Jeff Utecht – Educator, Consultant, Author
Posts tagged nextgenteachers
NETS Refreshed-Do we need tech standards?
Jun 9th
My last full day in Shanghai before flying out tomorrow to Seattle. It’s also the first day of summer vacation, so as I try and wind down from school and gear up for the projects ahead of me this summer I opened up my RSS reader to catch up on some reading. When I clicked on Warlick’s A Magnetic Field of National Educational Technology Standards (NETS) post, I knew I’d better set aside some deep thinking time for this one.
I was right!
The post itself is excellent as conversations about the NETS Refreshed are starting to take hold as we draw closer to NECC.
I’ve More >
TTWWADI
May 23rd
That’s The Way We’ve Always Done It
I was hit this week with a TTWWADI right in my own teaching. It’s the end of the semester and so in TTWWADI fashion the students are creating web sites using Dreamweaver.
The project includes everything we’ve been talking about this past semester. The only difference is the students have had a blog all semester and that is a web site.
The students have been excited to learn how to use Dreamweaver but I keep coming back to: Is this a skill I should be teaching in 6 and 7th grade?
Maybe…before Web 2.0 tools made it More >
Chaos vs Coherent
May 16th
My Superintendent:
“I’ve learned that there is a fine line between chaos and coherent.”
This statement has been replaying itself in my head now for a weeks. Maybe because I’m feeling my life is on the chaotic side of that line at the moment.
However, I’ve also been reflecting at where we are in education and where we are trying to go. Where does education fall on this line?
What I’m afraid of is that education is too much on the coherent side of that line, although we are trying to push the education system as a whole closer to that line More >
Laptops Hinder Learning?
May 14th
A Study on how laptops hinder learning made the front page of The International Educator newspaper that comes out monthly to overseas educators and schools.
Jason Welker wrote a great article at U Tech Tips about it.
First of all, to call this a “study” of the use of laptops inschools is inappropriate. A study with a sample size of TWO classes,yes, but its findings should be understood as applying only two thesetwo particular classes, which were large lecture-style universityclasses. This particular university’s laptop “program” is described asfollows:
“Students were told at the beginning of the course thatthey could bring their laptops to class to take More >
A Week of Just In Time Learning
May 11th
There is nothing like starting your week off with an e-mail from a teacher that simple says:
“Moodle is not working…do you know why?”
And then spending the next four days worried that you can’t fix it. It has been one of those weeks that I’ve relied on ‘just in time learning’ and my network of information to help me through what was a database disaster.
I wish you could monitor learning and knowledge over time. Because my graph for the past four days on how Moodle works and mysql databases must have doubled. Of course I can’t tell you what I learned, More >
School 2.0: Adaptable vs Knowledgable
Feb 7th
I just left this comment on a message board with some pre-service teachers:
What is more important to be adaptable or knowledgeable? (think dinosaurs)
The word adaptable and adaptability have been floating around in my head for some time now and how they define what we are trying to do in the 21st century and why it is so hard for us to put our finger on what School 2.0 means. I then read this from David Warlick
But it’s why I want to think about the term School 2.0 in a different way. Rather than referring to 2.0 as a version number, More >
It’s just hardware!
Jan 28th
Yesterday I, along with about 10 other educators from my school, went to the first Apple seminar for international schools held here in Shanghai. Apple has sent a team here to “break into the international school market in Asia.” They are based in Beijing but travel around Asia promoting their products and what they can offer to schools who are looking to either go to a full 1:1 program or just looking to get more technology in their schools. I get teased a lot from fellow teachers who are Mac lovers for being the “Dell guy” because I do own More >
Distance Learning…get creative
Jan 19th
I wrote a blog entry over at techlearning yesterday called New ways to communicate talking about some of the new ways technology can impact learning in school.
Wednesday I had a chance to try some distance learning out on my own. I work on two difference campuses that are, by taxi, about 2 hours apart. I’ve picked up a class this semester on the Pudong Campus, therefore limited my time on the Puxi campus helping teachers there.
Here’s a picture I took of teaching the class. We have a state of the art video conferencing system that connects the two campuses. It’s mostly More >
