Guest Commentary Educational Technology Bill of Rights for Students

Brad Flickinger is a technology integration specialist who teaches technology at Bethke Elementary in Timnath, Colo., and is the founder of SchoolTechnology.org. Recently, he wrote a student's edtech bill of rights that was published as part of the Digital Learning Environment Blog.

Taking the viewpoint of a student, Flickinger believes an edtech bill of rights should include:

• The right to use technology at school. I should not be forced to leave my new technology at home to use (in most cases) out-of-date school technology. If I can afford it, let me use it -- you don’t need to buy me one. If I cannot afford it, please help me get one -- I don’t mind working for it.
• The right to access the school’s WiFi. Stop blaming bandwidth, security or whatever else -- if I can get on WiFi at McDonalds, I think that I should be able to get online at school.
• The right to be taught by teachers who know how to manage the use technology in their classrooms. These teachers know when to use technology and when to put it away.

Click here to read all 10 of the rights Flickinger believes students need to have.

Guest Commentary: Give Students Mobile Devices to Maximize Their Learning Time

Chris Dede is the Timothy E. Wirth Professor in Learning Technologies at Harvard’s Graduate School of Education. Additionally, every fall, he co-hosts a major conference for Qualcomm on mobile learning.
Recently, Dede wrote a blog post for Education Nation's "The Learning Curve." In the post, he advocated for allowing students to use mobile devices in the classroom.
"We know that students’ lives outside school are filled with technology, giving them 24/7 mobile access to information and allowing them to participate in online social networks and communities where people worldwide share ideas, collaborate, and learn new things. Our education system should leverage students’ interest in technology and the time they spend learning informally outside the regular school hours to extend learning time in a way that motivates them even more," he wrote.
Click here to read Dede's entire post.

Guest Commentary: NYT's Online Debate 'The Frontier of Classroom Technology'

If you are part of the virtual education community, there is no doubt that the New York Times ongoing series of stories "Grading the Digital School" has come up as a subject of conversations.
Proponents of the series say the Times is shining a light fair on issues in online learning world. From for-profit companies that are entering the arena to where some of the children of Silicon Valley's Tech elite go to school (a Waldorf school that frowns on even letting the kids of the tech-savvy watch TV.)
Critics of the series aren't so kind. In a recent blog post titled "NY Times Declares War on the Future," Liberating Learning Blog contributor Tom Vander Ark wrote, "The New York Times has launched a full on war on education technology—except for when it’s in their own benefit."
"I cancelled my subscription to the Times. It was the paper of record but it’s just another pandering tabloid," Vander Ark concluded.
In an online opinion forum called "The Frontier of Classroom Technology," the Times takes a 360-degree look at edtech. Six "debaters" represent a variety of views on the intersection of education and technology. For example, Paul Thomas of Furman University calls a lot of edtech "a misguided use of money." Will Richardson, author of "Personal Learning Networks: Using the Power of Connections to Transform Education" writes, "Our kids are stuck in a paper-based, local-learning system that doesn't acknowledge the global, networked, always-on opportunities that mobile access affords.
Click here to read the forum and the more than 140 responses to debaters.

Guest Commentary: Bryan Setser on the Mobile Charter School

Bryan Setser is Chief Innovation Officer for Open Education Solutions. Writing for the Getting Smart blog, Setser recently talked about his preparations for participating on a panel called, "Wireless Edtech."
"I am thinking about Mobile School Design as both a supplementary school service and as a future school design," he writes.
"Research in the corporate world is already underway in this space with formal and informal learning protocols for business design
"Schools and districts can design the mobile school by ensuring that e-learning courseware has a mobile component. This way students and educators can log on to courseware and professional development assignments at anytime and anywhere," he adds.
Click here to read more.

Tom Vander Ark: 6 Reasons Kids Should be Allowed to Use Mobile Devices in School

Bans on student use of mobile devices exist for some good reasons—kids use them inappropriately at school and there are safety and security concerns. So why bother considering a change?
Click here to learn my six reasons for allowing kids to BYOD (Bring Your Own Device).
Click here to read my colleague Sarah Cargill's post "10 Unique Lesson Ideas for BYOD and BYOT (Bring Your Own Technology)."

Guest Commentary: Why Schools Should Stop Banning Cell Phones and Use Them for Learning

Audrey Watters writes about education and technology. In a recent post on Mind/Shift, which explores the future of learning by covering cultural technology trends and innovations, Watters wrote that she was tired of the obstacles prevent cell phones and other mobile devices from being used in K-12 classrooms.
"For man schools, these are formal rules written in school policy or in student handbooks," Watters writes. "But as phones become more like extended appendages in everyone's life, schools are rethinking their policies."
Click here to read the complete post and find out what classroom teachers are saying about using cell phones as learning devices.

Guest commentary: The Atlantic's 'Project Classroom: Transforming Our Schools for the Future'

Rebecca J. Rosen is an associate editor at The Atlantic and spearhead's the publications "Project Classroom" feature. She recently used Duke professor Cathy Davidson's new book Now You See It, as a jumping off point to write about digital learning and the future of education.
"In 2003 the iPod was a relatively new gadget for listening to music. Billboard ads showed young people dancing, iPods in hand. Few people would have pinpointed this newfangled Walkman as a powerful teaching tool," Rosen writes.
"Cathy N. Davidson, a professor at Duke University, believes that classrooms aren't keeping up with the kids. She thought, what is the untapped educational potential of the iPod? She and her Duke colleagues worked with Apple to give every entering freshmen an iPod, and then they sat back and watched as students and teachers developed innovate and collaborative ways to incorporate iPods into their work: med students could listen to recordings of heart arrhythmia, music students could upload their compositions and get feedback from other students, environmental studies students interviewed families in a North Carolina community about lead paint in their town, and then shared their interviews online, for other students to download," Rosen continues.
"No one could have predicted all the ways the iPods enhanced learning once they were in the hands of students and teachers -- and that's a central point of Cathy Davidson's new book," Rosen adds.
Click here to read the complete article.

Guest Commentary: Chris Dede--21st Century Education Requires Lifewide Learning

Christopher Dede is the Timothy E. Wirth Professor in Learning Technologies at Harvard Graduate School of Education. His fields of scholarship include emerging technologies, policy, and leadership. He, along with other members of the Harvard Graduate School of Education, took over Education Week's "The Future of School Reform" blog to post their viewpoints. In his post, Dede writes, "Educational transformation is coming not because of the increasing ineffectiveness of schools in meeting society's needs - through that is certainly a good reason - but due to their growing unaffordability." "New media are at the heart of innovative models for education: empowering new forms of learning and teaching while simultaneously contributing to the obsolescence of traditional schools/universities as educational vehicles," he continues. "In the past five years, social media, immersive interfaces from the entertainment industry, and ubiquitous mobile broadband devices have coalesced in powerful ways to empower and integrate learning in and out of school. Too often, I have seen educational technologies used to put "old wine in new bottles." Now, if we seize the moment, we not only can have new wine - such as peer mentoring anytime, anyplace - but also can move beyond the "bottle" of the stand-alone school, he adds. Click here to read his complete post.

Guest Commentary: Using Cell Phones in Schools--We Have to Take the First Step

Bill Ferriter teaches 6th grade language arts in North Carolina. He is an advocate of using mobile devices--smartphones, iPod Touches, etc.,-- in school. What's more, he says educators can't wait until every one of their students has a mobile computing device in order to make use of these devices part of the curriculum. Why? "One of the stumbling blocks to almost every reform initiative in schools is our stubborn refusal to move forward until the conditions are perfect for change. The result: Change never happens," Ferriter writes. "I don't care if 1 out of 10 students in your school has a cell phone. That's still one more device for learning than your teachers had before--and it is one more tool for learning that many schools don't have to provide," he adds. Click here to read Ferriter's complete post which was written for The Teacher Leaders Network (h/t MindShift).

Guest Commentary: Why Low Performing Schools Need Digital Media

Craig Watkins is a University of Texas at Austin professor who studies the youth digital media culture. In this thought-provoking essay, Watkins challenges the conventional wisdom of the so-called digital divide.
"When the social and digital media revolution gained momentum at the dawn of the new millennium, no one would have predicted that less than a decade later black and Latino youth would be just as engaged as their white, Asian, and more affluent counterparts," Watkins writes.
"Across a number of measures -- use of mobile phones and gaming devices, social network sites, and the mobile web -- young blacks and Latinos are beginning to outpace their white counterparts. For years the dominant narrative related to race and technology in the U.S. pivoted around the question of access. Today, the most urgent questions pivot around participation and more specifically, the quality of digital media engagement among youth in diverse social and economic contexts," he continues.
What does this mean for schools?
"Technology alone will not change what is happening in low-performing schools. But effective insertion of technology into the classroom might help break the ice that chills the relationship between students and teachers. Rather than spending their time and energy policing mobile phones what if teachers asked their students to pull out their devices to execute a class assignment?" he adds.
Click here to read the complete article.