Living a SMART life

We are living in a world with new and emerging technology all around us.  As we are living through a pandemic it has been all too clear that every digital company has flooded our email with offers of reduced or free access to their programs.  It has given education to see how new technologies can add value in learning.  Teachers were doing this before, as it is just part of their teacher life, they must adapt, learn and use emerging technologies for the betterment of the learning process.   We are currently watching these new technologies unfold in the world wide digital learning but there is a huge challenge of not every student has access.   In our school district we discovered during this crisis that students were accessing their online learning through a phone and not necessarily a larger device.  This feedback is promoting the stronger need for accessibility in our lesson designs and checking for accessibility.  This accessibility requirement...

Picture credit and more emerging trends found at Top 6 Educational Trends Right Now The spring of 2020 pushed emerging technologies right into our virtual classrooms.  These up and coming technologies may have only been in our “maybe we will use in the future” to how do we integrate them now with blended or virtual learning.  Some of the technologies got an upgrade as the demand of what schools needed to finish out the school year and now thinking of what school will look like in the Fall. I saw a very funny meme stating if you could go back in time to give 3 words of advice to your past self  what would you say “invest in Zoom”.  While Sykpe and Google Hangout had been an emerging tool for quite a while, when the pandemic arrived everyone seemed to be scrambling to understand and use Zoom.  Microsoft Teams and Google seem to be trying to match the capability of Zoom.  I believe this is a perfect example of an emerging technology that became part of the ed...

The future is here!  With current events the world has been turned upside down but not always in a bad way.  The technologies that have been waiting to make it the forefront in education now have teachers and education leaders scrambling to get them in the hands of both teachers and students.  The book by King described how much of our lives would be augmented by technology tools.  Some of these tools to help increase engagement or productivity may have seemed like a luxury. School districts may have put them into a “we will get them in the future” category - but here we are wishing we knew more about them and how these tools can help us with virtual learning.   Education now has opportunities to improve, advance and incorporate many new ideas and new technology innovations.  Changes over the past decade, like learning management systems, open educational resources, online courses and analytics, are now being looked at on every level of education and n...

BOOK REVIEW OF AUGMENTED: LIFE IN THE SMART LANE BY BRETT KING Marshall Cavendish Publisher, Singapore, 2016, 448 pages, $27 hardcover, 978-9814634038 To infinity and beyond…… While that is a very famous quote by my favorite Space Ranger (Toy Story Disney series) that is the feeling I got when reading this book by Brett King. While King talks about many technology trends he does so being informative not only for the tech audience but at the same time being interesting and appealing to a wider general audience too. The book begins by taking us through a quick review of the last 250 years of technological innovation, with increasingly shorter cycles of relevance and then obsolescence for different inventions. Moore’s Law and other key trends are all referenced and if you are not familiar with these points of reference they are all explained in a way that again treads carefully between keeping the general reader on board and yet also informing the more tech savvy among the audience. The ...

How much time do you think you spend on your smartphone?  I will not ask for just a phone since I am not sure those even exist anymore.  Do you use your smartphone for more than calling?  I am sure the answer is yes.  Is is getting harder to actually think about what our smartphones can't do.  We text, call, bank, travel remind, email, video call, check our health, serf the Internet and so much more. I found myself with a phone that decided to stop working.  Hence, it seems that my life then stopped working.  No more connecting or checking on anything.  I was trying to learn from that moment how much I depended on my smartphone.  Within just a few hours (that may seem very long for some of you) I ordered a new phone.  Yes, I needed to order it and didn't go right out to buy one but that is a budget thing for me.  So for three days I am without my phone!   This left me some extra time to think.  Since I could not liste...