Bret Victor wrote an essay in 2012 that left me desperately wishing I were a computer engineer. “Learnable Programming” was a critique of 1) Khan Academy’s newly released intro course on programming, 2) the Processing language the course focused on, and 3) decades of stagnation in programming pedagogy. The essay was funny, visually stunning, provocative,… Read more »
Posts Categorized: edu tech
Design Thinking for Education Technology
I’ve got a new review up on EdSurge this week. Instead of a product review, it’s a long look at a big report on new ways of thinking about how to evaluate and develop education technologies. Here’s the opening: Late in December, the U.S Department of Education’s Office of Educational Technology dropped a 100-page draft… Read more »
Breaking: Technology Changes Perceptions of Time and Quality of Information!
An edtech teacher friend emailed to get my reaction to this recent NYT article on a survey of how teachers think technology is changing the way students learn. Since I typed up my reply and spellchecked it, I figured I’d share: My reactions: 1) Gee–these are essentially the same questions about how cheap information technology… Read more »
Solving Big Problems with Diversity and Interdisciplinarity
There’s research emerging that interdisciplinary founding teams are vital to creating successful startup companies. Within the education technology sphere, this is obvious to folks who have taught and are looking for engineering and business expertise to help them get their ideas scaled into products. But I don’t think that necessity of diverse startup teams stops… Read more »
Hi, I'm Andrew Plemmons Pratt. I am the Program Manager for New Classrooms in Washington, DC. (Though opinions expressed on this site are entirely my own.) I taught 7th-grade English in Prince George’s County, Maryland as a member of the 2010 Teach For America corps. I write about literacy & edtech here—along with stuff like industrial archeology and bread baking.