Educational Technology

by Michael Gormley, Associated Press

A for-profit university operated by real estate mogul Donald Trump is being investigated by the New York Attorney General’s office. A spokesman for the Trump Entrepreneurial Initiative acknowledged receiving an inquiry from Attorney General Eric Schneiderman’s office and said the organization would cooperate with the probe. A person familiar with the situation tells The Associated Press that Schneiderman’s office is looking into clams that the developer and TV host exaggerated Trump University’s success. The person spoke on condition of anonymity because the probe hasn’t yet been made public. The person says Schneiderman is investigating four other for-profit schools in a case looking at deceptive business practices. He’s found more than a dozen credible complaints.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20110519/ap_on_re_us/us_trump_school_probe

by Denny Carter, eSchool News

Controversial blogger Andrew Breitbart might make college professors squeamish about recording their lectures. Breitbart has been accused of splicing web video before the University of Missouri incident. Web video purporting to show a University of Missouri-Kansas City (UMKC) lecturer advocating violence as a labor union tactic was deemed “highly distorted” by campus officials who reviewed the recording, which was posted last month by Breitbart, a conservative blogger with a track record of misleading, highly publicized videos.

http://www.eschoolnews.com/2011/05/19/recorded-lectures-take-on-new-risk-as-blogger-goes-after-teachers/

By Jenna Zwang, eSchool News

Sites like Wiggio and Sophia provide resources to make sharing information easier for all ages. As social networking and education become increasingly compatible, free websites like Wiggio and Sophia are working to strengthen this bond by providing additional tools for educators and students. Wiggio lets users form online groups and provides the tools to create private listservs and web addresses; manage events with a shared calendar; send eMail, text, and voice messages; and manage files in a shared folder. Sophia is a free social teaching and learning platform that offers academic content to anyone, free of charge. The website, which has been described as a mashup of Facebook, Wikipedia, and YouTube focused solely on education, also lets educators create a customized learning environment in a private or public setting.

http://www.eschoolnews.com/2011/05/19/free-websites-use-social-networking-tools-to-share-content/

By Audrey Watters, Read, Write Web

Having long wooed the educational market with its Apps for Education suite of productivity tools, Google is now poised to bring to students and teachers the hardware necessary to take full advantage of these Web-based apps and of the Web itself. Google’s Chromebooks for Education announcement at Google IO this morning could provide schools with a huge opportunity to equip their students with computers, at a $20 per student per month rate.

http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/will_chromebooks_for_education_be_a_good_deal_for.php?sms_ss=email&at_xt=4dcc37928b0ee439%2C0

by School CIO

Kineo, the seven-inch tablet and eBook Reader from Brainchild, has been shipped to ten states since being introduced at the Florida Educational Technology Conference in February. The Kineos being deployed are all equipped with Brainchild’s standards-based curriculum, Achiever!, and GlobalSYNC™ technology. “Kineo is an education-only tablet built for the ‘mission-critical’ environment in schools,” said Jeff Cameron, president of Brainchild. “A teacher cannot worry about bandwidth issues, screen freezes or free reign of the Internet. We have 16 years of experience in manufacturing handhelds and training teachers how to use standards-based curriculum. We’ve poured all of that experience into developing Kineo and GlobalSYNC.”

http://www.schoolcio.com/showarticle/39102

By Nancy Caramanico, CIO Advisor

Rewrite, add, delete, repeat. This is the cycle of school policies on technology. Or at least it should be. Policies need to adapt to the changing times. For School administrators and technology directors/CIO’s adapting to changing times is an important component to a strong leadership for educational technology use (Nets-A) It is the time of year when many schools are updating policies for the upcoming school year. Technology Polices are particularly susceptible to change. Quite simply, new technology forces us to re-imagine classroom environment with the innovations added in.

http://www.schoolcio.com/showarticle/39082

by Joanne Orlando, Sydney Morning Herald

We have the technology, now let’s focus on the main game: learning. The rhetoric of computer companies is that laptops in schools will transform how students are taught. Unfortunately, the federal government has succumbed to this rhetoric without thinking about the practicalities. Since the Rudd government launched its Digital Education Revolution, more than $400 million has been spent to provide every Year 9-12 student and teacher in government secondary schools with a laptop for the next four years. We were told laptops would revolutionise teaching methods and students would be learning the necessary skills to perform the jobs of the future. But like so many recent education policy announcements, things aren’t always as they seem.

http://www.smh.com.au/opinion/politics/free-laptops-all-very-well-but-how-best-to-use-them-in-testing-times-20110511-1eitv.html

By Tanya Roscorla, Converge

For almost two months, Shelton Tapley Jr. has been teaching families the skills they need to use the Internet. In the Natomas area of Sacramento, the bio-engineering major at Sacramento City College frequently works with residents of an apartment complex. “A lot of people would be scared to go into that complex, day or night, because of the way it looks,” Tapley said. “But once you get in there, they understand that you care, and they’re more inviting.”

http://www.convergemag.com/college-career/MESA-Students-Teach-Digital-Literacy-in-Community.html?elq=1b6ea6c5733c438683ff1e62f9f12aa9

By Tanya Roscorla, Converge

In Western Civilization class at The John Carroll School, freshmen grab plastic chairs from a stack against the wall, gather around the room in different areas and jump online with their tablet PCs. Using a class hashtag, they respond to questions that teacher Shelly Blake-Plock posts on Twitter. He projects their discussions on the classroom wall so that everyone can easily track what’s going on.

http://www.convergemag.com/edtech/How-to-Teach-with-Tech-Tools.html?elq=1b6ea6c5733c438683ff1e62f9f12aa9

By Tanya Roscorla, Converge

Across the country, schools announce iPad pilots, bring the mobile devices into the classroom and rave about their new tools. To figure out how this device impacts schools, we’ll take a look at pilot programs in two California schools and one Oregon school district. Keep reading to find out the technical and instructional implications of the iPad in the classroom.

http://www.convergemag.com/classtech/Impact-iPad-K12-Schools.html?elq=1b6ea6c5733c438683ff1e62f9f12aa9

By Converge

People have been proclaiming the death of paper for a long time. But that prediction has been exaggerated, Gartner Inc. research says. In the face-off between paper and screens, they’re almost equal when you measure how much time consumers read on each medium. Paper has a slight edge in this area, according to the report “Survey Analysis: Consumer Digital Reading Preferences Reveal the Exaggerated Death of Paper.”

http://www.convergemag.com/classtech/Gartner-Survey-Pits-Paper-v-Screen-Reading.html?elq=1b6ea6c5733c438683ff1e62f9f12aa9

by Dan Ackerman, CNet news.com

It’s hard to believe that before 2007, a low-cost laptop was one that came in under $1,000. But that was before the Netbook revolution kicked off, inspired by the Intel Classmate and the One Laptop Per Child XO, and spearheaded initially by Asus and its original Eee PC (which had a 7-inch display and ran Linux). From that point on, every PC maker was forced (some more reluctantly than others) to embrace this new subgenre, and Netbooks were everywhere. Until, like all fads, the Netbook burned out. Part of the reason was clearly Apple’s iPad, which became the new go-to entry-level computing device for people who either didn’t need or want a full PC, or just wanted a reasonably priced travel device for e-mail and Web surfing.

http://news.cnet.com/has-apples-ipad-finally-killed-the-netbook/8301-17938_105-20061085-1.html

BY ANDREW MYERS

At the MobiSocial Lab, an engineering research team asks fundamental questions about the marriage of mobile communications and social networking, and begins to design the future of open-source social networking. In a YouTube video, two Stanford graduate students stand together in front of a television. One draws with his finger on his smartphone, then holds it next to the second student’s phone. The drawing zips from one phone to the next. The first student then touches his phone to a television remote control and the image soon appears on a nearby TV. Then the second student begins to draw. His flourishes are duplicated pixel-for-pixel in real time on both the TV and the first phone. This is the world of MobiSocial – a glimpse into the future of mobile-social computing.

http://news.stanford.edu/news/2011/may/mobisocial-050911.html

by the Times of India

A new study has found that virtual possessions – digital imagery, Facebook updates, online music collections, e-mail threads and other immaterial artifacts of today’s online world – have a powerful hold on teenagers. In a study of 21 teenagers, researchers at Carnegie Mellon’s Human-Computer Interaction Institute (HCII) and School of Design discovered that the very fact that virtual possessions don’t have a physical form may actually enhance their value.

http://articles.timesofindia.indiatimes.com/2011-05-10/parenting/29527565_1_digital-photo-researchers-study

by Gregory M. Lamb, Christian Science Monitor

British game developer David Braben is showing off a working prototype of a tiny, thumb-sized computer that he says can be sold at $25 per unit. The nonprofit group Raspberry Pi is aiming the inexpensive device at less affluent school children and others who would benefit from having an ultra-small, ultra-cheap computer available to them. In an announcement on its website Raspberry Pi explained: “We plan to develop, manufacture, and distribute an ultra-low-cost computer, for use in teaching computer programming to children. We expect this computer to have many other applications both in the developed and the developing world.

http://www.csmonitor.com/World/Making-a-difference/Change-Agent/2011/0509/A-nonprofit-thinks-small-a-25-computer-the-size-of-a-thumb

By Morgan Day, North Canton Patch

Monday was a different kind of day for Hoover High School sophomore Morgan Landy. She arrived at school with a laptop computer in tow, something she normally doesn’t do. And she was able to use that technology in her Spanish class at the encouragement of her teacher. “Bring Your Own Technology is one of those options to say, ‘Hey, this could be a way to get newer technology into the school district,'” said Eric Curts, technology director for North Canton City Schools. “So that’s one of the reasons we’re looking at it.”

http://northcanton.patch.com/articles/bring-your-own-technology-pilot-program-keeps-internet-at-fingertips-of-hoover-high-students

by Alyson Shontell, San Francisco Chronicle

In 2007, Stanford professor B.J. Fogg encouraged his class to create Facebook apps for homework assignments. The resulting 31 apps became bigger successes than anyone could have predicted. Together, the class of 75 students created applications that were used by 16 million people. Some of the students made so much money that they dropped out of school. Others went on to create Facebook-based businesses, and sold them for millions of dollars.

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/g/a/2011/05/09/businessinsider-these-stanford-students-made-millions-taking-a-class-on-facebook-2011-5.DTL

by Ken Heinick, WSLS

Students at St. Paul School in Carroll County have seen iPods take the place of textbooks since December. Kellie Worrell, a 7th grade math teacher who helped spearhead the effort to wean students off textbooks, has taken technology in the classroom a step further. “The students love the iPods. They seem more engaged. So, I wanted to try and convert my worksheets to an ‘app,’” said Worrell. “It makes it better, and easier to understand,” said student Coby Busick. Worrell partnered with a programmer to create the new app “BrainStars,” because of what she says is a lack of “apps” for middle school students.

http://www2.wsls.com/news/2011/may/09/carroll-county-math-teacher-creates-ipod-touch-app-ar-1027357/

By Rick Nauert, Psych Central

A new international study suggests online social networking sites like Facebook can not only help students get into the academic and social swing of things in college — it can also boost learning. Researchers in China and Hong Kong said the finding that such sites can benefit learning and academics is a novel one, and underscores the need for academic institutions to be creative and resourceful in how they utilize social networking sites. In the study, authors found as many as 90 percent of college students use Facebook, with some universities now using it for orientation as well as encouraging students to develop new friends.

http://psychcentral.com/news/2011/05/10/using-facebook-to-get-better-grades/26042.html

by Rodney Gedda, CIO

Australia’s federal trade development agency, Austrade, will move 130 online courses to a new learning management system (LMS) hosted in the Cloud. Austrade has a large database of training and learning material which it is looking to move to a service provider outside the agency. According to Austrade, the new system must be a single integrated solution that incorporates comprehensive learning, performance and career management functionality with social collaboration features. And it must be “externally hosted”. Austrade follows another federal government agency, the Civil Aviation Safety Authority (CASA), which is doing an e-learning project this year. A key requirement of the new Cloud e-learning system is the ability to migrate historical data from the “legacy LMS and performance management” system.

http://www.cio.com.au/article/385932/austrade_move_e-learning_cloud/?fp=4&fpid=12

By Yelena Levina, Pipe Dream News

“The issue here is academic integrity,” said Jennifer Jensen, an associate dean of Harpur College. “We know many students would not violate rules during exams — but we need to ensure that all students are following exam rules and not using online materials or consulting with one another. Web proctoring is an effective and efficient way to do this during an online course.” Kate Flatley, Student Association vice president of academic affairs-elect, said the Harpur College Dean’s office informed her that Harpur College professors can opt to use ProctorU this summer, and that the service could eventually become mandatory for all online classes. She opposes the new requirement and is working to prevent its implementation.

http://www2.bupipedream.com/news/webcam-proctors-raise-questions-of-privacy-1.2225603