Dot Learnt

Each month, the Virtual Roundtable Series sponsored by CISCO brings together distinguished education leaders to discuss observations, comments and ideas that are meant to transform education. During the week of February 20^th, the series hosted a roundtable on Social Media in Education – What’s Working and What’s Not.

Anna Batchelder, CEO and Co-Founder of Bon Education was invited to weigh in. Anna directed the conversation towards the use of social media as it relates to cross-cultural understanding, digital literacy and open education.

Alongside Anna, Dr. Ron Burnett, President and Vice-Chancellor at Emily Carr University of Art & Design addressed issues on social media and the philosophy of learning.  Judy O’Connell, lecturer at the School of Information Studies at Charles Stuart University exposed participants to e-learning, game-based learning, ICT in education and media literacy. (more…)

Time-lapse videos are a remarkably breathtaking, yet simple, use of technology. With a camera and a basic video-editing program, time-lapse representations can be created for, well, just about anything.

So how can time-lapse be used in the developing world?

Students in emerging markets are witnessing rapid growth on a near-daily basis. As cities, regions and countries launch into the global scene, infrastructure and lifestyles changes can transform the traditional landscape in a matter of months. Some worry that this rapid change is leading to a loss of culture and value structures in emerging populations. But time-lapse videos are a tool that can help to preserve local tradition and memory – while promoting digital literacy. (more…)

This holiday season, give your family the gift of digital literacy tutorials. Google has put together a wonderful site called teachparentstech.org, that allows users to send custom email gift cards with embedded technology tutorials (such as the one above) for free.

Whether mom needs to know the definition of a word, dad wants to figure out the live traffic or grandma wants to make a blog, there is a tutorial here for practically all of your family’s basic tech needs!

Happy holidays!

Anna

Recently I attended a live webcast of TEDxChange in Dubai. Broadcast from New York City and sponsored by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the event hosted a series of famous speakers that reflected on the world’s progress towards achieving the UN’s Millennium Development Goals (i.e., end poverty and hunger, universal education, global partnership, combat HIV/AIDS, etc.). After mentally chewing on the event for a couple of weeks, what keeps coming back to me is Melinda Gates’ praise of Coke:

“Coke is everywhere. In fact, when I travel in the developing world, Coke is ubiquitous! … We’re trying to deliver condoms to people or vaccinations… Coke’s success makes you stop and wonder—How is it that they can get Coke to these far flung places? If they can do that, why can’t governments and NGOs do the same thing? … They sell 1.5 billion servings every single day. That is like every man, woman and child have a serving of Coke every week”.

Melinda then went on to point out that much of Coke’s success is due to its use of real time data, ability to tap into local entrepreneurs and incredible marketing. First two success factors aside, for this post I want to think about marketing because when it comes to using marketing and helping kids understand the power of marketing, most schools and educational content companies completely miss the mark.

(more…)

How do we educate students about technology when technology is ever changing and always advancing?

In 1965, Intel Co-Founder Gordon Moore stated, “the number of transistors incorporated in a chip will approximately double every 24 months.” His statement set the pace for the growth of semi-conductor technology (computers getting faster and faster and smaller and smaller) for the next half century, and the exponential growth of new technologies shows no sign of dropping off. So what does it mean to educate students in a world where their future careers probably do not even exist yet? In the article Achieving Techno-Literacy, which appeared in the New York Times Magazine’s September Education issue, author Kevin Kelly offers some up some of the ‘technological smartness’ that he has been passing on to his children:

(more…)

Welcome to dot.Learnt—a group blog written and edited by members and guests of Bon Education.

Bon’s mission is to help schools, universities and organizations use digital technologies to achieve their learning goals. Therefore, we spend half of our time in the field working directly with educators, students and members of the private sector to build organizational digital literacy and robust online learning communities. The other half of our time is spent working with technology companies and publishers to create digital education products and curricula that reflect the needs and realities of the field.

Most of our work takes place in the Middle East, some of our work takes place in North America and a small amount of our work occurs in Asia. Therefore, this blog is a reflection of the thinking and learning we do while traveling and interacting with humans and technologies across the globe.

We welcome you to post comments, challenge our assumptions and explore with us.

Namaste.

Anna Batchelder

Chief Education Officer and co-Founder

Bon Education

@bon_education

Like what you read? Become a fan on Facebook.