S2E5: Becky Lim and Matt Rhoads on EdTech and Global Collaborations

This is a lovely episode that I recorded towards the end of the summer featuring two of my favorite people in education and edutwitter, Becky Lim and Dr. Matthew Rhoads.

Becky and Matt are enthusiastic about the potential for edtech in the classroom, and in this episode they share some of their strategies for developing teaching staff so that they may enhance their instruction through technology tools. As the Director of Educational Technology and a design technology teacher in previous schools, I share some of Becky and Matt’s optimism about the potential for technology to make teaching more effective and efficient. Although, I have to admit, I’m a bit less optimistic these days than I was in the past. I think the evidence for the superiority of explicit teaching over discovery learning is pretty solid, but edtech entrepreneurs seem hellbent on convincing us that their new flashy tool will allow students to learn independently, and in increasingly unstructured ways. This reason, coupled with the fact that I regularly hear edtech gurus telling me that teaching content isn’t important, for students can just Google everything, has led me to gradually deemphasize technology in my work, although I still think it can be a helpful tool to teachers when used purposefully.

Becky and Matt not only appreciated this perspective when they read my snarky tweets on Twitter, but they asked me to write a chapter about integrating edtech with evidence-informed assessment and feedback strategies for the newly released book, Amplifying Instructional Design: A Global Collaborative, which is linked below. I also encourage you to check out the livestream recording I did with Becky and Matt a while back, right below the book, where I describe my assessment and feedback chapter in greater detail. Enjoy!