oh hi how are you glad to see you could make it I'm sorry I couldn't be there in person with you today but as you can see I'm in Toronto in Canada today and it's a little bit of a distance from Canada to Sweden I'm afraid so I've recorded this video to give you a little bit of an introduction to the key elements I think are essential to the success of Technology in educational projects today let me show you what I mean there are four tiers you have to keep in mind first you want to think about the affordances of the technology itself the fact that you have mobile technology so you're no longer thinking about take a computer in fixed location a at school and taking a computer fixed location be at home and then shuttle back and forth between the two but rather you're thinking about what can a student do at all locations in between school and home how can we go from traditional learning places to a continuum of learning spaces so that the entire world becomes a place of learning for the student a second crucial tier is the research that has gone from 1945 to the current day in terms of what works in uses of educational technology and we know that what works is the rich use of the technology to allow students to explore to allow students to create to allow students to use every affordance of these devices that we have today so that they can take data explore it research it find out what they've got and link it to other pieces of data including explanations some of those explanations will take the form of texts others will take the form of recording audio others may take the form of still images others will take the form of movies and all of those can be cross connected interlinked those with rich forms of visualization forms of visualization that span the range from traditional ones like maps or timelines to non-traditional ones like ways of visualizing for instance what the words in a text do then a third-tier is given by the models that help teachers get from the promise of the devices to what the research tells us that the devices can do and that here in terms of the models that are needed I have found three models that worked very well the first one which is a model I designed called the Samer model and the Samer model links how you use a technology to the outcomes for students if you use a technology at what is called the substitution level so that you're essentially using it to replace an older technology and doing exactly the same sort of things that you were doing in your classroom before with the old technology well this may be useful it may set the stage for future developments but it will not in any way shape or form significantly impact student outcomes a second tier is then the augmentation tier and then the augmentation tier now we start to say well can we at least use the technology to enhance how the students were carrying out tasks in the past before so that now we're not saying that they're carrying about exactly the same way they were doing them before now they're using certain features of the technology to make that task being accomplished in a more efficient fashion in perhaps a more informative fashion for the student in a Swifter fashion but overall the task remains the same this will introduce small noticeable but still small improvements for students the next level is the modification they've got the modification level we start to say well wait a second I'm sure that there were educational goals you always wanted to attempt accomplish reach with your students that you couldn't have before now we can use the technology to modify the tasks that you are doing before with the student so that now they're at heart the heart of the task remains the same but important aspects have been modified so that the student can accomplish new goals that they could not have accomplished before if the task before was say to write an essay individually now we might be talking about writing an essay that is jointly critiqued by an audience of the student peers so that they get feedback in ways they couldn't have before with edits icons that are richer than what they had before or before if they were doing set mathematical problems now we're talking about using tools that allow the students to still tackle set mathematical problems but get into reaches of math that would previously have been considered too complex for them to tackle where the computer can handle some of the pencil-pushing that's difficult or impossible for the student to do at this level we see significant improvements in student outcomes the sort of things that you want your students to do but we can go on a level further we can go a step further and that step further is the redefinition level and at the redefinition level what we have now is what happens when we say well what happens if we replace part or all of the old tasks with new tests that are uniquely made possible by the new technology that allow us to accomplish educational pedagogical goals that we never could have before we never thought we would be able to reach before so maybe now we take that si we were writing before and now we say well I'd like the students instead to tackle conveying deep analytical thought in other media so now perhaps they're doing digital video storytelling as their way of responding to a piece instead of writing an essay and furthermore furthermore they could become mentors to other students because if I put a certain criterion of quality on these pieces that the students are producing well they could form the background for other students to learn from them so we start reaching into new areas new domains that we couldn't have reached before at this level the redefinition level we start to see dramatic improvements in student outcomes this is the level at which your students who are failing are now successful and your students who were already successful are going places you've never seen students go before in addition to the Samer model there are two more models that I find useful one of them the TPAC model was developed by measuring color and the feedback model says something very profound it says when you look at using technology in education you cannot prioritize just the content knowledge or just the pedagogy or just for that matter the technology you have to think of all three at the same time and as peers to each other so when you're designing a unit of instruction it's not good enough to say well okay I'll figure out what the content is that I want to teach and then after that I'll go ahead and I'll fill in the blanks we'll open I go gee I'll see what technology I can bring along rather you want to be thinking in an organic fashion as to how all three of these will integrate and you wanna think of these as peers to each other you cannot think of one as less important or just accidental to the others the third model is a model I don't quite have a name for yet it's a model that says well based upon the research that was carried out by the horizon project report group over the past decade it's possible to extract five major categories that help teachers decide what technologies to use and how to use them for what purposes so the five categories are the social here are tools like blogs wiki's all the tools that we use to share things create things jointly and share what we created jointly things like YouTube and Flickr also belong here as do tools like Facebook and Twitter next we have the category of the mobile the devices were using are intrinsically mobile and in addition to that the software that runs on them can make use of this can make use of this fact to make things work better in terms of providing students with information that is relevant to where they are in the world information that says because you're here this matters to you the next category then is visualization visualization here is any tools that can be used to take something that's abstract and make it concrete in two or three dimensions for a student to look at and better comprehend so as I mentioned before this includes maps it includes timelines it also includes network diagrams which allow students to make sense of the connections among things and of course that includes all the traditional mathematical diagrams charts etc but enriched because now they can be interactive respond to exploration the next category is digital storytelling we are very good at storytelling we are particularly good at storytelling that uses concrete objects in the physical world and its counterpart when we use digital objects in the digital world so we bring together text image audio video to tell stories that can take the form of image assemblies digital comics digital videos and perhaps even include interactivity and exploration as part of these narratives and we can use these narratives to make better sense more sense for our students we can also use them to have students make better sense for themselves as they create digital storytelling narratives finally educational gaming I'm going to use a very simple definition of educational gaming here and that very simple definition is to say that okay what we're going to do is simply say we'll go take either a visualization or a digital storytelling narrative and we're going to have a stake in other words a way for a student to guide the visualization or to guide how the narrative progresses so that they can win and that progress process of winning actually drives their knowledge drives their exploration so that they become interesting entry challenged by how they win the game and in doing so they have to explore more deeply that narrative and the knowledge it contains or their visualization and the knowledge it represents one more thing is needed we need a focusing layer and that focusing layer has to take the form of something that brings together the efforts of different teachers so that they better mesh with each other and with the work of an institution and in that sense I have found that using a list of 21st century principles such as the one provided here by Miss rondelle week can provide exactly this type of focus exactly this type of a meshing so long as all the teachers and institution agree on two key things number one then any unit of instruction that they design using technology they will incorporate at least two or more of these principles as explicit design principles for what they do and number two that throughout the course of a year's instruction they will try to visit all of these principles in different combinations now not all nine of the principles you see here need to be in a single unit of instruction but over the course of a year you expect that online will have been represented to varying degrees in various units if you have those two elements then you have the necessary conditions for teachers to mesh their work together and for the institution to be transformed not just at the level of the individual classroom but at the level of teaching practice as a whole so that's it I hope that this brief introduction has provided you with a suitable framework for the work you're about to start with the excellent team at Lena I hope to be able to see you all in person soon until then best of luck with all your projects thank you