Mrs. Freddy's Practical EdTech

For this blog, I was tasked with reading a book entitled Teach Boldly  by Jennifer Williams. This was not my first choice for books, but I was interested in getting some ideas after reading the description. In my opinion, the book centered around the themes of social justice and equity in education. Williams goes into detail about how to achieve these things through using educational technology. I enjoyed the different examples of what she had been introduced to. In particular, Chapter 3 is titled The Human-Centered Learning Environment. This chapter described a plan created after Google did a diversity analysis within their own company. They realized that their company was not as diverse as they thought and they wanted to help change that. To tackle the problem, they decided that they needed to start at the beginning -- in schools. This was the birth of the Google Code Next lab in Oakland, California. It was centrally located in a diverse neighborhood and help students from local ...

Social media has become one of the most essential aspects of our lives today. We use social media to connect with friends and family. We use it to connect with other professionals in our fields. Our students use it daily to talk to all their friends the same way that we wrote notes back and forth between classes when I was in school. This is why we have to start teaching them how to be safe and learn to find quality information at a very young age. Arguments on social media can be used for good or bad and it's up to the reader to make sure that they get the right information. Most educators do not consider the possibility of actually using social media to teach their students how to argue online effectively and appropriately. The question is how do we decide what is the most accurate information we read when following these arguments.  For example, I like to follow several different news sources to distinguish between the stories and how they are covered by the different sources. W...