Educational Technology

By Sandy Fitzgerald, Newsmax

Pennsylvania Democratic Sen. Bob Casey says the nation’s students aren’t prepared for the more than 140,000 computer science jobs that become available every year, so he is pushing for a bill requiring U.S. schools to make computer courses part of their core curricula. “We’re not getting enough young people involved in this course of study,” Casey said Tuesday during a rollout of the Computer Science Education Act. According to the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, Casey spoke at the Pittsburgh Science and Technology Academy, a public magnet school. Casey, who introduced the bill, said the Senate will probably debate the issue in upcoming weeks, with lawmakers working on a rewrite of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act. The computer bill offers grants to states and schools to help them expand their high school computer science offerings.

http://www.newsmax.com/TheWire/computer-courses-directive/2011/11/02/id/416512

by Deborah Mcdermott, Seacoast Online

Cyberbullying is “a problem we deal with all the time,” Superintendent of Schools Henry Scipione said. “Anyone who tells you differently is not telling you the truth.” With that in mind, the School Committee is looking into whether its existing bullying policy is sufficient to deter this technological version of the age-old problem. Cyberbullying is a means by which students use computers, cell phones or other technologies to bully fellow students. The question that school committees and administrators grapple with is: to what extent should the school be responsible if the incident happens outside of school hours?

http://www.seacoastonline.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20111102/NEWS/111020362/-1/NEWSMAP

by the University of Northern Iowa

The CIRG has created a system where students can use their android-based smart phone to collectively respond to questions posted by the teacher. The class results are synthesized and may be projected for the class to see and discuss. Through the discussion, students are encouraged to revise their answers until a consensus is reached. Some of the future goals for the project include refinement of the response system, exploration of additional collaborative features and understanding the domain-specific applications. Each area of study comes with a unique way of completing certain tasks, and the group is learning how this technology can be adapted to best serve individual subject areas.

http://www.uni.edu/newsroom/uni-research-group-works-to-close-the-gap-between-smart-phones-and-the-classroom

By Chris Harlow, the Bolt

After severing ties with technology for an entire day, senior Chris Harlow recharges his spirits with his numerous electronic devices. Harlow was assigned a day “off the grid” after neglecting to pay attention to his journalism teacher. Technology is my passion. It is also my addiction. Rather, my incessant need for information is my addiction. Technology just feeds my craving. How did I become aware of this problem? I went “off the grid.” On Sunday, Oct. 23, 2011, I turned off my iPhone, shut down my MacBook Pro and unplugged the TV. I spent an entire day without technology — without the distractions of Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare, e-mail, text messages and all other modern technological inventions that consume time and attention. I even went so far as to turn off the radio that constantly plays in my room. It’s been months since I’ve sat in my bedroom in complete silence. It was awful. The idea to go “off the grid” came during journalism class one day when I was on my phone instead of listening to the teacher. She asked a question, and I was clueless to provide an answer. It wasn’t my decision to give up technology for a day, but my teacher’s — a consequence for letting my phone and the Internet interfere with real-life communication.

http://my.hsj.org/Schools/Newspaper/tabid/100/view/frontpage/articleid/468606/newspaperid/4439/Techfree_day_sends_message.aspx

By BROOKE ANDRUS, Bigfork Eagle

The importance of technology in the classroom has grown substantially in the last five years, which is why Bigfork superintendent Cynthia Clary believes it is time to revise the district’s policy regarding the use of personal electronic devices on school grounds. The district’s current policy — which was adopted in 2004 and revised in 2006 — heavily restricts the use of personal computers and electronic communication devices. According to the policy, communication devices such as cellphones must be “kept out of sight and turned off for the duration of the instructional day.” The policy also states that student possession of personal computers and memory storage devices — such as compact discs and flash drives — is prohibited unless the student obtains written permission from the district’s network administrator. Students must also have the network administrator’s approval to connect to the district computer network.

http://www.flatheadnewsgroup.com/bigforkeagle/news/local/article_60db43e2-04ca-11e1-9420-001cc4c002e0.html

by Adam Rodewald, the Northwestern

Children in Peter Iles classroom start the day by logging into the cloud through their new Chromebook computers. Using Google Apps for Education, the students of this split seventh- and eighth-grade classroom at Grace Lutheran School can instantly access lessons and homework while their teacher, Iles, acts as a facilitator tracking students’ work in real time and offering more individualized attention. In many ways, this educator and principal of a small private school in Oshkosh has set up the classroom of the future others in the city, state and nation are striving towards. Several private and public schools from Oshkosh are introducing mobile technology, including tablet computers and netbooks, into their classrooms for the first time this year. Five elementary schools in the Oshkosh public school district are integrating iPads into their classrooms this fall.

http://www.thenorthwestern.com/article/20111102/OSH0105/111020469/Area-schools-getting-tech-savvy-IPads-Chromebooks-netbooks

by Alan Knapp, Forbes

Mark Liberman, a Professor of Linguistics at the University of Pennsylvania, decided to take a more analytical approach. Faced with Davidson’s claim that Twitter was phasing out longer words in favor of shorter ones, he decided to see if that was the case…. The result? The mean word length in Hamlet (in modern spelling) was 3.99 characters; in P. G. Wodehouse’s Jeeves stories, the mean word length was 4.05 characters; in the DP‘s tweets, the mean word length was 4.80 characters. Once again, numbers foil an unsubstantiated claim!

http://www.forbes.com/sites/alexknapp/2011/10/31/no-twitter-isnt-ruining-the-english-language/

By: Susan Codone, Teaching and Learning

Kember, Leung, & Kwan, writing in Assessment & Evaluation in Higher Education (2002) indicate that formal faculty questionnaires completed by students at the end of the semester are not always effective in improving faculty performance, for many different reasons. Part of this problem is that the evaluations occur after the fact, after the class is completed and the professor and students have gone their separate ways. Hesketh & Laidlaw, writing in Medical Teacher (2002), state that feedback is most effective when it is well-timed according to daily work and is as close to the event that it evaluates as possible. That’s why I like to use something called a “plus/delta” evaluation. The plus/delta is a brief, half-page form that I hand out at the beginning of class. It was first developed by Dr. Marj Davis and Dr. Helen Grady at Mercer University. I ask students during class to think of a “plus” – something they like about our class, and a “delta” – something they’d like to change.

[ed. note – great practice that is easy to adapt to electronic delivery in multiple modes]

http://www.facultyfocus.com/articles/teaching-and-learning/getting-immediate-student-feedback-the-plusdelta-way/

By Don Reisinger, eWeek

With the launch of the Amazon Kindle Fire only a few weeks away, just about everyone is speculating on how it might affect the tablet business. For its part, Amazon believes that it should be able to secure a sizable portion of the tablet space with its device and, thus, put some real pressure on the leader in the market, Apple. Chances are that Amazon might be right. Based on the data available now, Amazon has reportedly ordered more Kindle Fire units than it initially anticipated. What’s more, the company’s decision to make it easy for the millions of people who visit Amazon every day to find the tablet on its home page has improved sales, and that will only continue to help them in the future. Meanwhile, other tablet vendors trying to grow their market share will find themselves overshadowed by not one, but now two premier tablet makers.

http://www.eweek.com/c/a/Mobile-and-Wireless/Amazon-Kindle-Fire-Poised-to-Reshape-Tablet-Market-10-Reasons-Why-438820/?kc=rss

By: Clint Boulton, eWeek

Apple’s iPad is proving popular in educational markets as a supplementary slate to desktop computers, according to Piper Jaffray. Android tablets, not so much. Numerous case studies and anecdotal evidence tell the tale of Apple’s iPad as a boon for e-commerce and even in some select business markets. Law firm Prosskauer Rose, for example, issued 500 iPad 2s to its attorneys, who use them to send and receive email messages and share contracts with clients. Now evidence of the iPad’s viability in the education market is beginning to emerge, according to Piper Jaffray’s Gene Munster. The analyst found that all 25 technology directors in U.S. school districts he polled were testing or actually rolling out iPads for users in schools. Conversely, no respondents indicated that they are testing or deploying Android tablets.

http://www.eweek.com/c/a/Desktops-and-Notebooks/iPads-No-Android-Tablets-Seen-in-US-Schools-674797/?kc=rss

by Mind/Shift KQED

Schools that receive discounts for Internet access through the federal E-rate funding are required to implement a number of measures, like creating an Internet safety policy and filtering and blocking access to certain types of online content. To that end, The Children’s Internet Protection Act, CIPA, addresses concerns about the type of online materials that children can access at school. We’ve written several times about some of the frustration and confusion that CIPA and filtering causes, and we’ve talked to the Department of Education’s Karen Cator for clarification about what the law really requires. But as more schools begin to implement one-to-one computer programs, providing each student with a laptop or a net-book or even an iPad, there are new wrinkles in thinking about CIPA. After all, these devices are meant to be used at school and at home.

http://mindshift.kqed.org/2011/10/when-school-web-filtering-comes-home/

By Laurel L. Scott, Standard-Times

Two banks of industrial black flat screens and computer towers dwarfed the children tapping on matching keyboards or wielding a mouse with mighty intent at a recent Saturday workshop in an office on the second floor of Angelo State University’s library. The 12 middle school students — six girls and six boys — were not the usual visitors to the Porter Henderson Library, but it was their third Saturday in a row, part of the “sweat equity” they had agreed to to take home one of those computers. They were part of the launch of “TexOS, the Texas Open Source Project,” a two-man nonprofit operation that hopes to provide not only a computer to a needy child but also a whole new mindset.

http://www.gosanangelo.com/news/2011/oct/25/collaborate-innovate-create-new-computers-new/

by KELSEY SHEEHY, Huffington Post

Laptops, iPads, and smart phones are moving into high school classrooms faster than students can text. Transforming the way students and teachers interact with information, these technologies are shaping the classroom of the future. U.S.News & World Report is recognizing high schools leading the charge with its first ranking of the country’s Most Connected Classrooms. We surveyed schools from our most recent Best High Schools rankings, published in December 2009, to gauge their connectivity. Of the 301 schools that responded, 185 scored well enough on the survey to be ranked.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/10/25/floridas-crooms-academy-o_n_1030454.html

By Antoine Abou-Diwan, Chatsworth Patch

When Our Community School needed new computers for its computer lab, it did not take the easy way out by simply buying the computers and having professionals set them up. Instead, they partnered with a local technology company to teach students how to assemble and set up the computers. Engineers from MSM Technology Group, a Chatsworth-based computer manufacturer and support company, supervised the charter school’s film elective class Tuesday as they seated heat sinks and CPUs, wired USBs and misplaced a screw or two.

http://chatsworth.patch.com/articles/chatsworth-students-build-their-school-s-computers

By Jaya Narain, the Tech (MIT)

Watson, IBM’s champion Jeopardy! computer, is making its way to Cambridge to compete in a trivia match with students from the MIT Sloan School of Management and Harvard Business School. The competition, dubbed the “IBM Watson Challenge,” will be held at the Harvard Business School’s Burden Auditorium on Monday, Oct. 31. The challenge will be preceded by “The Race Against the Machine: The Future of Tech” Symposium at the MIT Media Lab, which will include a number of talks about Watson’s creation and the future of the technology. Following the symposium, buses will depart from the Media Lab at 2:15 p.m. for those interested in attending the trivia competition at Harvard. The “IBM Watson Challenge” is the result of the efforts of Professor Erik Brynjolfsson GM ’91 of MIT Sloan and Willy C. Shih of the Harvard Business School. Brynjolfsson said the tournament stemmed from a mutual desire to highlight “some of the ways that technology is changing business.” Brynjolfsson said that the new technology could revolutionize day-to-day business.

http://tech.mit.edu/V131/N48/watson.html

By Robert Lemos, Dark Reading

As smartphones become more powerful, technologists have increasingly referred to the devices as pocket-sized computers. Yet less often do the experts consider the implications of a different aspect of the devices workers are carrying around: that of a capable pocket-sized suite of sensors. Researchers have begun to focus on this facet of mobile phones. Last week, for example, computer scientists at Georgia Tech showed how placing a phone on a desk could allow its accelerometer to detect the vibrations from key presses on a nearby keyboard and pick out words with an accuracy of up to 80 percent.

http://www.darkreading.com/advanced-threats/167901091/security/attacks-breaches/231901828/innovative-attacks-treat-mobile-phones-as-sensors.html

by Aayush Arya, the Next Web

According to computer scientist John Kubiatowicz, from UC Berkeley. The books you put on your Kindle increase its weight, and not in the sense of gaining you respect among your friends and colleagues for having a scholarly taste in books. No sir, it’s actual weight in the physical world. And it’s not just the Kindle or just e-readers either, it’s every device that you load data on. You see, the downloading of ebooks to your e-reader changes the level of energy stored in the electrons on it. Their physical number stays the same but, as Albert Einstein so cleverly put it, E=mc2. If those electrons are storing more energy, they gain more mass—ergo, your e-reader becomes heavier! You may have noticed that you have read over 150 words already and have yet to find out how much the weight actually increases by. That is by design. Because the increase in weight is by 10-18 of a gram, or 0.000000000000000001g. Kubiatowicz tells us that it’s called an attogram.

http://thenextweb.com/shareables/2011/10/31/your-kindle-becomes-a-little-heavier-when-you-load-it-up-with-ebooks-seriously/

by David Kapuler, Tech Learning

There’s no denying the appeal that online games have for kids. Despite the stigma games may hold, many online educational games not only enhance the joy of learning, but also strengthen skill sets. The following are my favorite educational gaming sites on the web.

http://www.techlearning.com/Default.aspx?tabid=67&EntryId=3281

by Eric Lawson

The release of Apple’s iPad opened up some great new ideas and creative paths for teachers looking for assistive technologies (AT) for their classroom. Tactile learners and digital natives alike love to use these handheld devices to learn about core curriculum standards within the classroom. According to Apple’s website, “iPod touch and iPhone use a high-resolution Multi-Touch screen, ideal for those who have difficulty using a traditional keyboard and mouse.” The iTunes app. store has even showcased a tab for special education apps, available as AT for students with learning disabilities. The app store often offers these same apps for the iPod Touch and iPhone. These tablets and handheld devices can be used in many different ways and offer communication options for students with autism.

http://www.techlearning.com/article/ipads-ipod-touches-and-iphones-as-assistive-technology-in-education/47768

By Tom Simonite, Technology Review

Decades of Moore’s Law have trained us to expect every new computer to do more than the one before. Google’s most ambitious foray into cloud computing, however, has it wooing businesses with computers that do much less. Those computers are known as Chromebooks. The laptops, officially launched in June, use an operating system called ChromeOS that is little more than a souped-up version of Google’s Chrome Web browser. “Chromebooks came from this realization that cloud computing gives an opportunity to rethink what the desktop is,” says Rajen Sheth, Google’s program manager for Chromebooks. The pitch to businesses is slightly more prosaic: outfitting and supporting workers with Google’s Chromebooks costs a lot less than giving them conventional PCs.

http://www.technologyreview.com/business/38985/?p1=BI

by USC

With the Construction of a New Quantum Computing Center at its Information Sciences Institute Campus in Marina del Rey, USC Charts a New Course into the Future of Computing. USC; Lockheed Martin, Inc.; and D-Wave Systems, Inc. officially unveiled the first commercial and operational quantum computer academic center at USC Viterbi School of Engineering’s Information Sciences Institute. USC is now exploring the promising future of quantum computing. Invoking super-conducting technology, USC has constructed a high-fidelity computing center to house D-Wave’s revolutionary quantum computing chip, recently purchased by Lockheed Martin and provided to USC for its applicability to information technology. USC and Lockheed Martin will work synergistically to explore the potential of the chip, which is at the cutting edge of technological advances. The D-Wave chip has 128 quantum bits ( or “qubits” ), which have the capability of encoding the two digits of one and zero at the same time – as opposed to traditional bits, which distinctly encode either a one or a zero. This property, called “superposition,” will allow quantum computing systems to perform complicated calculations exponentially faster than traditional computers. With the construction of the multi-million dollar quantum computing center, USC now has the infrastructure in place to support future generations of quantum computer chips, positioning the school and its partners at the forefront of quantum computing research.

http://media-newswire.com/release_1161194.html