Educational Technology

by PhysOrg.com

UT Dallas computer scientist Yang Liu has received a three-year, $350,000 grant from the highly competitive Air Force Office of Scientific Research’s Young Investigator Research Program to explore emotion recognition and modeling in speech processing. “The next-generation human-computer interaction interfaces will be more human-centered and socially intelligent,” Liu said. “They’ll have the ability to detect changes in the user’s affective behavior and thus initiate interactions accordingly.  Automatic recognition of emotion plays an important role in developing future intelligent systems.”

http://www.physorg.com/news190455033.html

By Denise Harrison, Campus Technology

What does Scott Walker, a 20-year veteran of AV in higher education, have against lecture halls? Campus Technology spoke to him to find out. We need to plan for different infrastructures. One example is that the analog VGA port is going away. The analog VGA port will be replaced by DisplayPort on the computer side, and DVI and HDMI for other content sources. So our systems simply have to accept that signal type in some form. This is a seismic shift because these are digital versus analog, and you can convert from digital to analog to a point, but not when you are dealing with digital content copyrights.

http://campustechnology.com/articles/2010/04/14/state-of-av-in-education.aspx

By Lauren DiSpirito, 13 WMAZ

As educators across Central Georgia and the nation look for ways to improve student achievement, some students at Macon State College in Macon got the chance to put their ideas to the test.  About 75 seniors in the college’s School of Education presented their findings Tuesday at the Action Research Gala, after researching topics in education, including how to use new technology in the classroom. Students Elizabeth Jones and Kristie Finch, who served as student-teachers at an elementary school in Warner Robins, taught fourth and fifth graders multiplication using computer games. They say after two weeks, the students improved their scores on a math test by nearly 20 percent.

http://www.13wmaz.com/news/local/story.aspx?storyid=77623&catid=153

By Sarah Juon, Rhinelander Daily News

For schools, the question is how to prevent bullying and when it does happen, what is the most effective way to prevent it from happening again? “Today, bullying is even more insidious because of technology and how the kids use it,” says George Risberg, the Rhinelander school district coordinator of a $1.2 million HODAGS (Helping Others Develop Assets to Grow and Succeed) grant. “You have cell phones and texting, the computer with Facebook and instant messaging, all of which makes it more difficult to deal with.”

http://www.rhinelanderdailynews.com/articles/2010/04/17/news/doc4bc91e695aa7c210863779.txt

by Jane Howard, Sunday Herald Sun

One of Geelong Grammar’s five campuses, Timbertop is in a remote location at Mansfield in the foothills of the Victorian Alps. While the school sees computer skills as vital, for one character-building year hi-tech gadgets and social networking are off-limits to students. “Separation from television, telephones, emails, DVDs and computer games creates a radical new silence, which our students convert to writing and reading letters and to conversation,” the school prospectus states.

http://www.heraldsun.com.au/news/web-ban-is-tweet-relief/story-e6frf7jo-1225854946424

by Angela Mulholland, CTV.ca News

What might be most surprising about Jason Mitschele is not that he’s blind and works as a federal prosecutor — though that is impressive. It’s that he’s blind and can’t read braille. And neither can most vision-impaired people in Canada. In fact, less than 10 per cent of Canada’s 830,000 vision impaired people can read braille. That’s the rate found in surveys from the U.S. and the United Kingdom — a startling statistic, especially since most sighted people assume all blind people learn to read through their fingertips.

http://www.ctv.ca/servlet/ArticleNews/story/CTVNews/20100416/future_braille_100417/20100417?hub=SciTech

By Cathy Nelson, Detroit Free Press

The problem — and it’s no secret to many parents — is that gaming can affect grades. A negative correlation between recreational video game playing and grades has been well-established by two decades of research, according to a 2004 study that appeared in the Journal of Adolescence. A Denison University study that appeared this year in Psychological Science found that owning a video game system hampered academic development in boys between the ages of 6 and 9, significantly lowering their reading and writing scores after only four months with the system.  For students, the distractions run deeper than video games, says Michele Ondersma, a child clinical psychologist and head of student support services at University Liggett School in Grosse Pointe Woods.

http://www.freep.com/article/20100418/FEATURES14/4180323/1218/Features/How-to-study-in-a-tech-filled-world

By Randall Stross, NY Times

One Laptop Per Child is a nonprofit group that thinks big. Since 2007, it has sold inexpensive but rugged laptop computers to the governments of less-developed countries. The goal is to equip each of the two billion children in the developing world with his or her own computer. It’s been slow going. About 1.6 million of the group’s laptops have been distributed to date, said Matt Keller, vice president for global advocacy at the O.L.P.C. Foundation, based in Cambridge, Mass. Today, the largest concentrations are in Uruguay, at around 400,000, and Peru, at 280,000, followed by Rwanda (110,000) and Haiti and Mongolia (15,000 each).

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/18/business/18digi.html?src=busln

by Melissa Garzanelli, Web Times

Andy Allen, library director for the Community Unit 2 School District, which includes schools in Serena, Sheridan and Harding, said his job description includes keeping up to speed on how to use technology in the classroom and being able to help with research.  “Our library has technology as part of the budget,” he said. “Part of my job is to help students and teachers use these programs … It’s hard to keep pace with what is going on.”  Kathy Parker, librarian at both Seneca High and Seneca Elementary schools, agreed learning to use technology is a big part of the job.

http://mywebtimes.com/archives/ottawa/display.php?id=401982

by Dr. Larry Dossey, the Huffington Post

Jeremy Rifkin, the author of the just-published book The Empathic Civilization: The Race to Global Consciousness in a World in Crisis, suggests that The Age of Reason is being eclipsed by the Age of Empathy. Today, young people see the world in a different way than their parents, who often cannot understand why their children are always glued to their BlackBerries in an orgy of talking, texting and tweeting. While their parents value individualism and privacy, today’s youngsters view connectivity, interaction and collaboration as everything. And forget privacy; for them, being out of touch is a cardinal sin.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/dr-larry-dossey/is-technology-making-chil_b_537205.html

by Duncan Alfreds, News 24

A global technology in education conference is underway in Cape Town and organisers want more teachers to have access to new technology. “The history of South Africa has created a lack of access in education, and particularly, low quality of education,” organiser Nancy Knowlton of Smart Technologies told News24.  She said the conference was organised in SA because individual countries had regional differences and “people further down the adoption line” could show how technology had impacted in classrooms in other parts of the world. “Before you can implement technology in classrooms, you need basic pre-conditions and a level of infrastructure to facilitate it,” she said. “There are people in Mexico who use our smart boards under a tree. They store it in a shed and use it with a generator during the day.”

http://www.news24.com/SciTech/News/Education-needs-technology-20100415

By Carter Rogers, Tufts Daily

Two universities are offering iPads to all incoming freshmen, but there are catches.   Apple’s new iPad tablet computer has been on the market for little more than a week, but that hasn’t stopped Seton Hill University, a Catholic liberal arts school in Greensburg, Pa., from making the device a key part of the school’s future. Starting this fall, the university will be giving all incoming freshmen an Apple iPad.  Seton Hill is promoting the initiative so heavily that if users type www.setonhill.edu into their Web browsers, they will be taken straight to a page promoting the free iPad initiative.

http://www.tuftsdaily.com/universities-claim-they-see-classroom-potential-in-the-ipad-1.2225085

by Mark Leland, Fox 11

by John P. Martin, Philadelphia Inquirer

the Next Web

After Office 2007, Microsoft didn’t have to come up with something radical for the next version of their Office suite. This allowed Redmond to refine the product and add features that would suit the growing global needs. Users are not restricted to their desk anymore and the Office team realizes this. With services such as Zoho and Google Docs providing anywhere access to documents, Microsoft is leveraging their Office Suite along with Office Web Apps to compete. Here’s a list of some Office 2010 features to enhance your user experience.

http://thenextweb.com/microsoft/2010/04/24/office-2010-collaborate-share-socialize/