Colleagues,
We often talk about the benefits of technology in learning for students in the classroom and for educators involved in professional development. Recently, I've had conversations with colleagues on the pros and cons of smartpens. These pens can record what you hear, say, and write and links your notes to your computer. You can replay audio directly from paper by tapping on your notes. What do you think about smartpens in your classroom for students, or for you in your professional development classes? What privacy concerns do these pens bring forward?
The second 'newish' idea is bringing voice technology devices like Amazon Alexa, Google Home, and Apple's Siri in the classroom. What do you think? Can either of these devices aid in your classroom or in your professional development?
I'd love to hear your thoughts.
Sincerely,
Kathy Tracey
Comments
I love smart pens, but oh, I'd feel like I had to sneak it into a class (I've used it at meetings while showing it off to all present). I would love being able ot hear the lecture again... to tap at just the right place as I can w/ the meeting notes... but feel like a teacher would be "I don't think so!" ... tho' lectures do get recorded, so I think it would be fine if everybody k new about it.
Alexa? Not in my house. That's just too huge an invasion of privacy and I don't know *where* my data is going. And if the "smartpen" is too smart -- mine just recorded, it didn't talk to "The cloud" -- I don't want that either.
A chunk of technology that I'm exploring right now is speech recognition. https://pub.lucidpress.com/2f091482-82da-44a9-b8da-0f9c52f81482/#kDXU0y0swYzB (it can be downloaded as PDF) goes into tons of detail on getting past how to use the software and into how to use it for actual writing for school, in K-12 settings. I had an instructor come by yesterday distressed because "none of my students can type! It's taking them forevver!" Now, I'm reasonably confident there are other issues, too... but we talked about speech recognition... but that no, it really doesn't lend itself to whole-class training for a host of reasons but I brought it up at a staff meeting and one of our coach/advisors wants to explore training our "student mentor" team so that they can then train students.
If anybody else out there's interested we could collaborate madly :) When I get to the part where we use outliners and organization tools it makes me want to run back to making math lessons though :-)