Two Minutes

Plugging into gadgets to teach

Scott McLeod has heard complaints from fellow educators that students are so plugged into their personal electronic devices they're tuning out everything else. If that's how students like to receive their information, says the Iowa State associate professor of educational leadership and policy studies, why not turn those devices into educational tools?

Tech king of CASTLE: McLeod co-directs the University Council for Education Administration's Center for the Advanced Study of Technology Leadership in Education. Funded by the U.S. Department of Education, the center turns school administrators into technological leaders using nationally recognized curricula and free resources.

Writing the book on effective education: McLeod serves on a team that's developing a federal "what works" publication on using technology in education.

Dangerously irrelevant ... not: To communicate with educators daily, McLeod created the blogs Dangerously Irrelevant and Leader Talk. They were two of the top 10 education blogs in the George Lucas Education Foundation's Edutopia Magazine. McLeod was also featured in the May 2008 Cable in the Classroom magazine cover story, "The Tech Evangelist."

-- Anne Kassel
McLeod

"I think it's increasingly clear that we're living in a world of multimedia. We can bemoan the decline in text, or we can teach kids how to master this new information environment -- and I think there's a role for that, both in school and at home."

Scott McLeod

McLeod is an associate professor of educational leadership and policy studies. More Two-Minute briefs.