Educational Technology

By Tanya Roscorla, Converge

During the next five years, six emerging technologies show potential to influence teaching and learning in higher education, according to a new report. The 2012 NMC Horizon Report on higher education suggests when these technologies could become mainstream, meaning 20 percent of colleges and universities adopt it within the specified time frame. Keep reading to find out what technologies appear on the short list and how they could affect universities.

http://www.convergemag.com/policy/6-Technologies-to-Watch-in-Higher-Ed.html

Full 2012 Horizon Report:

http://www.educause.edu/Resources/2012HorizonReport/246056

By Tanya Roscorla, Converge

As the federal government emphasizes tracking educator and student progress through data, states build the capacity to collect and act on education information. But on the road to a successful outcome, states are facing roadblocks that threaten to hinder their progress. Along the way, they are learning some valuable lessons.

http://www.convergemag.com/training/5-Data-Obstacles.html

By Steven M. Baule, CIO Advisor

As technology leaders in schools develop plans for bringing more technology into schools and particularly in those programs where there is a BYOD (bring your own device) component, it is essential to ensure that the issue of equity and equal access for all children has been considered and that a solid plan is in place to address those issues. Reaching out to local service organizations and businesses may assist the district in providing better access for all children both during and outside of the school day.

http://www.schoolcio.com/Default.aspx?tabid=136&EntryId=3723

by School CIO

Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (HMH) today announced the results of a yearlong pilot of HMH Fuse: Algebra I, the full-curriculum algebra app developed for the Apple iPad, involving the Amelia Earhart Middle School in California’s Riverside Unified School District. The pilot showed that over 78 percent of HMH Fuse users scored Proficient or Advanced on the spring 2011 California Standards Tests, compared with only 59 percent of their textbook-using peers. The first assessment of the pilot— Riverside’s district algebra benchmark –took place during the second trimester of the 2010–2011 year. Students using HMH Fuse scored an average of 10 percentage points higher than their peers. The app’s impact was even more pronounced after the California Standards Test in spring 2011, on which HMH Fuse students scored approximately 20 percent higher than their textbook-using peers.

http://www.schoolcio.com/article/math-scores-rise-with-use-of-ipad-algebra-curriculum-/52154

by Elisabeth Rentschler, WLFI

Many Tippecanoe School Corporation students traded in their pencils for electronic markers. Although February 1 has been dubbed National Digital Learning Day, many Tippecanoe School Corporation teachers incorporated new technology into their lesson plans all year long. Students at Wea Ridge Elementary have something to look forward to each day they go to school. That’s because each classroom is equipped with a new interactive board. The boards are computer-generated and allow students to write electronically. All classrooms are also equipped with new laptop computers.

http://www.wlfi.com/dpp/news/local/new-technology-helps-make-learning-fun

by Peggy Aulisio, Southcoasttoday

A federal grant is bringing Acushnet students into the 21st century, making learning fun while preparing them for the jobs of the future. Using just some of the new technology last Friday, students in Shane Martin’s sixth grade math class were moving words on a screen under column headings. They were using a technology similar to what CNN does with maps when calling elections, although not quite as flashy. Students in another room were watching a video showing what happens when baking soda is mixed with vinegar. And in another class, students studying Social Studies were matching Longfellow’s poem on Paul Revere’s midnight ride to the Revolutionary War events that actually happened. They checked the facts, not by poring through a textbook, but in a virtual museum on the Internet.

http://www.southcoasttoday.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20120126/PUB01/201260378/1039

By Buster Bytes, San Jose Mercury News

Today marks the beginning of Black History Month, which is a perfect time to commemorate the achievements of African Americans in the history of technology. This month-long observation began in 1926 as Negro History week under the suggestion of historian Carter G. Woodson. It was expanded in 1976 to become Black History Month. It is celebrated in the United Kingdom in October and in February in the United States and Canada, where it is also known as African-American History Month.   This column generally deals with technological advances, it will now set out to remember some of those African Americans who have been most influential in our nation’s development in this field. And while these innovators and their contributions are far too many to list in one column, here are just a few of the more noteworthy: (please follow the URL for the rest of the story).

http://www.prospectusnews.com/mobile/famous-african-americans-in-technology-1.2760108

by Byron Brown, News-Tribune

When students in my online course in intermediate microeconomic theory head for the bookstores, they will feel the pain of the marketplace. The required text for the course, Jeffrey Perloff’s sixth edition of “Microeconomics,” will lighten their wallets by a hefty $206.67 retail. Or $147.52 from Amazon. The book is a 20-chapter behemoth that tips the scales at over three pounds, more than the weight of two iPads. The best deal for the students is to buy a used copy in a local bookstore and resell it at the end of the course. That option will end up costing a student about $50 – one-fourth of the publisher’s suggested retail price. It’s the choice of about 75 percent of my students. Why didn’t most of the students choose the electronic version of the text? When publishers began producing e-texts they sold them for about one-half the suggested retail price of a new paper version. But students have shown a stiff resistance to buying them, mostly because they are 65-plus percent more expensive ($82.99 versus about $50 for the Perloff book) than the used paper option.

http://www.thenewstribune.com/2012/01/29/2003731/the-e-text-revolution-apple-bites.html

By Brian Robinson, Federal Computer Week

Technologies come and go. Of course, that’s equally true in government, despite the feds’ propensity to hang on to IT much longer than its recommended expiration date. As refresh cycles turn over, agencies see familiar — and often well-loved — technologies replaced. We’ve hit unusually uncertain times, however. The “cloud first” mandate, the mobile revolution, cybersecurity fears and budget constraints are just some of the issues that agency leaders must tackle as they consider the future of the IT infrastructure. With that in mind, Federal Computer Week looked at a handful of familiar technologies that could — or should — be reaching the end of their shelf life in 2012 and pondered the likelihood that they will still be with us in 2013.

http://fcw.com/articles/2012/01/15/feat-tech-on-the-outs-2012.aspx

by Carl BR Johnson, Weal

With iPads being thinner and lighter than the average textbook, the iBook system is looking like a viable option for students looking to reduce their bulk. The iBooks 2 app has just been released by Apple for use with Apple’s iPads to allow teachers and students alike to utilize a new digital textbook collection. The iBooks system can liberate students across the globe, from bulky, heavy and expensive textbooks with a modern and easy-to-use iPad textbook, that is if schools and publishing houses use the technology. SAIT dean of information and communication technology Rand Ayres said SAIT plans to eventually use the iBooks system to replace traditional textbooks.

http://www.theweal.com/2012/02/02/giving-up-paper-and-learning-from-a-computer-screen/

By Brandon Keim, Wired

Much as tablet computers went mainstream in the iPad’s wake, Apple’s latest educational project heralds an age of tablet-based schoolbooks. That, at least, is the hope and hype surrounding iBooks textbooks, launched Jan. 19 at a promotional gala held in the Guggenheim Museum and advertised in terms as glowing as an iPad’s screen. In coming years, schools worldwide will grapple with whether to adopt tablet-based materials, on the iPad or on other platforms. They’ll consider many factors — including cost, intellectual property issues and logistics — that may ultimately prove as important as the textbooks’ contents. But as learning is the ultimate purpose, the question remains: Will kids really learn more and better on tablets than existing media? That’s far from clear now, and the reality may prove less revolutionary than the hardware.

http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2012/01/ipad-textbooks-learning/

by Adam S. Bellow, MindShift

Sometimes teachers and administrators need a kick in the pants to see what they perceive as problems re-framed in a different way. Adam S. Bellow, author of The Tech Commandments, and founder of eduTecher, spoke to a roomful of receptive teachers at the recent ISTE 2011 conference, and demonstrated some of the ironies and contradictions the education system is mired in. And he had some advice.

http://mindshift.kqed.org/2011/07/the-seven-golden-rules-of-using-technology-in-schools/

by June Kronholz, Education Next

As youngsters completed one lesson, an online “knowledge map” helped them plot their next step: finish the module on adding decimals, for example, and the map suggests moving next to place values, or to rounding whole numbers, or to any of four other options.  Julian, meanwhile, tracked everyone’s progress on a computer dashboard that offers him mounds of data and alerts him when someone needs his attention. He showed me, for example, the data for a child who had been working that day on multiplying decimals. The child had watched the Khan video before answering the 1st practice problem correctly, needed a “hint” from the program on the 3rd question, got the 7th wrong after struggling with it for 350 seconds—the problem was 69.0 x 0.524—and got the 18th correct in under a minute. But just as powerful are the data kids have on themselves. The Covington youngsters regularly pulled up an array of charts that showed them which math concepts they had mastered and which they were working on, needed to review, or were stumbling over.

http://www.theschoolboards.com/showthread.php/2321-Can-Khan-Academy-Move-the-Bell-Curve-to-the-Right

by Eileen FitzGerald, News Times

Technology in schools has grown by leaps and bounds in nearly a half century. Teachers and students access knowledge from around the world and use applications that make learning interactive, just for a start. It’s wonderful to see young students who can use a flip camera or make a video in third grade, and it’s always impressive to see how easy technology is for students. The challenge, I know, is to keep it in balance. DeBlois has been Bethel’s supervisor of Information Technologies for more than a decade and has led his district’s expansion of technology use. This fall, Bethel High instituted the program “Bring Your own Technology” so students can bring their iPhones, iPads and laptops to school and use the school’s wireless connection.

http://www.newstimes.com/news/article/Eileen-FitzGerald-Technology-leads-the-way-in-2926945.php

Neil Keene, The Daily Telegraph

When Neve Wallington and her friends walk into kindergarten for the first time on Monday they will be stepping into a world of learning that would have been science fiction just a generation ago. Laptops, iPads, computerised whiteboards and giant video screens are just part of the hi-tech arsenal to prepare four-year-old Neve and an estimated 66,000 other NSW kindergarten students for life beyond school. In all, 767,000 students — including those starting kindergarten –will return to school next week. Ashbury Public School principal Sue Shelley, a teacher with more than 30-years experience, said that, while literacy and numeracy were still a school’s core business, technology played a greater role than ever before.

http://www.dailytelegraph.com.au/news/sydney-nsw/hi-tech-beginning-for-class-of-2012/story-e6freuzi-1226255780588

by Google+ Hangouts

Join Khan Academy founder Sal Khan and Stanford professors Peter Norvig and Sebastian Thrun discuss the future of technology in education. Using a Google+ Hangout, these three leaders in massive open online learning discuss the realities and possibilities. They take your questions from multiple university campuses live on Google+.

BY Jeff Natalie-Lees, Aberdeen News

Jordan Houseman, a 10-year-old student at the South Dakota School for the Blind and Visually Impaired in Aberdeen, is one of the 10 percent of the blind nationwide who are learning to read and write Braille. The number of students learning Braille has declined each decade since the 1950s, when more than 50 percent of the blind learned it, according to a 2009 report from the National Federation of the Blind. The reasons are many, including widespread integration of visually impaired students into the classroom, medical procedures that can improve vision, computer voice recognition technology, audio texts and other technology, according to the report.

http://www.aberdeennews.com/news/aan-use-of-braille-is-decreasing-but-school-still-teaches-it-20120128,0,878850.story

by IRA PORTER, The News Journal

There are now more than 500,000 iPhone apps, and one of them is the creation of Rumi Khan, a 12-year-old student at Newark Charter School. The Delaware Department of Education recently recognized Rumi’s efforts to create and distribute “Dare to be Square: The Adventure of the Red Square.” Rumi designed the game, wrote the code and drew the graphics for the game, which has 10 levels where the main character, the square, fights enemies to ultimately recapture his lost memory. He created everything but the music. A snippet of the game is at grabbyarmgames.com, the website for Grabby Arm Games, which he founded. “I look at this as a way to express myself creatively,” Rumi said. “If music-making is a form of art, why can’t game-making be?”

http://www.delawareonline.com/article/20120129/NEWS03/201290347/12-year-old-app-creator-goes-above-and-beyond–

by the Northwest Indiana Times

Purdue University North Central Elementary Education students who were enrolled in the fall semester online section of the course, Integrating Technology into the Classroom have created a variety of inquiry-based web resources for use by the teachers and students of Lake Hills STEM Magnet Elementary School in Michigan City. During the fall 2011 semester, Erin White, PNC coordinator of Learning and Technology and continuing lecturer in Education, who taught the “Integrating Technology into the Classroom” online course, initiated the WebQuests project. It was decided that the class would create WebQuests to highlight the Science, Technology, Engineering and Math (STEM) disciplines in response to the statewide emphasis placed on the STEM curriculum in the elementary grades. White and Shelley Deutscher, Lake Hills STEM coordinator, agreed to have the technologically-savvy PNC students apply their newly acquired skills to produce 18 different Indiana Standards-based WebQuests.

http://www.nwitimes.com/news/local/porter/valparaiso/pnc-students-develop-webquests-for-elementary-students/article_d2055585-99f7-5e0e-bd90-0db49c1b3f48.html

by Women in Technology

An online course for women in science, engineering and technology jobs (SET) that helps them return to work after a break has been praised by one of its organisers. Run by the UKRC and Open University, the course aimed to address the issue of the large number of women who fail to return to their career and stem the gender gap in the industry. While many participants returned to their SET career, author of a report into the course, Clem Herman from the Open University, said that many ‘soft outcomes’ also came about from the project, such as increased confidence and self esteem.

http://www.womenintechnology.co.uk/news/online-it-course-for-women-returning-to-work-praised-news-801281884

by Faculty Focus

For the past two years, Faculty Focus conducted a survey on Twitter usage in higher education, this year we expanded the survey to include Facebook and LinkedIn, while changing a number of the questions as well. Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn are considered “the big three” in social media, and we thank those who recommended we take a broader look at the landscape.  All three platforms have their strengths and weaknesses, and are better used for some things than others. But how are the three being used in higher education today? It’s our hope that these survey results provide at least some of the answers while lending new data to the discussion.

http://www.facultyfocus.com/wp-content/uploads/images/2011-social-media-report.pdf