Archives For Technology & Culture
Clayton R Wright reminded me about Jane Hart’s Top 100 Tools for Learning 2014 is in it’s 8th edition. If you click any of the items on the list, http://c4lpt.co.uk/top100tools/analysis-2014/ you will be able to view additional information such as website URL, cost, availability, and comments from respondents to the annual survey regarding why they found the tool useful.
I find it very interesting that PowerPoint is the only non web or cloud-based tool in the top 10. The future of Educational technology is cloud-based.
2014 Top 100 (Only the first 10 are listed below. Go to Jane Hart’s site to see the complete list.)
1 – Twitter
2 – Google Docs/Drive
3 – YouTube
4 – PowerPoint
5 – Google Search
6 – WordPress
7 – Dropbox
8 – Evernote
9 – Facebook
10 – LinkedIn
The University of Minnesota (UM) has created the Hype Cycle for Education tool to create and share community-sourced information about educational technology to all University students, staff, and faculty. UM believes that the Hype Cycle Tool will provide data that help improve decisions regarding technology investments. UM states that:
The Hype Cycle for Education tool enables you to
Learn about new academic technologies being piloted here at the University and discover new ways of supporting teaching and learning with technology.
Share your experiences with emerging technologies, your resources and technology pointers, and your views on which technologies should be centrally piloted and where we ought to focus our attention and resources in the academic technology domain.
Innovate by adopting new technologies or applying new techniques in your courses, collaborating with peers to organize (and communicate about) local pilots, participate on the Hype Cycle advisory group, and/or join a centrally supported pilot.
In the article 4 Lessons Learned from Higher Ed Tech Failures in 2014 Tanya Roscorla suggests that to prevent failure of Ed Tech projects administrators must:
- Become smarter about running experiments, which usually include technology
- Figure out how to scale innovations that are working
- Watch smaller schools to see how they approach technology because they have more freedom to innovate
- Recognize that universities are in a turbulent period of time and identify the cost of being wrong about education technology
While these are salient points and should be factors to consider Roscorla has missed the fundamental issue that needs to be addressed if your organization is to be successful in deploying Ed Tech effectively. Ed Tech should be used to enhance the learning environment rather be used as a magic bullet to change the way that students, faculty, staff and administrators work in the educational environment.
All too often in Higher Ed technology is deployed and everyone has to adopt to the technology rather then find the appropriate technology that can be adopted to the learning environment. The starting point for all technology related projects in Higher Ed should be the learning. This means that we look to the needs of the learner and faculty first, then the staff and administration.
Unfortunately, most administrators in Higher Ed do not have enough knowledge and experience with Ed Tech so decisions regarding the selection and support of the technology are most often off loaded to IT departments. Even though IT departments are focused on serving the user their priority is to help the user to deal with the technology that the IT department has chosen to deploy. If the priority is the technology then it makes perfect sense to pay attention to technology testing, scalability, technology deployments at other institutions, and costs.
However, if the priority is the learner then issues like flexibility, usability, mobility and adaptability are paramount because the technology needs to adapt to the learning environment and support the learning. IT should play a support role in selecting the technology but the primary selection should fall upon an advisory group comprised of faculty, students and other learning support staff who understand the importance of putting the needs of the learner first.
The fundamental question needs to be asked–who does Ed Tech serve? The learner or administration and IT. Until we start focusing on the learning we will continue to see significant Ed Tech project failures.
In the TechRepublic post Chromebooks leapfrog iPads in US education market for first time, here’s why Conner Forrest points out that Chromebooks got to 20% marketshare of the education market worldwide and nearly 50% share in the US education market.
Why is Google taking control of the market share?
- Lower hardware costs – some Chromebooks come in below $200.
- Lower management costs – simple management console and no imaging costs.
- Students prefer Chromebooks to iPads – in grades 3-12 overwhelming preference for Chromebooks. Younger students benefit from the touch screen of the iPad.
- Web-based apps – majority of major educational software is now available online.
- Google Classroom – Collaborative integration of Google Docs, Drive, and Gmail. Nothing native to the iPad provides the same service.
Cost aside, Google Chromebooks provide a much simpler and easier to use ecosystem for students, teachers and administrators than the iPad.
This could be a huge blow to Apple because the education market has been one of Apple’s keys to success. With their continued inability to grow their iCloud service into anything that remotely offers the power of Google Docs/Apps for education I don’t see them regaining the Educational market share in the US and would expect to see their world wide Educational share decline as well.
I think that this is also an example of Google beating Apple at is own game – simplicity. Over the years people (myself included) have been willing to spend the premium dollar on the iPhone, iPads and other Apple products in general because they are so simple to use. The iPhone, iPad and other Apple devices work so well together that they required minimal management. Once you learn all of Apple’s idiosyncrasies you are up and running.
Google’s products have matured to the point were they are equally simple to use and with the added infrastructure of Google Classroom and Google Apps for Education Google offers a management simplicity that Apple has not been able to match.
As much as I enjoy using my MacBook Air, my iPad or my iPhone I can only tolerate iTunes and iTunesU and other Apple management tools. The wonderful option is using the best of both worlds. For the most part I use Apple hardware but for almost everything else Google is my first choice.
It will be interesting to see how this continues to develop. Are you Google or Apple purist or are you a hybrid user?
