All too often, educational technology takes the form of an edtech professional (like me) sitting down with an instructor and saying "look at all these cool tools and toys we have! Here are the things you can do with them! And here's the ones we have a license for."
Tech people like me love cool toys and new ways of doing things, so we tend to leap right into extolling all the technological virtues of--to pick an arbitrary example--Noteflight, and then only at the end of the conversation do we start talking about how the instructor should take a look and see if it matches their pedagogical goals for their music class. (Yes, I inflicted that conversation on a poor music professor not too long ago.) This can foster a culture of technology for technology's sake, where the focus is on the technological impressiveness of the tools, rather than the actual goals that they are meant to achieve.
Worse than this, though, is the simple fact that there are too many digital learning activities out there and there isn't yet an ingrained cultural knowledge of the purpose and benefits of each one. Possibly no one resource can encompass all digital learning activities, but I did come across a handy cheat-sheet that offers a good jumping-off point:
Tech people like me love cool toys and new ways of doing things, so we tend to leap right into extolling all the technological virtues of--to pick an arbitrary example--Noteflight, and then only at the end of the conversation do we start talking about how the instructor should take a look and see if it matches their pedagogical goals for their music class. (Yes, I inflicted that conversation on a poor music professor not too long ago.) This can foster a culture of technology for technology's sake, where the focus is on the technological impressiveness of the tools, rather than the actual goals that they are meant to achieve.
Worse than this, though, is the simple fact that there are too many digital learning activities out there and there isn't yet an ingrained cultural knowledge of the purpose and benefits of each one. Possibly no one resource can encompass all digital learning activities, but I did come across a handy cheat-sheet that offers a good jumping-off point:
This chart of Bloom's Digital Taxonomy from Fractus Learning takes many of the most commonly used digital teaching tools from social bookmarking, to blog commenting, to building wikis, and order's them according to a modified version of the famous Bloom's Taxonomy.
Although this certainly isn't the be-all and end-all of digital learning technology, it is an interesting way of thinking about it. Some digital tools clearly do engage higher-order thinking than others, and it would behoove me and my fellow EdTech professionals to bear in mind that, when recommending tools like tagging and online journaling, they might kind of ...suck. At least, if high-order thinking is your goal.
Although this certainly isn't the be-all and end-all of digital learning technology, it is an interesting way of thinking about it. Some digital tools clearly do engage higher-order thinking than others, and it would behoove me and my fellow EdTech professionals to bear in mind that, when recommending tools like tagging and online journaling, they might kind of ...suck. At least, if high-order thinking is your goal.