John Cano

Fostering Digital Citizenship is crucial in the XXI century. The current education system is not completely responding to this need, and it is necessary to design experiences across the curriculum to help students to become digital citizens. One of the components of becoming a digital citizen is to be able to use technology in an ethical way. This is, being able to communicate properly in online contexts, being careful to be respectful and mindful of other people's beliefs, ideas, cultural background and point of views of a particular topic. Online hate has become a critical issue in our society and one of the main reason this is happening is because the lack of ability to tolerate or respect opinions or ideologies different than ours. For this reason, I can think of some opportunities that can be executed inside and outside of classroom contexts to help students develop this abilities. Designed by Freepik Creating Personal Learning Environments through LMS Creating a Pe

--> The Augmented Reality (AR) Sandbox is a tool created by researchers at the University of California, Davis. In this sandbox, “the sand is augmented in real-time with an elevation color map, topographic contour lines, and simulated water” ( Augmented Reality Sandbox Website ). After exploring some of the possibilities that this tools has to offer for educational purposes, I thought about how this could be used for other purposes and also how, in general, Augmented Reality could be implemented for other purposes. The AR Sandbox in use at UCLA It would be nice for this AR Sandbox to be adapted to their location (this would imply personalized programming depending where it is being used) to show which animals can live and which plants can grow based on the natural conditions (e.g. weather, humidity, altitude). This addition could bring even more opportunities to this tool to be implemented and used in different subject matters or courses in schools or higher

Talking about digital media as a tool to support teaching and learning is not new nowadays. The single fact of including technologies in the teaching process will not imply that we are innovating in our classrooms or teaching environments (face-to-face, online, blended). We could could transform the whole student experience using simple tools as PowerPoint, but we can also use it just to replace a blackboard (which is okay, but it'd be the same than before just using a different tool). What digital technologies could help with, is bringing a great variety of possibilities to change the classroom experience and transform it into a constructivist, unique and student-driven one. This, of course, will imply some changes in educators' mindset. Changing the paradigm of teaching, giving students the chance to become "the main characters of the movie", where questions and students' interests are taken into consideration in the curriculum design. Image  Designed b

There are many educational approaches related to how educators should teach in order to promote a meaningful learning in their students. It is still common to see that many educators stick to the idea that their knowledge means power in classroom settings, where no doubt is allowed since the one who can ask the question is the professor. Technologies have brought new ways of writing and communication. All Internet users, despite their background or profile, are able to add more information in the cloud (Internet). Every single day, the amount of information uploaded to Internet is massive and, as users, it is impossible to embrace it. This information is being created by different type of users, for multiple purposes (connect with other people, communicate an idea, marketing, fun, debate about a topic, share new academic content/research findings, news, trending content, among others) and in a diversity of formats (images, texts, videos, audio, etc.). If we put these co

Time goes by very fast and so are the “trends”. Our society is facing a very fast-paced lifestyle, where technology is all around us. For better or for worst, people rely on technology to do everyday tasks (organizing a schedule/calendar, writing, saving personal information, cooking, streaming/downloading/uploading multimedia from Internet, among many others) and current generations are used to it. We do not need to go 10 years in the future from now to identify many challenges that we may be facing in our world and the educational area is the one of those that need to be prepared to face the current (and fast) changes brought by technology. The 21st Century demands educators with a new mindset: willing to become lifelong learners and innovators. Teaching must become a space of sharing and constructing the skills that are needed today and, also, that will be needed in the future (critical thinking, problem solving, etc.). Educators need to embrace technology as a main ally