The K-20 Blog turns three the day after tomorrow! But since November 17 is a Saturday this year and we’re not talking about the celebration of a toddler’s birthday but about that of a blog, the NEO team decided to do something special about it today!
K-20 Blog’s anniversary party did not consist of screaming kids in colorful clothes and high on sugar. No, no. There were adults. Talking in a normal voice. Wearing average office attires. Still high on sugar. Because of this:
It was a nice cake. Was. Absolutely delicious. Yum.
A big cake for a long year.
It was a long year, this year. We learned a lot. And if you’re a regular reader of this blog, I hope you did too. From gamification to digital citizenship to PD for teachers to classroom robots and everything in between, the 102 posts that have been published on the K-20 Blog in the last 12 months covered oh so many subjects related to education technology and e-learning for educational institutions.
After mixing numbers of page views, time on page and social sharing with extra special topics and a pinch of subjectivity, I figured out the best recipe for a blog anniversary cake. If that cake consisted of its best posts, that is. Here are 10 of the K-20 Blog’s best posts from the third year of its existence:
Change is happening at a far slower rate across “ordinary” schools. In 2015 the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation released an interesting report from the series Teachers Know Best that sought out 3100 educators to establish the state of technology integration across K-12. The figures in that report indicate that the digitization of the classroom is not happening as rapidly as the tech media would have us think. So take a look at this process of bridging the digital divide, using a step-by-step model.
Instructional Technology Coaching (ITC) is a prevalent method of deploying on-going professional development for teachers, with a specific focus on the integration of technology into both the curriculum, as well as the method of instruction. So check out these 12 rules to keep your coaching relevant, interesting and even fun. This post comes with plenty of resources for teachers.
All the trends and all the advancements in education are based on living breathing people who want to make the world a better place. They can be educators who are directly involved in the process of knowledge transfer in a classroom, administrators of any kind of educational institution, policymakers, business people, activists, researchers, bloggers, and so on. So here are 10 edtech people to watch this year.
Blended learning is a formal education program in which a student learns at least in part through online delivery of content and instruction with some element of student control over time, place, path, and/or pace and at least in part at a supervised brick-and-mortar location away from home. And there are more than one way to achieve this. So check out these 4 models of blended learning!
Creating a good training program for all the educators in your school isn’t always easy. You need a good team, plan the content, schedule the training, and much more. This seems exhausting, expensive and time-consuming, but it’s actually not. That’s why we’ve put together a simple and easy to follow guide on how to create your own LMS training program. Just remember: start small and keep on going!
TED Talks are awesome. Maybe it’s the variety of topics they cover, the perfectly timed length of the speech, the simple setting, or maybe all of these; but either way, I think we can all agree that TED Talks are awesome. And if we add education to the mix, they are even more awesome. So check out these TED Talks of teachers or educational experts that every teacher should see!
The e-learning industry is growing as there are always new players penetrating the market. Each LMS vendor has a unique selling offer, and your educational institution has a unique set of needs. Wherever you turn, keep in mind that there is one type of LMSs that could be better in the long-term — one with a cloud-based architecture. Read on to find a number of reasons to opt for a cloud-based LMS for your school.
If you have spent any time in the ed-tech world you will no doubt have realized that there is a swirling cloud of acronyms that attend the subject, from ISTE, CoSN to NMC and P21. A veritable “alphabet soup”. With so many ed-tech organizations in the US and worldwide, a definitive quick reference guide to the major players, with a brief description would be a handy resource for our readers. So here are eight of them.
An LMS for Higher Education brings in plenty of benefits for university administration and faculty members, but most of all, for students. Being able to access various learning materials, to enroll in self-paced courses and competency-based ones, to contact the person of need at the moment of need and to have a bird’s-eye view over their own progress are just five of the benefits an LMS can give HE students.
Despite the advantages, PD is a challenge for many teachers. Not only do they not necessarily have the time to complete the required PD hours, but in many instances PD courses do not necessarily fit with their particular professional interests or are not nuanced enough to address specific professional goals. Fortunately technology, specifically in the form of micro-credentials, makes everything easier.
And so ends our list of best performing K-20 Blog posts. These 10, along with all the others published during the past year, as well as those from the previous years have pushed our blog up in the list of all e-learning blogs. We’re now in the first 5%! Kudos to all NEO writers!
And if you’re still thinking about the anniversary cake, it ended a while ago.
Happy anniversary, K-20 Blog! NEO LMS is proud of you!