplishments and be an integral part of learning.

Students work harder when teachers give them a role in determining the form and content of their schooling -- helping them create their own learning plans and deciding the ways in which they will demonstrate that they have, in fact, learned what they agreed to learn.

The day-to-day job of a teacher, rather than broadcasting content, is becoming one of designing and guiding students through engaging learning opportunities. An educator's most important responsibility is to search out and construct meaningful educational experiences that allow students to solve real-world problems and show they have learned the big ideas, powerful skills, and habits of mind and heart that meet agreed-on educational standards. The result is that the abstract, inert knowledge that students used to memorize from dusty textbooks comes alive as they participate in the creation and extension of new knowledge.

New Tools and Environments

One of the most powerful forces changing teachers' and students' roles in education is new technology. The old model of instruction was predicated on information scarcity. Teachers and their books were information oracles, spreading knowledge to a population with few other ways to get it.

But today's world is awash in information from a multitude of print and electronic sources. The fundamental job of teaching is no longer to distribute facts but to help children learn how to use them by developing their abilities to think critically, solve problems, make informed judgments, and create knowledge that benefits both the students and society. Freed from the responsibility of being primary information providers, teachers have more time to spend working one-on-one or with small groups of students.

Recasting the relationship between students and teachers demands that the structure of school changes as well. Though it is still the norm in many places to isolate teachers in cinderblock rooms with age-graded pupils who rotate through classes every hour throughout a semester -- or every year, in the case of elementary school -- this paradigm is being abandoned in more and more schools that want to give teachers the time, space, and support to do their jobs.

Extended instructional periods and school days, as well as reorganized yearly schedules, are all being tried as ways to avoid chopping learning into often arbitrary chunks based on limited time. Also, rather than inflexibly group students in grades by age, many schools feature mixed-aged classes in which students spend two or more years with the same teachers.

In addition, ability groups, from which those judged less talented can rarely break free, are being challenged by a recognition that current standardized tests do not measure many abilities or take into account the different ways people learn best.

One of the most important innovations in instructional organization is team teaching, in which two or more educators share responsibility for a group of students. This means that an individual teacher no longer has to be all things to all students. This approach allows teachers to apply their strengths, interests, skills, and abilities to the greatest effect, knowing that children won't suffer from their weaknesses, because there's someone with a different set of abilities to back them up.

To truly professionalize teaching, in fact, we need to further differentiate the roles a teacher might fill. Just as a good law firm has a mix of associates, junior partners, and senior partners, schools should have a greater mix of teachers who have appropriate levels of responsibility based on their abilities and experience levels. Also, just as much of a lawyer's work occurs outside the courtroom, so, too, should we recognize that much of a teacher's work is done outside the classroom.

New Professional Responsibilities

Aside from rethinking their primary responsibility as directors of student learning, teachers are also taking on other roles in schools and in their profession. They are working with colleagues, family members, politicians, academics, community members, employers, and others to set clear and obtainable standards for the knowledge, skills, and values we should expect America's children to acquire. They are participating in day-to-day decision making in schools, working side-by-side to set priorities, and dealing with organizational problems that affect their students' learning.

Many teachers also spend time researching various questions of educational effectiveness that expand the understanding of the dynamics of learning. And more teachers are spending time mentoring new members of their profession, making sure that education school graduates are truly ready for the complex challenges of today's classrooms.

Reinventing the role of teachers inside and outside the classroom can result in significantly better schools and better-educated students. But though the roots of such improvement are taking hold in today's schools, they need continued nurturing to grow and truly transform America's learning landscape. The rest of us -- politicians and parents, superintendents and school board members, employers and education school faculty -- must also be willing to rethink our roles in education to give teachers the support, freedom, and trust they need to do the essential job of educating our children.

Judith Taack Lanier is a distinguished professor of education at Michigan State University.

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Redefining the Role of the Teacher: It's a Multifaceted Profession

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A closer look at what being an educator really means.

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When I went to school it was common place for a teacher to place a text book in front a set of students and offer the simple yet daunting line, "copy that". There would be no talking to either the teacher or fellow pupils. For me lessons seemed to drag so much that I wasn't engaged in the subject material. I'm proud to say that I became a teacher in spite of the education I received; I believed that I could and would do a better job. This task was made easier through the use of technology in the classroom.

During 10 years in the profession, I've seen technology alter the role the teacher almost beyond all recognition. Teachers have undergone a Kafkaesque metamorphosis from Mr Chips to Mr Jobs; wooden, flip-lid desks have been replaced by iPads. The question we have to ask is, has this change from teacher to that of facilitator of learning been positive? Undeniably so, in my opinion.

Making use of technology to allow students the freedom to discover solutions to problems both independently and collaboratively is a force for good. As educators we strive for students to engage with our subject beyond a superficial level. We want them to be active learners, learners who have a thirst for discovery and knowledge. Technology places the world in the hands of every student inside the confines of your classroom.

There are many ways in which technology can be used in the classroom to engage students and facilitate exciting, engaging and interesting lessons. I'm not going to ignore the fact that there is a cost attached to most things, but it's about getting more bang for your buck, as our American cousins would say. Whatever you choose to use you need to make sure that you're getting it for the right reasons.

If you're not used to allowing your students space to guide their own learning then I can see how this all might seem intimidating; don't let it be. For many of us it feels counterintuitive to allow our students the space to discover solutions as these might not be the ones that we want them to find. Allowing the use of technology in my classroom has freed me from my lesson-plan shackles. It feels strange at first but the this type of emancipation is addictive

We all feel the stresses of getting students through exam courses and allowing them the freedom to wander is sometimes too much for some to allow. However, in my experience allowing the freedom to search and discover the subject through technology has fostered a love for my subject.

The best teachers that I have seen using technology to aid independent learning are the ones who have embraced the power that is already in the pockets of students. Most students have powerful devices, primed and ready to go in their pockets - the dreaded mobile phone. If you're lucky like me, your school will see the power that these wonders hold. Allowing students to unholster these weapons is a liberating experience for both teacher and student. Filming a peer assessment or recording a group discussions and uploading to AudioBoo is yet another way of engaging students.

Allowing yourself the opportunity to do something new and using technology as the tool can open up a cave of treasures that hooks the attention of the student and once you have that it can lead them anywhere.

Mike's tips for getting started with technology in the classroom

* Do plan how you're going to use the technology in advance. How is it going to aid the learning of your students? If it isn't going to aid teaching and learning then you shouldn't use it

* Don't buy the latest fad product. There has been a temptation for schools to replace laptops for tablets. This might have been successful for some schools but as good as tablets are, they aren't ready to replace laptops ... yet

* Do invest in good CPD in brushing up your ICT skills. This doesn't mean that you have to pay an expensive consultant. Simply ask your ICT department for some training or advice. Also, ask colleagues, NQTs or PGCE students for some fresh technology ideas

* Don't give up. You might try something once and it doesn't work but don't let that put you off. Try and discover what works best for you and your students. If that doesn't work then try something else

* Do focus on how technology can aid not hinder student progress

This content is brought to you by Guardian Professional. Looking for your next role? Take a look at Guardian jobs for schools for thousands of the latest teaching, leadership and support jobs.
Topics

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How has technology transformed the role of a teacher?

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When I went to school it was common place for a teacher to place a text book in front a set of students and offer the simple yet daunting line, "copy that". There would be no talking to either the teacher or fellow pupils.

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Social Media | Feature

Pros and Cons of Social Media in the Classroom

There's an ongoing debate about the role social media should play in education. Advocates point out the benefits that social media provides for today's digital learners while critics call for regulation and for removing social media from classrooms. Finding a middle ground has become a challenge.

As an educational tool, social media enriches the learning experience by allowing students and teachers to connect and interact in new, exciting ways. Web sites such as Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn provide a platform where users can dialog, exchange ideas, and find answers to questions. These sites are designed to foster collaboration and discussion.

Despite these benefits, critics argue that there are serious risks to using social media in the classroom. What are these risks-and do they outweigh the potential for opportunity?
PROS
Educational Tool Today's students arrive on campus, fluent in Web and social networking technologies. Educators can leverage this knowledge to enrich the learning experience. With social media, instructors can foster collaboration and discussion, create meaningful dialogue, exchange ideas, and boost student interaction.

Enhance Student Engagement Social media is an effective way to increase student engagement and build better communication skills. Students who rarely raise a hand in class may feel more comfortable expressing themselves on Facebook, Twitter, or YouTube. Social networking platforms enable teachers to establish "back channels" that foster discussion and surface ideas that students are too shy or intimidated to voice out loud.

Improve Communication Among Students and Teachers Facebook and Twitter can enhance communication among students and teachers. Educators can answer students' questions via a Facebook page or Twitter feed, post homework assignments and lesson plans, send messages and updates, schedule or announce upcoming events, and share interesting Web sites and multimedia content. Students can use Twitter to get help from instructors or other students. A great way for instructors to give participation points in addition to in class participation is by having students tweet about something that was discussed in class.

Preparing Students for Successful Employment Students entering the workforce can use social networking sites to network and find employment. With LinkedIn, students can establish a professional web presence, post a resume, research a target company or school, and connect with other job seekers and employers. College career centers and alumni associations are using Twitter to broadcast job openings and internships. Students should follow businesses or professional organizations on Facebook and Twitter to stay updated on new opportunities and important developments in their field.
CONS
Social Media can be a Distraction A common complaint among educators is that social media is distracting in the classroom. These instructors maintain that tools like Facebook and Twitter divert students' attention away from what's happening in class and are ultimately disruptive to the learning process. With the possibility that the use of social media tools can be an invitation for students to goof off, instructors should make sure they won't be abused.

Cyberbullying While social networking sites provide a way for students and teachers to connect, they can be a weapon of malicious behavior--even on college campuses. In a study about cyberbullying at Indiana State University, researchers Christine Macdonald and Bridget Roberts-Pittman found that almost 22 percent of college students admit to being harassed online. Of this group, 25 percent report they were bullied through a social networking site. Instructors who use social media as part of their course activities should be aware of potential dangers and plan to intervene on minor incidents before they become more serious. "By intervening at minor behaviors, we can stop more severe negative behaviors," said Macdonald. "We must insist on civil and respectful behavior."

Discouraging Face-to-Face Communication Some educators are concerned that while real-time digital stream may create a safe harbor for students who are uncomfortable expressing themselves, students are missing valuable lessons in real-life social skills. Students may find themselves at a disadvantage during college admission or job interviews when they need to command attention and deliver a coherent message. At social gatherings and in personal relationships, they need to be able to effectively express themselves and connect with others.

Ultimately, while the debate continues over what role social media should play in the classroom, no one can argue the influence that social networking has on today's students. This tech-savvy generation conducts much of their life through social media channels. Not surprisingly, they're already using YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter as tools for learning and collaboration. They expect that their campuses will follow suit. With this in mind, it seems prudent for today's institutions to get on the social media train and find ways to successfully integrate these tools into the classroom.

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Pros and Cons of Social Media in the Classroom -- Campus Technology

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Social Media | Feature There's an ongoing debate about the role social media should play in education. Advocates point out the benefits that social media provides for today's digital learners while critics call for regulation and for removing social media from classrooms. Finding a middle ground has become a challenge.

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Millennials live and breathe on social media, so teachers are learning how to incorporate the medium into the classroom successfully.

In doing so, teachers not only encourage students to engage actively in the material, but they also provide online communities for students that might not exist for them in real life.

But how are teachers infusing social media into their everyday lessons? We've highlighted several different examples and offered our own ideas on how to best engage students.

1. Encourage students to share work socially.

Anna Divinsky created an iTunes U class at Penn State University called Art 10: Introduction to Visual Studies, which she then adapted into a massive open online course (MOOC) on Coursera. The MOOC, called Introduction to Art: Concepts and Techniques, amassed more than 58,000 students.

For each class assignment, students were responsible for evaluating each other's work. Because the class was online, social media played an essential role in connecting students and creating an online community.

Students shared their work on a variety of platforms. On Flickr, they tagged their artwork with "artmooc." On Twitter, they included the #artmooc hashtag. Others posted to Facebook, and continue to do so to this day, even though the course has been over for quite sometime.

@psutlt #art10psu Art in the style of Rousseau (done in pencil) pic.twitter.com/oOA9UrlX6E

- Wendy S Dixson (@WendyDixson) July 16, 2013

"It was fascinating to see learners from all over the world wanting to connect with one another in order to build a sense of community," Divinsky says.

But what was even more surprising was how social media allows students to self-organize into smaller, independent groups. These groups were based on commonalities like age, language and art proficiency levels. By allowing students to share on the site of their choosing, social sharing will come more naturally.

2. Use a hashtag to facilitate guest speaker discussions.

According to a recent YPulse survey, 21% of Millennials use Twitter as their primary source for finding news. Encouraging students to engage with guest speakers via Twitter makes them more engaged with the platform and prepares them to raise important questions online.

During an investigative journalism class at New York University, one professor invited prominent journalists to come speak to the class of more than 200 people, and encouraged students to live-tweet the interview using the hashtag #IJNYU. Because the class was so big and the tweets so frequent, the hashtag occasionally became a trending topic in New York City. Students were then required to turn in a Storify summary based on their classmates' tweets, within 24 hours.

Another way to incorporate hashtags during classroom discussions is to encourage students to tweet questions to a guest speaker as the speaker is talking. This is exactly what Mara Einstein and Chad Boettcher did for NYU's Innovations in Marketing class. This method ensures that students don't interrupt the speaker while he or she is talking. More importantly, however, is that it also engages the students' social communities outside of the classroom, so people who aren't taking the class can also chime-in with questions for the guest speaker.

3. Require students to keep a blog.

While teaching The Business of Media, another class at NYU, Ted Magner required students to keep a "trends" blog on the media sector of their choosing. Not only did this activity keep the students reading relevant articles every day, but it also required them to become familiar with hyperlinks, image embeds and how to cite sources digitally. Perhaps most importantly, it gave them material to include in portfolios after graduation.

Keeping a blog is a phenomenal way to work on your voice as a writer, and to truly explore and hone in on your personal interests. However, between essays and homework assignments, many college and high school students see blogging as more of a chore than a positive career move. By requiring students to keep a blog in place of some traditional assignments, you make your job as a teacher easier, and you help them establish their digital presence as an emerging thought leader.

4. Require original expert sources.

For journalists, LinkedIn has proven to be an invaluable tool to reach out to sources, from CEOs to corporate PR representatives. Teachers can foster this skill by encouraging students to reach out to sources directly through LinkedIn.

It should be noted, however, that free accounts on LinkedIn are mostly intended to be used for professional networking. Features that come with a LinkedIn Premium subscription may make the source-gathering process easier.

5. Use Google Hangouts.

If you're teaching remotely, or if you're teaching an online class, Google Hangouts can be a great way to check in with students face-to-face.

This is also a good option for adjunct professors who wish to conduct office hours but may not be on campus often enough to meet with all of their students.

6. Create a social classroom on Edmodo.

Edmodo helps you create a social, digital classroom. On Edmodo, you can vote, post assignments, create a class assignments calendar, and upload photos and messages to students.

With more 17 million users, Edmodo has been a highly successful endeavor. It allows students to get real-time feedback by taking quizzes online. Teachers can also engage socially with one another by sharing lesson plans online and asking questions to their online communities.

Edmodo's Global Read Aloud program encourages students to practice their reading and public speaking skills with other students from around the world.

7. Hold a class in Second Life.

For the class Philosophy of Cyberspace at Northwestern University, students created accounts on Second Life to explore themes such as online identity, online community building and in-game economics.

Some days the students would meet in the virtual world instead of meeting at a real-life lecture hall. The professor would send out an email saying, "Class on Tuesday will be held in Second Life instead of the lecture hall. I'll email you all the coordinates soon."
Editor's note: The writer of this article took both Innovations of Marketing and The Business of Media while a student at NYU. Image: Flickr, Jason Howie

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7 Ways Teachers Use Social Media in the Classroom

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Millennials live and breathe on social media, so teachers are learning how to incorporate the medium into the classroom successfully. In doing so, teachers not only encourage students to engage actively in the material, but they also provide online communities for students that might not exist for them in real life.

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Edutopia is a free source of information, inspiration, and practical strategies for learning and teaching in preK-12 education. We are published by the George Lucas Educational Foundation, a nonprofit, nonpartisan organization.

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Whenever we think of a classroom, all we can imagine is a teacher and students, where a teacher is lecturing students and students are taking down the notes. It comes to our mind naturally, because we all studied in that manner. But the scenario has changed today as many schools are incorporating technology in the classroom that is making the learning process more effective and more entertaining. The different types of technology in the classroom make education and learning a fun experience for children.
Technology Used in Classrooms
Given below are some of the most basic types of technology to use in the classroom that would help you understand their importance.
Whiteboard
We will name it 'magic board'. Does the name sounds interesting? Imagine how thrilled children would feel when they hear this name than the usual, boring blackboard. Whiteboard makes education an interactive process. It is an easy to use device that is used in combination with computer and a projector. Your board can be quickly transformed into a computer screen, which can be viewed by all the children in the classroom. Movable objects, sounds, and pictures can make the lessons as well as teaching interesting and easy to understand.
SMART Boards
They are a fantastic way to keep the mind of a student alert in class. It is an interactive whiteboard, which allows the professor to project an image from a laptop to the front of the room. Then, the teacher can digitally draw on that image. Graphs and tables are also available with this. It can also enhance plain templates into customized learning tools, as well as store plenty of information.
Mimio Boards
They are interactive white boards that allow the teacher to use computer functions on the whiteboard. Sensors are placed in this board, and a special pen is to be used, that acts like a mouse. Teachers go through the graphs, figures, lessons, websites, etc., using this board. Students can also use this to display their PowerPoint presentations.
Projector
A projector is again one of those devices that has wide applications in the classroom. A teacher can present a lesson using meaningful and colorful transparencies that grabs the attention of the students immediately. A teacher can also present notes in the similar manner, where a student can read everything from the last bench as well. Apart from this, using a projector with computer has more benefits. You can show students many documentaries, short study films, or PowerPoint presentations that contribute to increased retention. This is used in psychology, biology, chemistry, engineering, and many more such streams.
Sound Amplifiers
Sound amplifiers are very useful and are widely used in big classrooms. At times, many students cannot grasp what the teachers are saying, because they cannot hear them. At such times, sound amplifiers are useful as they make the teacher audible to all the students. Many research studies have concluded that a clear and audible voice can grab the attention of the students that results in better learning. After realizing the importance of such devices in schools, many schools also use mike system where a student can ask the question sitting on his own desk without having to shout. Also, teachers and students use wireless microphones, which help people with mild voices to present their doubts and queries clearly to the entire class. Research has proved that microphones help students and teachers interact in a better manner, reduce student absenteeism, and help to promote a clear, discussion oriented class, which goes ahead to boost the students' confidence.
Personal Computers
Imagine, students have to carry no books to schools, just wear the uniform and take the lunch box, and they are ready for school! Well, it is possible now with the inbuilt individual personal computers that many schools provide their students with. Students can access books, notes, dictionaries, encyclopedias, etc., on their PCs with the help of the Internet and special educational software that are extremely user-friendly and promote better learning process. Some educational software are fun to use, as they teach children through games, pictures, charts, and graphs. Such things hook the interest of a student for longer time and make even the boring subject an exciting one. There are also software available on custom platforms, which include book-like devices (for ebooks), consoles, Leapfrog products, etc.
Internet
The internet is a treasure trove of knowledge. In the 21st century, it is impossible to imagine our lives without the web. It has proved to be tremendously useful in schools and colleges as well. With the help of the internet, the school/college website can be created, using which the student can come to know each and everything that is happening in class, and he can stay updated wherever he is. For instance, if the student is ill or has not attended school due to some reason, and the teacher has announced a new test and has uploaded the date on the website, he can get to know about it just by browsing through the site. Also, the teacher can conduct online tutorials and mock tests. Students can also submit their seminar notes, projects, and homework. Also, there are a lot of ebooks available, through which students can gather information and increase their knowledge. Important sites like Google Earth and Google docs can also be used. A multitude of educational sites are available for students, some prime examples being Quora, Discovery Education, Interactive Learning Sites for Education, etc.
Software
The advent of IT has revolutionized the outlook of the world. Each and every application in every field has particular software to work with. There are plenty of such educational software as well. They are used by teachers for the grading system, to grade the students according to their work and merit. In huge institutions, a variety of software is used to collect student data, related to their personal information, academic progress, extra-curricular activities, etc. It is used in classrooms as well, to have an e-format, which helps teachers with student assessment. Some examples of such software include Microsoft, GradeXpert, Accelerus, Rediker, etc.

These were some of the types of technology in the classroom that are easy to use. These technologies are beneficial, as students can use them for learning, practicing, and expanding what they have learned. They allow students to access course material or a syllabus easily. They also encourages the participation of each student in the learning process, which is crucial for better understanding of the subject. They also help teachers in better classroom management. Today, when children are so tech savvy and love spending time with gadgets, they can provide them with stimulus, making learning or studying a fun activity.

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Whenever we think of a classroom, all we can imagine is a teacher and students, where a teacher is lecturing students and students are taking down the notes. It comes to our mind naturally, because we all studied in that manner.

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The technology you can use to support learners

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The technology you can use to support learners

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Technology in the ClassroomAmber Britson (Frampton)

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What kind of Tech can you use in the classroom

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What kind of Tech can you use in the classroom

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Technology includes physical and process applied science that can be incorporated into a project. After learning the use of technology in the classroom in the previous articles, let's go in details and learn various types of technologies that are being used in the classroom. You might be familiar with most of these technologies.

TYPES OF TECHNOLOGY USED IN THE CLASSROOM

1. Use of computers in the classroom: Computers have evolved and they have changed they way the look and the way they function. Now days we have both desktop computers and portable computers commonly known as notebooks or laptops. New technologies have also emerged and birthed some new computer related gadgets like the iPad or Galaxy tablet. These computers can be used by teachers to assign work to students and study groups in a classroom. Also teachers can use computersto illustrate visual related subjects which help students to learn easily. Modern computers come with installed applications which can help students study well. For example, students can use internet explorer to search the internet, they can use word processing application to write notes. Teachers can also help their students to learn complicated applications on these computers as a way of making it easier for students to learn and also make the teacher's job easier.

2. Creating class websites and blogs: It is very easy to create a website or blog using WordPress or any other content management software. Teachers can create class blogs were they post assignments. If the school has no website sever to host these class blogs, the teacher can use free website hosting services like wordpress.com or blogger.com. Via these platforms, the teacher will create a blog under a sub domain of that host. For example, matchclass.wordpress.com, so students will find all academic assignments via that blog. It is very easy to manage and post data to a blog, because they have simple HTML editors.

3. Use of digital microphones in the classroom: Big classrooms are characterized by endless noise, so teachers can resort to these wireless digital microphones. The microphone will transmit the voice to the loud speakers and every student will hear their teacher clearly. This helps the teacher not to strain their voice while trying to explain points to their students. These digital microphones are not too expensive so even a small income generating school can manage to buy a wireless microphone for every classroom. Also students can use the same microphone when asking questions to their teachers in class, or when they are explaining a subject to their fellow students during a classroom debate.

4. Use of mobile devices: Teachers and students can use smart-phones for academic purposes in the classroom. Mobile learning is becoming so popular. It is similar to e-learning or long distance education. Though its based on mobile phones. M-Learning is convenient because it is accessible from anywhere. Mobile phones are very light yet they can also have the same application a simple PC can have, a student can access academic information like assignments via an educational mobile application (APP). Teachers can tell their students to use mobile apps like '' to access course materials and also to post questions about specific subjects, all this can be done in the classroom or outside the classroom.

5. Use of smart interactive Whiteboards: Modern smart white boards have a touch screen functionality, so the teacher can illustrate points using a pen or their finger. Using a projector, teachers can display visual images on these white boards which improves the learning process. Students will learn more easily with visual images. Also students can use a white board to draw, write or manipulate images. Smart whiteboards come in various sizes, the wide ones are better, because they can show a lager image and can also be used by two students at a time. Most of them are electronically powered , so they can be switched on with a button, and they can also save teachers work for latter use.

6. Use of online media: Teachers and students can both use online streaming Medias to learn in the classroom. With the aid of a projector, computer, internet and a white board, a teacher displays a real-time example using sites like Youtube.com. This website has videos which can be used for academic reference. ''Let's take a simple example on how a Geography class can use technology. Teachers can explain volcanic activities and its impacts on the environment using live stream YouTube videos about the subject. This type of illustration will attract the student's attention and they will learn easily."

7. Use of online study tools : Online study tools like "Dynamic Periodic Table" ( ptable.com) which can be used by Chemistry students in keeping elements apart , "Foldit" ( fold.it) this tool can help biology students easily understand basics about proteins. "Mathway" ( Mathway.com) this helps math students solve math challenges, students can simply select a subject and hit solve, the equation will be solved by the tool. All these academic tools can improve the way students learn.

Serious research has been undertaken to publish this content, so you're in the right place. I love technology, I believe embracing its potential for personal, business or educational advancement will pave the way forward for us all. We've all heard "knowledge is power", with this website I hope, to some degree, to empower you!

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Types of Technology Used In The Classroom - Use of Technology

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Technology includes physical and process applied science that can be incorporated into a project. After learning the use of technology in the classroom in the previous articles, let's go in details and learn various types of technologies that are being used in the classroom. You might be familiar with most of these technologies.