Portfolio

I'm getting ready this week for MassCUE, the annual Massachusetts gather of the EdTech community. It's held at Gillette Stadium, which is a quirky and awesome place to go for a conference. The Kraft family is very generous in sharing the space, and John Kraft last year gave the best impromptu "keynote" of the conference […]

I spent two days last week at the Open Education conference in Park City. It’s a community and a movement that has evolved around developing and distributing educational content. It’s right there, in the title, these are folks with an interest in “resources.” For a long time, the group has been primarily interested in making […]

If you wanted an introduction to what I care about, where I've come from, what I believe in, and what I'm hoping to do next, here's a video introduction to my work. This was produced by the media production geniuses at the Digital Media and Learning Hub at U.C. Irvine when I was a Digital […]

I'm in the process of writing a paper based on some findings about collaboration in wikis, from a large scale content analysis of 400+ wikis drawn from nearly 200,000 wikis. The core findings are that student collaboration only happens in about 11% of U.S., K-12 wikis, and most collaboration is simply posting individually created content […]

Today I have a video op-ed up on the Harvard Graduate School of Education website, where I address some of my concerns about the role of education technology in expanding educational inequalities. Here's the video, and I'll expand on my concerns below: Basically, I think there are two visions for free and Open educational resources […]

Tom Daccord, my partner at EdTechTeacher, and I recently made a series of professional development videos with McGraw Hill for their new Social Studies program Networks. I'll post them here over time, and the whole collection can be found at http://vimeo.com/edtechteacher/videos/sort:newest. One of the really fun parts for me was that the producer of the […]

We're unlikely to have much luck improving student learning outcomes with technology if we don't measure the impact of our technology investments and interventions. In the last year or so, I've been thinking a lot about how I can be of service to school leaders who are trying to figure out how technology should fit […]

Following up on my recent post about Bud Hunt, his research, and assessment, I thought I'd share this video from our series with McGraw Hill about Alternative Assessments Using Technology in the history classroom. The full video series is here: http://vimeo.com/edtechteacher/videos/sort:newest.     Technology in Social Studies Classrooms: Alternative Assessments Using Technology from EdTechTeacher on […]

I have a been working recently with several schools and organizations in thinking about the Flipped Classroom (we even have a summer workshop coming up at Harvard this summer). I'll probably write more about Flipped in a future post, but the idea is that you reorganize instructional time so that the most cognitively demanding tasks […]

Audry Watters at Hack Education has a write up of some of my thoughts on inequality, and it stimulated a lively conversation, mostly hostile to my views. Having Jim Groom respond to my work was quite a treat, even if he calls my arguments silly. And someone even refers to my work is evil--I'm just […]

I'm getting ready for talk at the Berkman Center on Jan. 17, and I've been continuing to think a lot about issues of equality and education technology. I have one observation that I'll be trotting out in that talk, along with a corresponding suggestion. There are lots of different kinds of inequality that teachers encounter […]

I got a lovely note this week from a teacher in Silicon Valley. In it, she remarks on how in her current high-performing, wealthy districts, students are taking the lead in using OER tools to push forwards their education. I'm reposting the note with her permission, though I've obscured her name and the districts that […]

I'm taking my last class at HGSE, a 3-day Jan Term seminar, with three folks who have been in the education reform business for a long time, Bob Shwartz, Mike Smith, and Michael Barber (that's Sir Michael Barber to you, buddy!) It's called Seminar on Education Policy: Effective Education Systems, but it probably could be called: […]

For the first 10 or so years of my career, I was pretty much exclusively interested in pedagogy, instruction, learning, and the classroom level education. The instructional core is where the rubber meets the road, where teachers and students get to together and try to rewire each others dendrites and neurons in pro-social ways that […]

I gave an hour long talk today at the Berkman Center (link to event here, livestream, etc. will be up eventually), which mostly focused on how technology innovations interact with our extremely inequitable education systems. I made a passing comment that in one school I visited in rural South Georgia, a common pejorative among kids was "that's […]

I just want to point out that around 9:45 in this video, Sal Khan says that he is planning to produce a series of dating advice videos. He says they are for his 2 year old daughter, for when she grows up. He thinks that she'll be more likely to listen to a younger version […]

Dear Rep. Markey, Sen. Kerry, and Sen. Brown, I write to you in strong opposition to the current SOPA and PIPA bills that have been introduced into Congress. I write as a constituent in Arlington, MA, as a former classroom teacher, and as a current education researcher. Piracy is a serious and important issue that […]

So last Friday I gave a talk at the Berkman Center riffing on my most recent policy quandary: Will Free Benefit the Rich? That is, will the widespread availability of free and open educational resources disproportionately benefit already-advantaged students? Is this a policy problem, or is it actually desirable in the long run? If we […]

I'm proud of my fellow educators today for their entirely reasonable reactions to Apple's education announcement. Richard Byrne as per usual, sums up the vibe well: The iBooks textbooks look very nice and have some interactive elements. But, I can't help but wonder why Apple choose to make the, "iBooks will make kids' backpacks lighter" […]

After my recent talk at the Berkman Center, Will Free Benefit the Rich, a reporter from the Boston Phoenix asked me to chat with her about MITx. Her position was pretty clear-- the response to MITx seemed "rhapsodic" and she wanted to use my research as a lens to raise questions about whether MITx was […]

I'm in the air between Boston and Minneapolis, on the first leg of  a ~30 hour journey journey to Singapore. My EdTechTeacher colleague Tom Daccord and I have been invited by the Academy of Singapore Teachers as part of a new exchange program called the Outstanding Educators in Residence program. We're each spending two weeks […]

Introducing, Ask a Researcher: Every week, I try to reserve a few hours for answering questions, reading colleagues papers, reviewing proposals for conferences, offering school and job advice, and generally being of service to other educators. Most of this has happened over email for the last few years, but now if I write up anything […]

Ask a Researcher question in response to my Berkman Luncheon talk: Will Free Benefit the Rich? Just watched the video, I found it very useful. I am writing a paper concerning the urban/rural divide in education in Thailand and what you are saying about the 'haves and have nots' is very relevant to what I […]

Another question in my Ask a Researcher series: This leads me to a question I wanted to ask you about the role of student motivation in measuring the successful implementation of OERs. When Sal Khan was at my school a couple of weeks ago, he met with teachers and I asked Sal Khan how his […]

So if you are one of the world's best education systems, how do you keep getting better? In Singapore, the answer is the Academy of Singapore Teachers. One of the most important points that came out of the McKinsey evaluation of global education was that the strategies that get a school system from poor to […]

Fact: The national school systems with the highest test scores also have the least variation in test scores among subgroups (by race and income). In other words, the best systems are also the most equitable. What's harder to prove, but seems to be the case, is that equity is not merely a by-product of excellence, […]

The teaching job in America was designed as a temporary position, for men before the headed to college or for women before they got married. As it transitioned into being a career, it never really developed the features of having a career trajectory. It's one of the only careers in America where the responsibilities that […]

You know those people into webinars who dial in from overseas at ungodly hours... that was me today, hosting a 4pm EDT webinar at 5am from Singapore. We were lucky to host Angela Maiers, who is coming this March to keynote the MassCUE/METAA Leadership Conference, and our conversation was about Angela's campaign to promote Passion […]

One of the great things about my job, is that by virtue of being an outsider, often organizations will bring together diverse groups of people to solve important challenges around technology integration ("Justin Reich is coming next week, let's have him meet with all the stakeholders.)  But the meeting I had in Singapore on Friday […]

One of the amazing facets of my visit to Singapore is that I've not just been invited to present to audiences, but I have been invited to be part of the system in Singapore. Over the past week, I have had the chance to offer two history master classes to Singapore teachers on tech integration […]