Educational Technology

By Dian Schaffhauser, Campus Technology

Blackboard is expanding its footprint in the services and support arena with the purchase of Presidium, a company that provides call center support services to hundreds of higher education clients. Presidium offers three lines: call services for front office and technical support, process improvement, and managed technology for moving applications online. That service has included support for multiple institutional applications, including Blackboard Learn. As a result of the acquisition, Blackboard said it will now be able to help customers with recruitment and enrollment of students, assessment of financial aid eligibility and disbursement of awards, student registration and advising, and development of retention programs and degree completion efforts.

http://campustechnology.com/articles/2011/01/13/blackboard-buys-higher-ed-support-firm-presidium.aspx

By Dian Schaffhauser, Campus Technology

Microsoft has shared additional details for its next generation of Live@edu. Named Office 365, the set of cloud-based applications adds additional collaboration and communication components and is scheduled to appear in the second half of 2011. The company has also announced expected pricing. The announcement came during BETT, a UK-based education conference taking place this week in London. Along with Office applications, Office 365 will incorporate Exchange, SharePoint, and Lync. This last is Microsoft’s latest edition of its communication server technology, which integrates “presence” and communication via voice, video, and application sharing.

http://campustechnology.com/articles/2011/01/11/microsofts-liveatedu-to-morph-into-office-365.aspx

By Bridget McCrea, Campus Technology

Leaders in higher education IT departments shared their technology plans for 2011 with Campus Technology. Despite predictions of flat IT budgets, their organizations are taking on ambitious projects and actually continuing to beef up services for faculty and students, moving into app development, shoring up wireless infrastructure, virtualizing servers and desktops, and experimenting with newer mobile platforms.

http://campustechnology.com/articles/2011/01/13/the-2011-it-agenda-in-higher-ed-3-perspectives.aspx

By Charlene O’Hanlon, THE Journal

K-12’s tendency toward slow adoption isn’t all bad. It allows schools to draw from the experiences of colleges and universities, which have come to function as a proving ground for classroom devices. Care has to be taken when relating technology’s use in college and university lecture halls to the way it’s applied in K-12 classrooms. To some degree, what happens in higher ed stays in higher ed. Differences in pedagogy, learning styles, and even attendance can impact the way the respective students in the two environments consume technology, which in turn impacts the technology’s effectiveness as a learning tool. In higher education, for example, classes are large–some lectures can have as many as 200 students–and attendance is often not mandatory. Technology, as such, is viewed more as a utility than a perk.

http://thejournal.com/articles/2010/11/01/trickle-down-technology-tech-lessons-learned-from-higher-ed.aspx

by THE Journal

Incorporating video or online games into instructional activities continues to gain acceptance, as game makers produce increasingly sophisticated products–such as virtual world environments (see “Next Stop, OpenSim!”)–that pose many benefits for teaching and learning. Below, secondary school students identify many positive effects of bringing gaming into the classroom. About six out of 10 middle school students think the use of games would help them understand difficult concepts. Greater engagement in subject matter is gaming’s most widely seen benefit among high school students. At both the middle school and high school levels, connecting the real world to the subject matter received the fewest responses.

http://thejournal.com/articles/2011/01/11/drill-down-gaming-in-education.aspx

by Maria MAHERIDOU, et al; TOJDE

Teachers to be able to respond to their responsibilities over time cannot be sufficient equipped by the undergraduate curriculum. It is required constant informing on developments in both their subject matter and the science of education, updating their knowledge (Creed & Perraton, 2001). In Greece, educational training programs carried out mainly in the capitals of prefectures and as a result, teachers of all specialties confront the difficulty of access to them (Emmanouilidou, Antoniou & Derri, 2010; Papadouris, 2001). Moreover, the shortage of resources for conventional approaches to continuing education, and the capacity of distance approaches to reach scattered or large audiences, has led to its extensive use for teachers’ continuing education (Creed & Perraton, 2001).Although continuing professional development is characterized by a diversification of provision, in terms of programmes’ types, duration, management, technology to deliver the educational material, feedback issues, it is an area in which distance education can play a significant role.

http://tojde.anadolu.edu.tr/tojde41/articles/article_4.htm

by Jessica Scott, The Grand Rapids Press

An increasingly digital world has pushed school districts to incorporate more technology into the learning process. Students tap the Internet to do everything from researching assignments to collaborating with classmates on projects. But while the “digital divide” is narrowing, it hasn’t closed in urban and rural communities. One-third of U.S. households has no Internet access. Those families look to public libraries and school media centers as resources for their children.

http://www.mlive.com/news/grand-rapids/index.ssf/2010/12/grand_rapids_students_caught_i.html

by Linda Sadlouskos, Basking Ridge Patch

Ridge High School already has been offering free online courses on a pilot basis for the past year and a half. That course list was made available to students who wanted advanced or unusual courses that wouldn’t likely be offered at a public high school, such as very advanced math or language classes. The more limited classes offered this year through Virtual High School will be folded into a much larger program, Educere, for which the school district will be charged nothing for adding to its curriculum. The new program will allow students even to take their required courses online, after obtaining the approval. One of the most popular online offerings is expected to be a half-year course on personal finance that is a state requirement for graduation. Students then would be able to fill the second half of the year either with an elective, possibly online, or a study hall.

http://baskingridge.patch.com/articles/online-courses-open-opportunities-for-students-could-save-money-for-schools

by Daniel Nugent-Bowman, Your Ottawa Region

A Grade 10 computer science class from Mother Teresa High School has teamed up with a group of elementary school children in order to create a new interactive learning tool. The 20 students from Patrick Coxall’s class have been to St. Luke Elementary School three times and will return once more in January before getting the chance to show off the final project to in early February. Working in small groups with the younger children, the goal of the high schoolers has been to learn the Grade 3 curriculum and then design math, English and French educational programs that they be turn into an application for an iPhone or iPod Touch.

http://www.yourottawaregion.com/news/local/article/924351–students-team-up-to-create-interactive-education-program

By Dave Murray, The Grand Rapids Press

First, no one I spoke to thought online education would be a job-killer. There are certainly NovaNet programs used by some area schools where a student sits down in front of a computer and works his way through, with a teacher answering questions if needed. But most of the experts told me the most effective online programs are the “blended” efforts, where students perform some of the work online but still meet regularly with teacher, both face-to-face and over the Internet. And experts said online learning does not work well with all learners and even all teachers. They recommended that, at least for now, online should be one option. But I don’t think anyone can dispute that the Internet has change virtually everything we do and in ways we could not have imagined. Why would education be any different?

http://www.mlive.com/news/grand-rapids/index.ssf/2011/01/are_virtual_classrooms_a_fad_a.html

By Tanya Roscorla, Classroom Technology

As school libraries lose funding and staff, they’re looking for ways to help people understand what they do and how it impacts student learning. And in an age where digital literacy and information access skills reign, the librarian plays an important role, said Mary Barbee, coordinator of media services and technology training at Gwinnett County Public Schools in Suwanee, Ga. Each school in the district has certified librarians and paraprofessionals in the media center.

http://www.convergemag.com/classtech/School-Libraries-Digital-Literacy.html

by Converge

The Win a Wireless Lab sweepstakes

Who: Public and private school teachers, administrators, school technology specialists and district employees

What: Ninth-annual sweepstakes awards three grand prizes of 21st-century classrooms from CDW-G and Discovery Education. Some of the prizes include a $5,000 digital media grant from Discovery Education, 20 notebook or tablet computers, and three wireless access points.

The Follett Challenge

Who: Private and public school librarians who actively champion an information literacy-based school program for students

What: A contest that awards prizes to school libraries that do the best job of applying technology, content and creativity in ways that engage students and foster literacy and critical thinking.

http://www.convergemag.com/classtech/2-Contests-Offer-Technology-Prizes.html

By Seth Augenstein, The Star-Ledger

With a simple touch, Marc Rader knows what comes next in his day. The 13-year old taps the tablet computer screen, and a picture of the kitchen sink pops up, accompanied by his mother’s voice. “Wash your hands,” the recording says. A video pops up demonstrating the soap-lather-rinse routine, and he goes across the apartment to the sink and mimics it under the stream of the tap. Then, he rushes back to the screen where more chores pop up — setting the table for dinner, starting the microwave, vacuuming the floor, brushing his teeth. The basic “app” is specifically tailored by his tutor to guide him through his nightly ritual: one touch, a task, a next step, and a video reminder.

http://www.nj.com/news/index.ssf/2011/01/apple_ipad_itouch_may_help_peo.html

by the San Francisco Chronicle

At the beginning of the decade, most people would have predicted that schools would be using computers and technology in ways that enhanced student achievement and learning. Today, at the end of a decade that has seen an enormous expansion in the use of technology in everyday life, schools are still using computers in much the same way that they were at the start of the decade. More classrooms have computers; more schools have computer labs; but curriculum development has not kept pace with the interconnected, social nature of today’s Internet. Even as students text, access YouTube and update Facebook on their mobile phones, their classroom computers block access to most of those same services. Teaching students to be smart consumers of sometimes unreliable Internet data and careful stewards of their personal information is of paramount importance for the next decade, but it’s not clear that schools are up to the task.

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/blogs/rnorton/detail?entry_id=80163

B.A. Morelli, Iowa City Press-Citizen

Advances in technology are helping expand and improve the quality of distance education in Iowa. Today, the virtual distance education classroom includes automatic voice- and motion-activated 360-degree or double-mount video cameras, and software that presents visual, audio, slideshow presentations, real-time instructor notes and personal space for student notes on the student’s desktop computer screen. “The teacher can walk around the room and the camera follows,” said Ron Kral, University of Iowa’s instructional development and Web services manager. Some of UI’s high-tech classrooms have about $25,000 worth of technology in them.

http://www.press-citizen.com/article/20110103/NEWS01/101030307/Technology-improving-distance-learning

by Martin Bryant, the Next Web

Automattic‘s WordPress.com, the commercially run leg of the popular blogging platform is growing incredibly fast, according to its latest statistics. Automattic tells us that it has seen over 6 million new blogs sign up in the past year and that total pageviews for the year stood at 23 billion, up an impressive 53% from 2009. Media uploads also doubled to 94.5 terabytes of new photos and videos, while new posts were up 110% to 146 million. Meanwhile, mobile WordPress blogging is on the up. The company’s userbase for its mobile apps increased 700% to 1.4 million in 2010.

http://goo.gl/F1HIy

by Courtney Boyd Myers, the Next Web

Announced recently, the state of Vermont, located in the Northeast corner of the United States, is best known for its snowy mountains, delicious ice cream and Phish-loving hippies. The state is making notable headway to improve its economy by launching the “e-Vermont Community Broadband Project”, which will bring broadband and education to 12 rural communities. The e-Vermont Community Broadband Project received federal stimulus funds to encourage broadband use in rural areas. As part of the project, not only will the towns receive broadband Internet but they will also receive digital tools and in-depth Internet training like ways to take full advantage of the Internet for creating jobs and innovative schools, providing social services, and increasing community connection. A few of the communities include Bridgewater, Calais, Castleton, Dover, Fairfield, Hardwick, Jay/Westfield, Middletown Springs, Moretown and Morristown, Vermont

http://goo.gl/BoDQY

by the Next Web

Kevin Rose? Yes. Kevin Rose. The Digg creator posted on his blog tonight that, apparently, he has some inside information about the iPad 2. What he doesn’t tell us is his source, which isn’t very surprising. What he did tell us is, essentially, what we already knew: Now, I said essentially. The reason for that? We postulated, back in late November, that the refresh would actually come in January. We were told that Apple had 2 events to be held in the first quarter of 2011, and we figured that an iPad refresh in January would likely fit the timeline. In fact, that thing about the display? Digitimes talked about that in November as well. Though we’re still fairly certain that it won’t be a true Retina Display, you can almost bet on something that will run 720p video in full resolution.

http://goo.gl/udCRG

By Scott Aronowitz, Campus Technology

A report published by the Blackboard Institute has identified several ways in which educators can best encourage high school students, especially those from underrepresented groups, to pursue higher education. The report, entitled “Closing the Gap between High School and College,” is based upon one-on-one interviews with 24 recognized experts in education theory and practice. Among the interviewees for the report, the top strategy identified for motivating students to invest themselves in planning for higher education was exposing them to the college learning experience, specifically by offering and strongly encouraging enrollment in accelerated learning, advanced placement (AP), and international baccalaureate (IB) classes and programs.

http://campustechnology.com/articles/2011/01/07/report-technology-one-key-to-preparing-students-for-college.aspx

Nominations are now open for our 7th annual Innovators awards.

We seek exemplary colleges and universities, their visionary technology project leadership, and their innovative vendor partners who have deployed extraordinary campus technology solutions to campus challenges. Is your innovative technology project a model for others to follow? Entry deadline: Feb. 15. Entries will be reviewed by our Innovators Judging Committee of higher ed tech leaders, many of whom are former Campus Technology Innovators award winners. Final winners will be selected by our expert team of editors.

Winners will be recognized with:

A special feature in our August issue and on our website

Award ceremony at the Campus Technology 2011 conference in Boston, MA, July 25-28, 2011.

1 free registration to Campus Technology 2011 for the project lead

Discounted registration for project team members

Other special recognition for vendor partners and project contributors

http://campustechnology.com/articles/2011/01/06/2011-innovators-call-for-entries.aspx

By Bridget McCrea, Campus Technology

In an attempt to protect its computer network, Dominican University spent years looking for the right security solution. The Illinois university’s new approach, spurred by a virus outbreak originating in the residence halls, validates all computers attempting to connect to the network and requires students to view an approve the school’s computer security policy.

http://campustechnology.com/articles/2011/01/06/taking-command-of-the-campus-network.aspx