News and Trends

PD Tips: Interviews with the experts

4/1/2011 By:

“To be viable going forward, we’ll need to be much more sophisticated in understanding student learning and their increasing use of handhelds, tablets, and Facebook. That’s where they want to get their information, so it’s important we provide it to them through those portals.”
—Fred Bartels, technology coordinator at Rye (NY) Country Day School

“We have an equity problem now because kids have more technology in their pocket than they’re being allowed to use in school. We need to be the leaders on this and ask ‘How do business and politics make good use of these tools?’ It’s not just social. It really does work well for individualized learning.”
—Jack Leiman, instructional technology facilitator at Tacoma (WA) School District

“Teachers no longer cause people to know things. People can know things by just looking for them from a variety of information sources. A teacher, in order to be valuable, has to help that student make meaning of the knowledge or ask them to demonstrate that they’ve made meaning.”
—Renee Jesness, information and technology literacy integration specialist at Minneapolis Public Schools