Central College

What School Leaders Need to Know About Digital Technologies and Social Media

This page contains resources from my work with Central College in Pella, Iowa. These materials are made available under a Creative Commons 3.0 attribution-share alike license, which means that you are both allowed and encouraged to use them! Please contact me if you have any other questions about these resources.

March 5, 2013

0. Some things to take home with you today

1. Lunch & Learn: Innovative instructional uses in higher education

1a. Flipped classroom

1b. MOOCS

1c. Adaptive learning software

1d. Crowdsourcing

1e. Other resources

2. Lunch & Learn: The information society is here

  • Our backchannel 
  • Global, not just local
  • Open, accessible, and free, not just closed, locked-down, and costly
  • Active and interactive, not just passive and receptive
  • Real-world, not just classroom
  • Robust student engagement, agency, voice, and ownership
  • Production, not just consumption
  • Connected communities of interest, not just geography
  • Crowdsourced amateurs, not just individual experts
  • Individualized/personalized, not masses
  • Self-directed v. instructor-directed
  • Disintermediation
  • Replacement by software
  • Being findable
  • Credentialing

3. Workshop: Schools, technology, and learning

3a. Our backchannel  (also, I am @mcleod on Twitter)

3b. #pencilchat

3c. Three big shifts

3d. Powerful technology, powerful students

3e. Discussion and solution-building

3f. Evaluating technology integration in our classrooms

3g. Closing thoughts

3h. Trends and tech integration

3i. Other technology integration resources

3j. Some guiding questions

  • What can we do to increase the cognitive complexity of students’ day-to-day work so that they are more often doing deeper thinking and learning work?
  • What can we do to better incorporate digital technologies into students’ deeper thinking and learning work in ways that are authentic, relevant, meaningful, and powerful?
  • What can we do to give students more agency and ownership of what they learn, when they learn, how they learn, and how they show what they’ve learned?
  • What can we do to better recognize and assess when students’ deeper thinking and learning work is (or isn’t) occurring?
  • What can we do to build the internal capacity of both individual educators and school systems to be better learners and faster change agents?
  • As we move toward more cognitively-complex, technology-suffused learning environments, how do we bring educators, board members, parents, communities, policymakers, and higher education along with us?
  • As we move toward more cognitively-complex, technology-suffused learning environments, how do we ensure that traditionally-underserved student and family populations aren’t further disadvantaged?
  • As we move toward more cognitively-complex, technology-suffused learning environments, what individual and societal mindsets – and local, state, and federal policy supports and/or barriers – need reconsideration?

Miscellaneous Resources

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