Welcome Back ......

For many of you this will be the end of the first full week
of school and I suspect the relaxing rhythm of the summer has been replaced
with the frenetic pace of the classroom. Or what a good colleague of mine calls
the “tyranny of the moment.”
Still, what could be better than teaching science! And it’s with that
excitement that I am looking forward to this school year.

I keep hearing that we are at a turning point with technology in education and that paper will be a historical remnant in schools very soon. Now, I’m not exactly sure how that will happen given the smaller
budgets for resources, for teacher training and the lack of research on how
kids learn using technology. I hate to be a mini-luddite and say this, but
paper isn’t going anywhere soon. Some of you may have heard my rant before on
this, but the day the photocopier goes from our schools, then we’ll be moving
towards fully integrating technology into our learning processes.

In the meantime, I believe we are still in a very exciting period of discovering how kids learn with various print resources and electronic technologies. And being in science is the perfect course to look for
blended resource solutions to assist in this exploration. For me, having a
blended resource program is having a cost effective, high quality core resource
that forms the basis for everything that follows in and out of the classroom.
Rather than spending valuable time searching the web for content to describe
plate tectonics or photosynthesis, I suggest we focus our efforts on how to
improve student understanding of these concepts and skills. And that is where
the technology works in a blended model. Let’s give teachers the tools to use
digital resources that will impact on student achievement.

At Edvantage we have some exciting projects in development right now that blends our work text with web resources that puts you, the teacher, in control of what your students need at that precise moment to better
understand the concepts covered in class. Add to that an iPad interactive text
platform and you can understand why I am very excited about this school year.

Now, if I can figure out how to use Twitter in the classroom, then ….

Lionel