Edina Digital Age Learning

Yesterday I had the pleasure of presenting at the TIES 2015 Conference on the topic of "Stop Looking At Squirrels," where I spoke about the need to avoid the "squirrels," or bright-shiny tools that may look cool, but don't really align with best practice regarding digital age learning. The slide deck is here: During the presentation, I asked the question: "Is Google Classroom a squirrel?"  Don't get me wrong, I think Google Classroom is a great tool for organizing Drive files and managing sharing! Google opening it's API for others to access and share data between systems is a BIG deal! AND...as of today, you can't track students by standard within Classroom, you can't organize units of content without a lot of savvy with Docs and Drive, and there is no parent access.  Note: After sitting in Andrew Stillman's presentation today on Growing Wings on Google Classroom , it may not be long before these shortcomings are no lo...

Today, I'm changing the title of this blog from "Edina Tech Integration," to "Edina Digital Age Learning." This shift reflects a philosophical evolution that the work that I do, isn't as much about integrating technology as it is about learning in a digital age. (In fact, my colleague Molly Schroeder and I are looking to change our titles to "Digital Age Learning Specialist," to reflect this shift.) For the last few weeks, I've been developing and tweaking the framework below. The framework defines some philosophies around digital age learning combining work from Ruben Puentedura's work on SAMR, Susan Oxnevad's SAMR Ladder , and Carl Hooker's SAMR pool . Carl's thoughts more closely resemble my own regarding digital age learning, in that I don't believe that every lesson lends itself to redefinition. It's not a ladder to climb, as much as it is a pool to swim in! Click on the icons below to see what it might look l...