Educational Technology

By Tanya Roscorla, Converge

The 46 members of the Horizon K-12 Advisory Board narrowed a long list of emerging technologies down to six that the New Media Consortium highlighted in the “2012 Horizon Report K-12 Edition.” For the past two years, cloud computing has topped the list. But this year, it’s been adopted widely enough that it’s not highlighted in the report. Also of note, game-based learning has stayed in the same time-to-adoption category for the past three years. And augmented reality reappeared in the top six after barely not making it last year. Increasingly students, employees and the world expect to see schools embrace technology. For example, students want to bring their own mobile devices to school. “The Internet is really provoking us to rethink what our roles are as educators,” Johnson said.

http://www.convergemag.com/policy/6-Emerging-Technologies-2012-K-12-Horizon-Report.html

by Ainslie MacGibbon and Elisabeth Tarica, The Age (AU)

Tablets are the new textbooks at Manor Lakes College in Wyndham Vale, where each year 6 and 7 student owns an iPad that travels between home and school each day. The 1500-strong secondary school, on the outskirts of Werribee, is something of a laboratory for innovative learning. If the school has a mantra, it is: embrace technology and face reality. Its students are, after all, digital natives who adapt to changing technologies faster than parents and teachers. Corrie Barclay, the school’s eLearning co-ordinator, says the nature of technology means it is constantly changing — and often schools struggle to keep up. “Education needs to keep up because devices such as iPads and iPhones have greatly altered the way we go about our lives,” he says. Mr Barclay says the the amount of digital learning resources available is phenomenal.

http://www.theage.com.au/national/education/byo–next-wave-in-the-erevolution-20120525-1za1c.html

BY THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

Math is so popular at Ritter Elementary School in Watts that kids arrive before the morning bell and line up to do extra work before class, but it’s not the subject that’s the real attraction as much as the method — computers. “It’s a lot more fun this way,” said 8-year-old Erica Quezada, fitting colorful cubes into a shape on her screen as another third-grader leans over to point out another way she can solve the problem. Stand-and-deliver is increasingly giving way to point-and-click in schools across California and elsewhere as computers are being used to supplement, and in some approaches, supplant textbooks and teachers.

http://www.thereporter.com/news/ci_20722417/california-schools-expand-lessons-computer-aid

By Cormac Foster, Read, Write, Enterprise

Degrees may become optional, but assessments will not. Internet Research Group’s Peter Christy sees a codified analysis of “demonstrated behaviors” as the answer. “The idea is to have someone tell you about important behaviors – how they dealt with problems previously that were thought of as important to the position in question. One can imagine a much more valuable “CV” in a modern form, in which the person made assertions about what they did of importance in a previous position and there was the opportunity for others to comment on the assertion (a more substantial form of Facebook, perhaps). Sort of like a social form of performance reviews – interesting but a little frightening… .” So don’t spend the kid’s college money just yet. Making the initial cut to get to that interview will always require a standout resume, and a degree is still a good way to start building. And that’s particularly true for folks who want to do something other than coding apps.

http://www.readwriteweb.com/enterprise/2012/05/college-degrees-more-and-more-theyre-just-a-piece-of-paper.php

By Dan Rowinski, Read, Write Web

Everyone ought to be able to read and write; few people within the global mainstream would argue with that statement. But should everyone be able to program computers? The question is becoming critically important as digital technology plays an ever more central role in daily life. The movement to make code literacy a basic tenet of education is gaining momentum, and its success or failure will have a huge impact on our society. What if any educated person had equal sway over the power of machines? What if we were to expand our notion of literacy to encompass not only human languages but also machine languages? Could widespread facility in reading and writing code come to be as critical to society as the ability to manipulate spoken and written language?

http://www.readwriteweb.com/hack/2012/05/computer-programming-for-all-a-new-standard-of-literacy.php

By CHRISTINE ARMARIO, Huffington Post

More high school students are enrolling in math and science classes and seeking online learning opportunities. Fewer want or are able to find jobs while in school. Those are just some of the changes under way at the nation’s high schools in how students are learning and what they are doing with their extra time, according to a report released Thursday by the U.S. Education Department. The annual “Condition of Education” report said there has been a marked increase over the last two decades in the percent of high school graduates who had taken calculus, from 7 percent in 1990 to 16 percent in 2009. Overall, the percentage enrolling in math and science courses increased in all subjects except algebra I, a class many students now take in middle school. Yet while more are enrolling, the report also states that scores have largely stagnated: Seventeen-year-old students performed neither significantly better nor worse on a national math and reading assessment than they did in the early 1970s.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/05/24/science-and-math-classes-_n_1542722.html