Google Drive, Google’s online file storage system, is now live. With it you can upload and access all of your files including videos, photos, PDFs, Google Docs and more, just like with Dropbox or Sugarsync. Google Docs is integrated with Google Drive so you can work on all your documents, presentations and spreadsheets, as well as share content and then add and reply to comments on any file (PDF, image, video, and so on) and receive notifications when some one else comments on a shared item. It has added some social networking features to cloud file storage. Drive will also recognize text in scanned documents. (similar to what Evernote does). One other nice feature is that you can open all these types of files (over 30 different ones) right in your browser, even if you don’t have the original program the file was created in on your computer. That’s a big feature.
Innosight Institute today released the report “Classifying K-12 blended learning,” which defines the emerging phenomenon of mixing online learning into brick-and-mortar schools. According to the report, blended learning is defined as a formal education program in which a student learns at least in part through online delivery of content and instruction with some element of student control over time, place, path and pace, and at least in part at a supervised brick-and-mortar location away from home. Innosight is a non-profit think tank co-founded by Professor Clayton Christensen of Harvard Business School. The white paper is co-authored by Innosight Institute Senior Education Research Fellow Heather Staker and Executive Director of Education Michael B. Horn. It identifies the four models of blended learning and provides working examples from schools including KIPP LA Empower Academy, Rocketship Education and Carpe Diem. It also identifies several new sub-models, including the Flipped Classroom and Station Rotation.
What are the biggest challenges in your day-to-day life and how do you manage them? Staying focused on the “big picture’ is the biggest daily challenge. There are a great many distractions in educational technology such as technical issues, new technologies, curriculum changes, administrator concerns, staff and student training, federal and state guidelines, Internet safety and more. I find planning to be the best way to manage them all. We try to plan with a variety of people. I plan with my staff weekly, administrators monthly, our site-based team bi-annually. My staff and I attend conferences and monthly meetings with a tri-county technology consortium. My staff and I also attend regular roundtable meetings at our educational service center which is an arm of the Texas Education Agency. This allows us to stay up-to-date with county, regional, state and national technology innovations, challenges and information.
by Colin Calleja, Christopher Bezzina, Times of Malta
The interactive whiteboard has the potential of engaging students to become active participants in learning. It can support students through presentations of multimedia content that aids in information processing and retention. As with any resource used in the teaching and learning process there are leadership implications that need to be taken into consideration. Research shows there is much more to the effective use of this technology than simply ensuring teachers have access to this equipment. Research carried out by Derek Glover and colleagues at Keele University highlights some important implications of using interactive whiteboards in the classroom so as to ensure there is a link between technology and pedagogy. In this research the authors point to three progress-ive stages to help develop the concept of interactivity.
By John Williams, MetroWest Daily NewsComputer technology has long been the driver of the U.S. economy. It permeates everything we do and use from the cars we drive to the appliances we use, to the smart home technology beginning to appear in newer homes to manage our utilities. Careers in technology have also been a great source of employment for our citizens, especially in the information technology (IT) field which has been the foundation of business growth for decades. Enter “onshoring”: an emerging alternative with tremendous appeal. It has several names, including onshoring, rural sourcing, home sourcing and insourcing. The concept is to bring work back to locations in the continental United States and take advantage of the highly efficient, effective and innovative U.S. workforce to perform IT functions that have been offshored over the past decade. This idea, and now trend, is being fueled by all of the shortcomings listed above.
The technology used in classrooms at the school not only helps engage students, said Klamath Falls City Schools superintendent Paul Hillyer, but helps reduce the district’s paper use. “They’ve reduced significantly their use of papers, and even books to a certain extent, because they can do so much on the iPad,” he said. Classrooms district-wide are still a long way, Hillyer said, from a paperless classroom. But initiatives at the district to save on copies made, and paper and toner used in those copies, could save the district $50,000 next year on its $100,000 copying-related costs. “Our hope is to reduce our copying costs by half,” Hillyer said. Scott Mahaffey, the district’s director of technology, said the district in July closed its print shop. In its place, the district leased photocopiers.
by Jonathan Robe, Center for College Affordability
A couple of weeks back, NPR’s “All Things Considered” had a segment on the “explosion” of online learning and the implications this will have going forward for higher education. NPR’s Steve Henn, I thought anyway, had an insightful comment about the risk an online learning model would allow someone who is nothing more than a “shut-in, matriculating couch potato” (to use Robert Seigel’s term in the segment) from never leaving his bedroom and yet obtaining a college degree. While that is certainly a legitimate concern (and one of a number of reasons why many people are understandably skeptical of online learning in general), I think Henn’s response was appropos: “while perhaps someday, there may be people who never leave their basement, I think at this point, there are many thousands more people around the world who really, this is a window that opens and allows them to see a bigger, broader piece of the world than they could before.”
Online classes may have increased educational accessibility for many students, but a study conducted by two Ohio University professors shows they might have contributed to a large increase in academic dishonesty. Mark Shatz and Frank LoSchiavo, two psychology professors at OU’s Zanesville Branch campus, used an introductory psychology course to survey the level of academic dishonesty in online courses. At OU, students can take online classes through programs offered by the eCampus department. The research found that, after students had taken a class with 14 online, not-proctored quizzes, 72.5 percent of the 40 students reported cheating on at least one of the quizzes. The 14 quizzes allowed students plenty of opportunities to cheat, LoSchiavo said.
We have several exciting news items about online learning and Quality Matters at Ohio State! Marie Mika’s Marriage and Society online course (SOCIOL 330) went through a formal Quality Matters review by three certified peer reviewers who are online faculty at Ohio institutions of higher education. They examined Marie’s course in fine detail against the Quality Matters rubric and determined that it meets the standards that characterize a high quality online course. This means that Marie will be able to display the “QM Recognized” logo in her course, and her course will be listed on the QM Recognized Courses web site. Marie describes her experience of going through a QM review in this video.
IT administrators, professors and CIOs are driven by the needs — and rising expectations — of students. In the world of higher education, technology is a catalyst for real growth. Topics like online learning, “bring your own device,” electronic textbooks and cloud computing are hot in the industry right now, and rightfully so. Technology is creating better learning environments, faster and more efficient access to resources such as e-mail and online lectures — and, ultimately, a better experience for professors and students. What about the men and women behind all that campus technology? IT workers need resources too. EdTech: Focus on Higher Education has surveyed the web and found what we believe are the 50 best IT blogs in higher education. These blogs — including well-known names and some who are less familiar — cover every aspect of technology, both in the classroom and behind the scenes. Learn from tech experts and IT peers at colleges who are in the trenches. Dig into the very best the web has to offer.
The Knowledge Graph enables you to search for things, people or places that Google knows about—landmarks, celebrities, cities, sports teams, buildings, geographical features, movies, celestial objects, works of art and more—and instantly get information that’s relevant to your query. This is a critical first step towards building the next generation of search, which taps into the collective intelligence of the web and understands the world a bit more like people do. Google’s Knowledge Graph isn’t just rooted in public sources such as Freebase, Wikipedia and the CIA World Factbook. It’s also augmented at a much larger scale—because we’re focused on comprehensive breadth and depth. It currently contains more than 500 million objects, as well as more than 3.5 billion facts about and relationships between these different objects. And it’s tuned based on what people search for, and what we find out on the web.
Udemy.com, the platform that empowers experts around the world to build and share online courses, today announces its top ten earning instructors. The company also releases new data showing a sharp rise in user engagement over the past year. The top ten earning Udemy instructors, ranging from designers to corporate trainers to computer programmers, brought in a combined $1,654,480 in the past twelve months.
The idea of one computer per student is becoming increasingly common in the Swedish school system. The University of Gothenburg, Sweden, is now conducting several studies on the educational consequences of the so-called 1:1 initiative in a group of Swedish municipalities. ‘The teacher is the key to successful use of computers in the classroom,’ says Professor Berner Lindström, scientific director of the studies. More than two-thirds of all Swedish municipalities have implemented a 1:1 project to some degree, a development that started 3-4 years ago. Some municipalities go all out and provide students at all levels with personal laptops or tablets, whereas others have chosen to move slower and test the idea in just a few schools.
School librarians Sally Mays, who helps Spanish-speaking students develop information literacy skills, and Elizabeth Kahn, who teaches kids how to access reliable information and use it effectively, are winners of the 2012 American Association of School Librarian’s (AASL) Information Technology Pathfinder Award. The $1,500 honor recognizes two school librarians—one in elementary and another in secondary school—for demonstrating vision and leadership while using information technology to build lifelong learners. It is sponsored by Follett Software Company.
Education Scotland is to look at how tablet computers and mobile devices are being used in classrooms and consider how they could be introduced in schools on a wider scale. The Scottish Government body will take stock of how existing schemes are working before providing recommendations to Education Secretary Michael Russell. Almost 20 schools across 10 local authorities are already using devices such as iPads and Android technology to aid learning.
As Newsweek recently reported, “In the past 25 years, while health-care costs have risen 250 percent, higher-education’s costs have skyrocketed 450 percent, according to the National Center for Public Policy and Higher Education.” Blame this phenomenon on whatever you like — the failure of state support to keep up with student growth, for example (although this doesn’t explain private tuition inflation), or on complacent management — but at the end of the day, it won’t particularly matter. A reckoning awaits. Oddly, however, the Times never mentions the most likely disruptive agent of the higher-ed status quo: online learning.
With online education becoming more popular every year, Purdue has developed a system which includes an online section using “websites on steroids” to teach students. Last Friday, President France Córdova announced an initiative for college students around the world to access Purdue’s online courses. The system is called PurdueHUB-U and it includes a “blended format” class for residential students. Through this website hub, residential students will be able to learn class content online by watching the lectures, submitting homework and taking tests. The actual class time will be used for activities, more engagement and participation. Provost Timothy Sands said the hope for the project is to give students the chance to have a more beneficial classroom experience.
The textbook publisher McGraw-Hill Higher Education announced a pilot program with University of Minnesota bookstores last week that may eventually make early semester lines and sold-out core texts as obsolete as the diskette. McGraw-Hill will offer its complete catalog of more than 1,600 e-books to University of Minnesota students starting in the 2012 fall semester (the number of participating students was not yet available). Professors decide whether to sign up their classes.
Millions of apps vie for educators’ attention. And with limited time and budgets, it’s not always easy to find the ones that will keep students’ attention and teach them at the same time. As school districts search for the few quality apps that will fit into their curriculum, instructional technology staff at three elementary school districts shared how they measure and find quality apps.
Just as CEOs push for that one more penny per share in EPS, University Presidents care about nothing but getting their endowments and revenues up. If it means saddling an entire generation with obscene amounts of school debt, they could care less. This is how they get their long term contracts and raises. It’s just a matter of time until we see the same meltdown in traditional college education. Like the real estate industry, prices will rise until the market revolts. Then it will be too late. Students will stop taking out the loans traditional Universities expect them to. And when they do, tuition will come down. When prices come down, Universities will have to cut costs beyond what they are able to. They will have so many legacy costs– from tenured professors to construction projects to research– they will be saddled with legacy costs and debt in much the same way the newspaper industry was. This will all lead to a de-levering and a de-stabilization of the University system as we know it.
Right now the Khan Academy offers almost 3500 tutorials, with topics ranging from calculus to art history and there are plans to expand the curriculum. But that doesn’t mean Khan is planning to alter the Academy’s signature stripped-down production, which usually consists of a black background, colored inks and a voice track. This accidental innovator is committed to keeping it simple — and keeping it free. And to date, with the Khan Academy clocking over 140 million views and counting, who can argue with him?
