TECHNOLOGY area

Computers are incredibly fast, accurate, and stupid; humans are incredibly slow, inaccurate and brilliant; together they are powerful beyond imagination. ~ Albert Einstein

Welcome to the Technology Area of the Educational CyberPlayground. There is so much more besides what you see on the navigation bar to your left. I've tried to break it out so that your eye can see it quickly because statistically most folks won't / can't / don't even read this far. Plan on visiting over and over again, cause this will take time, but it will be time well spent.

2008 The International Society for Technology in Education (ISTE) has issued new technology standards for teachers.

The "NETS for Teachers, Second Edition" includes five categories, each with its own set of performance indicators: (1) Facilitate and inspire student learning and creativity, (2) Design and develop digital-age learning experiences and assessments, (3) Model digital-age work and learning, (4) Promote and model digital citizenship and responsibility, and (5) Engage in professional growth and leadership.
Under the category "facilitate and inspire student learning and creativity," for example, there are four performance indicators: (1) Promote, support, and model creative and innovative thinking, (2) Engage students in exploring real-world issues and solving authentic problems using digital tools and resources, (3) promote student reflection using collaborative tools, and (4) model collaborative knowledge construction by engaging in learning with students.
For every performance indicator within each category, ISTE has included a rubric that describes what meeting the standard would look like at four levels of proficiency: beginning, developing, proficient, and transformative.
The "transformative" proficiency level is new to the revised standards, and it's indicative of ISTE's more recently articulated focus on really transforming education through the use of technology, not just layering technology over traditional educational practices. [source]

Educators, Administrators, Parents and Policy Wonks alike will find sections dedicated to the New Teacher and Administrators as well as resources and special topics about K-12 Classroom Law, Different Teaching Styles, technology tips, Digital Divide, Digital Equity, grants. Family Rights, Privacy, Standards, HomeSchoolers, Plagiarism, Digitial Rights Management DRM, Copyright, and CopyLeft issues, Power and Bandwidth.

1934 Paul Otlet (1869 - 1944) Starts Using Technology to Help Us Organize Information and the Classification of knowledge. In the late 1800s and early 1900s Otlet pioneered the field of what we today call information science, but what he called documentation. A hundred years before the development of the Internet, Otlet used terms like web of knowledge, link, and knowledge network to describe his vision for a central repository of all human knowledge.

The Concept of the Computer Emerges: Paul Otlet

 

"Why don't they pass a constitutional amendment prohibiting anybody from learning anything? If it works as well as prohibition did, in five years Americans would be the smartest race of people on Earth."
~Will Rogers

OPTIONS: Digital Students @ Analog Schools "Professors don't really get that" these skills aren't really being offered in the classroom. Marco Torres ex-students produced a video about their first year in college. Basically about their disappointment in the use of technology in their classrooms, that they were expecting more.
At risk, professors say, is nothing less than U.S. technology supremacy. As interest in computer science drops in the U.S., India and China are emerging as engineering hubs with cheap labor and a skilled work force. Schools across the country are taking steps to broaden the appeal of the major. More than a dozen universities have adopted "media computation" programs, a sort of alternate introduction to computer science with a New Media vibe. The classes, which have been launched at schools from the University of San Francisco to Virginia Tech, teach basic engineering using digital art, digital music and the Web. The computing industry has a reason to be concerned about the future. The number of new computer science majors has steadily declined since 2000, falling from close to 16,000 students to only 7,798 in fall 2006, according to the Computing Research Association. And the downward trend isn't expected to reverse soon. The association says about 1 percent of incoming freshmen have indicated computer science as a probable major, a 70 percent drop from the rate in 2000.

 

"If we don't change directions, we'll wind up where we're headed." ~ Chinese Proverb

Education is a business and your school district technology decisions are made by the CIO the Chief Information Officer. Why doesn't your school use free software tools? That is a business decision. Business Relationships are not based on what makes good sense for education but on money. Ask your school board why they don't have free software. Ask your school CIO why they aren't using free software. Your school CIO decides where to spend money.

Who actually Teaches Computers?

The most damaging phrase in any language is "it's always been done that way." ~ Rear Admiral Grace Hopper

Charlie Lyons, superintendent and director at Shawsheen Valley Technical High School, in Billerica, said he spends $50,000 a year on  computer updates and security. He also hired a director of computer services because the school has nearly 700 computers. More teachers who used to keep grades on paper and tests in files are relying on computers.

"Children today are tyrants. They contradict their parents, gobble their food, and tyrannize their teachers."   --  Socrates (420 BC)

Students, Teachers Differ on Technology Use.
Do kids use computers and get anything out of it? Monterey Institute for Technology and Education studies "informal learning" what children learn outside of school, with digital media and the Internet. With digital media (music, video, photos and text on connected devices), kids are galloping ahead in their informal learning, even as their formal education isn't much different from their parents', and their schools are scrambling to figure out what to do about their tech proficiency. Young Web devotees are engaging their minds far more than previous generations that were glued to the television," e.g., posing questions in chat or IM, researching answers, designing pages and profiles, and developing skills they'll need in future careers. Teen life has become a theatrical, self-directed media production. 68% of teens have profiles on social networking sites, about 75% spend 2 - 3 hours a day listening to or downloading online music.[1] The student has become the spy master “the emergence of citizen’s media” in education.

From 1983 - Present
It is still a disaster in the K-12 classroom according to the children. Kids know how to use technology but teachers don't.
Teachers who participated in the Bell South Foundation's Power to Teach project www.bellsouthfoundation.org/pdfs/pttreport03.pdf
reported that they had made significant strides in integrating technology into the learning experience. However students reported seeing few changes in classroom instruction, they see it as nothing has changed, technology is still only an add on and not really a seemless part of the ONLINE CURRICULA. Technology will never replace teachers -- but, those who use technology will replace those who do not.

Are you new to the internet?

Start by playing with the interactive tutorial for beginners that teaches you how to click and scroll to rock'n roll around the net.

2007 State Technology Grades & Download your state report!!
Overall Grades at a GlanceThe Editorial Projects in Education Research Center now finds that, unlike 10 years ago, most states have technology standards for students and educators, for example. But few states test to see if those standards are being met, so the degree to which schools are reaching them is unknown. Anecdotal evidence and research suggest that teachers’ integration of digital tools into instruction is sporadic. 2007 The majority of teachers are not tech savvy. Many young people’s reliance on digital technology in their outside lives stands in sharp contrast to their limited use of it in school.

Seymour Papert 1983 to Nicholas Negroponte

DR. PAPERT who you can WATCH VIDEO 1983 is an adviser to the ''Negroponte's One Laptop Per Child'' project, an effort by the MIT Media Lab to provide low-cost $100 laptop computers to children in the developing world. see Logo as a Symbol of Constructionist Learning and Cynthia Solomon who worked closely in the development of Logo with Seymour Papert and Wally Feurzeig at Bolt, Beranek and Newman and then in1969 joined Seymour at the MIT Artificial Intelligence Lab where we started the Logo Group.

Negroponte - How the $100.00 Laptop will change education. Children in the USA will compete for the job that can be outsourced to the rest of the world.
I HAVE ONE OF THESE COMPUTERS!!
[People ask why, why is it that you want to give computers to children in many places where they hardly even have books.
The answer is, that you're asking the wrong question. If you think about people doing (Allan Greenspan explains) knowledge work, knowledge work means anything to do with writing, or numbers, or information, all the people in the world except children have opted to use the computer as the natural medium.
They have found this is the efficient way to do knowledge work. So, if we want to bring the children of the world into the knowledge economy, knowledge society, the computer is the only means of doing that.
Q: If I live in a country where I want to have these laptops, how do I get them? Does my government have to buy them or can each school buy them?
A: For the moment only governments can buy them.

 

YOUR SECURITY

LEARN HOW TO PROTECT YOUR PRIVACY AND YOUR COMPUTER FROM EVERYTHING NASTY.

SECURITY
The Data Loss Database - Open Source has almost 510 events and over 143 MILLION compromised records as of 12/06. Now that everyone will have one of those $100.oo computers it is going to change you need to be aware of computer security problems. There will be so many new worms, viri, trogen horses, botnets and other skank to defend against it may break the interent.

A tool is what you make of it.
You might be able to paint a masterpiece using a a brick dipped in paint or a hammer to put a screw into a board. It all depends on what a human does with this tool - not the tool itself.

Do you have experience? Learn what an Educators Professional Responsibility is to the public, to make sure their website does not end up as a nasty /xxx/ site. Do you know how Bury Your Dead Ed Dot With Dignity?

PLUG INTO INTERNET HISTORY

 

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Computer News Headlines

Clinton Takes Questions in a Digital Fireside Chat (NYT) November 9, 1999
Already the master of the rope line and televised town meeting, President Clinton took a technological leap into the computer age Monday night by becoming the first president to participate in a live Internet chat. The president, who describes himself as old-fashioned and technologically challenged when it comes to computers, never touched a keyboard or a mouse. He merely sat in front of a Toshiba laptop on a stage at George Washington University and responded verbally to questions sent to him. His remarks scrolled word for word across tens of thousands of computer screens. The president appeared in a tiny video box, and could be seen -- albeit sometimes just barely -- putting his hand to his chin, sipping from a soda can and looking amused at the entire extravaganza.