Category Archives: trends and changes

Augmented reality and education

The same trends seem to keep appearing – new technology is first used by the entertainment / gaming industry (they have lots of money); then some businesses take ideas on board to keep ahead of their competitors; then education sees the potential and starts to consider how ideas in the new technology could be harnessed for learning. As far as I can see, the same thing has happened with AR. So what’s the difference between Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality?

This blog post has some useful ideas, as well as an info-graphic to visually explain the trends and ideas associated with AR:

https://edtechmagazine.com/k12/article/2017/10/how-will-ar-transform-education-infographic

10 Reasons Teachers should Try Blended Learning ~ Educational Technology and Mobile Learning

See the original article on www.educatorstechnology.com

This article has some interesting points; it also made me think about some issues:

For many years now, I’ve argued that one of the good things about using technology can be that it encourages (forces?) you to re-think what you’ve been doing. To successfully integrate the new technologies that our learners are using in all parts of their lives, we often need to reconsider what it is we are actually doing in the classroom. This could, of course, lead to the conclusion that what we are doing works perfectly well; if that’s true, then we should continue to do it that way. But the important thing is that we’ve examined it and considered the arguments for and against, and are therefore in a much stronger position to justify what we are doing.

Very often, though, we find out that we don’t actually know what we’re doing! we’ve lost sight of the main learning, or the real-life reason for learning about something in the first place.

And then we could consider transforming what takes place in the classroom. In today’s schools, we are no longer trying to teach how to understand the world we live in right now, but giving our learners the tools, principles and approaches that will guide them to the world of the future. The processes have become more important than knowing one piece of information; how we get there and how often we persevere are much more important.

Why AppleTV & iPad beats Interactive Whiteboard….every time.

See on Scoop.it – Mobile learning for students and teachers

My school has interactive whiteboards installed in every classroom. This is a fairly recently upgrade. It was just in the last few years that this “initiative” was completed. Every classroom, K-12,…

Ruby Rennie Panter‘s insight:

Is this the end for interactive whiteboards?

See on ryanorilio.wordpress.com

Remembering where you found information

You know what it’s like – you’ve started browsing the web and you come across an interesting blog; you start reading, and then you follow a link; you find another interesting page and follow a link there; and at some point you decide you’ll write down your own thoughts on the topic.

But can you remember where the idea came from?

The idea of “The Curator’s Code” is to keep track of where the ideas came from.

So I found this idea while looking at Facebook and the e-learner’s group there   https://www.facebook.com/#!/pages/E-Learners/159384510762376, who linked to the page about the ᔥ Curator’s Code http://curatorscode.org/

I’m still working out how and when to use it …

ebooks and the internet

There’s an interesting article in today’s Guardian about ebooks:

https://apps.facebook.com/theguardian/books/2012/feb/15/book-internet-merge

I must admit, I’m using ebooks more and more. It’s so easy to look for a book, click, download it and start reading. I can have the book on my phone as well as my iPad. Recently, I was meeting someone for coffee, I got there a bit early, and while I was waiting I could have a read of my current book without having to think in advance that I should put a book in my bag.

There are, though, a couple of things that they still need to sort out:

  • you can’t yet buy a book to gift to someone. My Dad (who has Parkinson’s) now has the Kindle app on his computer screen and it’s easy for him to read the text without having to hold a book or device, but I can’t send him a book as a gift
  • likewise, when you’ve read the book you can’t pass it on. They need to find a way to make second-hand ebooks available

I’ve been mulling over the possibilities of publishing course notes as an e-book; still not sure that it would add anything to the way we do things just now. However, if it were possible to have a whole collection and then the notes bring it together, much like having a webpage that has a series of links except the links would be to journal articles and books, then perhaps it would be a useful academic tool. It would be like the library part of a course. Would it, however, make students lazy? Would they then be unable to search for their own references?

New VLE coming soon …

As some of you have commented, WebCT is a useful tool but some parts of it don’t respond in the way that you would expect. In a couple of weeks we’ll have a look at how to use WebCT as a teacher. The principles are similar for several other Virtual Learning Environments that are in common use in education. However, the University of Edinburgh is shortly going to move to a different, updated platform. More information on Learn 9, the new platform, can be found here.

Innovative learning – using a wiki

Coming up in February, the University will have the first “innovative learning week”. The idea is to have a week when students can find out new ways of learning across the university. What I thought was interesting to note was that it has been decided to use a wiki to get the information out. I suspect that one of the main reasons for this is that it is really quick and easy to update a wiki page, whereas a webpage is more static and has to take more effort and understanding of how webpages work.

What do you think of the way the wiki for Innovative learning is being used?

https://www.wiki.ed.ac.uk/display/InnovLearning/Home