Educational Technology

by The Jackson Sun

The Juilliard School announced on Monday a new series of kindergarten through 12th-grade online music courses available to students nationwide. The initiative is called Juilliard eLearning and is powered by Connections Education. Connections will offer new arts education courses to more than 40,000 K-12 students enrolled in its national network. It will offer classes to educational institutions and directly to students and adults. During a live-streaming press event, Joseph Polisi, president of The Juilliard School, said school officials are anticipating primarily high school students to be enrolled, although the program is for elementary and middle school students as well. The online learning program will offer advanced course offerings such as advanced placement music theory.

http://www.jacksonsun.com/article/20130319/NEWS01/303190014/Juilliard-offer-Web-courses-Online-music-instruction-planned-students-nationwide-grades-K-12

by edX

EdX, the not-for-profit online learning enterprise founded by Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), today released its XBlock SDK to the general public under the Affero GPL open source license. XBlock is the underlying architecture supporting the rich, interactive course content found in edX courses. With XBlock, educational institutions are able to go far beyond simple text and videos to deliver interactive learning built specifically for the Internet environment. The release of the XBlock source code marks the first step toward edX’s vision of creating an open online learning platform that mirrors the collaborative philosophy of MOOCs themselves and is an invitation to the global community of developers to work with edX to deliver the world’s best and most accessible online learning experience.

https://www.edx.org/press/xblock_announcement

By Steven M. Baule, CIO Advisor

Wandering around the Internet somewhere, I came across the saying “Fairy dust and Grit.” I think it is a wonderful potential motto for many school IT departments in this time of really significant change for schools. Budgets are being cut, positions either eliminated or unfilled, and—at the same time—we are expecting more from our IT staff and technology in general. Ever since the Internet arrived on the scene some Boards of Education have looked at IT resources as a magical way to reduce dropout rates, increase test scores by engaging more students in learning, etc.

http://www.schoolcio.com/Default.aspx?tabid=136&entryid=5510

Ry Rivard, Inside Higher Ed

If you wonder why your university hasn’t linked up with Coursera, the massively popular provider of free online classes, it may help to know the company is contractually obliged to turn away the vast majority of American universities. The Silicon Valley-based company said to be revolutionizing higher education says in a contract obtained by Inside Higher Ed that it will “only” offer classes from elite institutions – the members of the Association of American Universities or “top five” universities in countries outside of North America – unless Coursera’s advisory board agrees to waive the requirement.

http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2013/03/22/coursera-commits-admitting-only-elite-universities

by School CIO

A recent Dell and Intel-commissioned Harris Interactive online survey of 203 US school system administrators and IT decision makers highlights the tablet management challenges faced by schools today. The results show that tablets are increasingly becoming a standard IT device (53 percent of IT decision makers surveyed have deployed them in their schools). However, other studies show some tablets can cost significantly more time and money to manage.

http://www.schoolcio.com/cio-back-office-business/0104/new-tablets-to-help-personalize-learning/53579

Brian Sin, SlashGear

When one door closes, another one opens, and that statement proves very true for Feedly. After Google’s shocking announcement that it’s going to shut down its Google Reader service, Feedly’s user base has increased phenomenally. The service has already gained over 500,000 new users in just 48 hours. Feedly has done a great job in enticing Google Reader users to convert to its service, and it has launched new servers and increased its bandwidth by 10 times in order to keep up with demand. Feedly announced that Google Reader users would be able to seamlessly migrate their RSS feeds over to its service. The service even offers similar features to Google Reader, alongside its own special features. The service allows you to view your RSS feed in a condensed style (Title View) for those of you who have so many updates in your Google Reader feed that you have no time to scan through them individually.

http://www.slashgear.com/500000-google-reader-users-convert-to-feedly-16274360/

by Online Learning Insights

In this post I share my peer grading experience as a student in the e-learning and digital cultures course [edcmooc] offered through Coursera. I’ll provide readers a window into the student experience —how it works, guidelines provided by the instructors and assignment criteria. I’ll also share the assignment I submitted for this course and share the results—grades and comments provided by four students that evaluated my digital artefact. My last post delved into peer grading, the pedagogy and the learning theories behind the process of peer grading. I thought readers may find it useful to view the experience from the inside, viewing the process as a student would.

http://onlinelearninginsights.wordpress.com/2013/03/11/peer-grading-a-student-perspective-from-an-open-and-online-course/

by Jake New, Inside Higher Ed

A good grade in a class or a degree on a wall can’t always tell the whole story of what a student has learned. A journalism degree denotes that a student graduated from a journalism program, but not necessarily that she excels at finding sources through social media, for example. Now, after two years of development, Mozilla has released Open Badges 1.0, free software that allows for a new way to recognize learning: digital badges.

http://chronicle.com/blogs/wiredcampus/mozilla-releases-long-discussed-software-to-offer-badges-for-learning/42975

By Nick Grantham, Fractus Learning

If you have not yet explored Udemy, I can’t urge you enough to just dive in and see what all the hype is about. With the the catchphrase of “Start Learning from the World’s Top Instructors“, the platform is a treasure trove for all life long learners. And with more than 350,000 students already enrolled in Udemy courses, it is a pretty big class to join. Why am I so enthusiastic you ask? Well, over the past week we have spent a lot of time in the platform, tweaking and perfecting our first Udemy course, “How to Use Online Video to Flip the Classroom“. What I really noticed once we started looking around is how many awesome Udemy courses are available on just about everything.

http://www.fractuslearning.com/2013/03/13/udemy-courses-for-teachers/

by Emma Rich and Andy Miah, the Guardian

At the end of 2011, a few geeks in Sweden set up the Swedish Twitter University, which brought lectures in a series of tweets to a class of around 500 followers. It may have been the first time Twitter was used to deliver higher education, and given recent debate about massive open online courses (MOOCs), it seems apt that we reflect on what Twitter might do to transform the classroom and open up a new space for public education? Last month we put together an experiment that tested these limits, using a bespoke hashtag to bring together all of the content. Running a seminar in Twitter might sound like a relatively simple exercise: ensure students have devices through which to tweet, then position your visiting professor – aka Andy Miah of the University of the West of Scotland – in front of his computer and let rip, but there was a bit of prep time involved too.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/higher-education-network/blog/2013/mar/13/twitter-transform-learning-higher-education

By Nathan Mooney, University of Southern Maine Free Press

“A threat and an opportunity,” USM Professor of Linguistics Wayne Cowart said of MOOCs. Though it sounds a bit like a cuddly science fiction creature, what Cowart was referring to is actually a hot topic in higher education lately –massive, open, online courses or MOOCs. For some, the idea of giving away university-created content in a free, albeit creditless, online setting is unsettling. However, the number of students that MOOCs attract — often hundreds of thousands sign up for a single course — has made it a topic that demands attention. “As scary as it sounds when Stanford says ‘We’re going to enroll 200,000,’ it’s very unclear just what the nature of the threat is to an institution like USM,” said Cowart. “We should respond in whatever way seems to be making sense.”

http://usmfreepress.org/2013/03/13/so-what-is-a-mooc-anyway/

By Tom Simonite, Technology Review

The world’s largest search engine is now experimenting with jewelry that would eliminate the need to remember dozens of passwords. Passwords remain the standard method of protecting personal accounts, but people struggle to remember them, and they are often stored insecurely. As part of research into doing away with typed passwords, Google has built rings that not only adorn a finger but also can be used to log in to a computer or online account. The search and ad company first revealed its plans to put an end to passwords in an academic paper published online in January (see “Google’s Alternative to the Password”). The effort focused on having people plug a small USB key that provides their credentials into a computer. The possibility of using special jewelry in a similar manner was mentioned in that paper.

http://www.technologyreview.com/news/512051/google-wants-to-replace-all-your-passwords-with-a-ring/

by James Temple, Tech Chronicles

I certainly commiserate with those lamenting the demise of Google Reader, a well loved product that many relied on to capture the droplets of compelling information amid the fire hose of online content. But some commentators saw a far more ominous message in the news that the online giant is officially pulling the plug on Reader, which allowed people to track and scan multiple RSS feeds that  update whenever a particular author or publication adds content. Many read the news as a kind of nail in the coffin for RSS and some fear that would amount to a victory for “silos” on the Internet, forcing people to navigate to particular sites (say the NYtimes.com or SFGate.com) to cobble together their daily reading.

http://blog.sfgate.com/techchron/2013/03/14/death-of-google-reader-%E2%89%A0-death-of-disaggregation/

By BRETT NUCKLES, This Week News

Online learning has the potential to change the face of the Olentangy Local School District and free up space in district buildings — but it may not be for everyone. That’s one of the conclusions reached by Martin Johnson, chairman of a volunteer committee that’s working to plot a course for the future of the district. The undertaking is called Project 2020, and committee members released a 254-page report last month after more than two years of work. The implementation of new technology is a major focus of the report. High school students already have access to a growing number of online classes, and teachers increasingly integrate the Internet into lessons and homework assignments. “But not every kid is going to be wired for an online environment,” Martin said. “Some are going to do really well with that and others will do much better in a traditional classroom.”

http://www.thisweeknews.com/content/stories/olentangy/news/2013/03/12/online-courses-increasingly-offering-college-edge.html

By Todd R. Weiss, eWeek

Google creates a new Website to let the users know what’s really happening when we type a query into the Google Search box. Google wants users to know how sesarch actually happens, from the moment they type a query into the Search box on Google.com until the instant the results appear, ready for curious users to find just the information they are pursuing. That’s the idea behind a new Website, How Search Works, created by the search giant to explain the unexplainable in the complex process that occurs when a user begins looking for answers using Google’s search engine.

http://www.eweek.com/search-engines/google-explains-how-search-actually-works/

By Darryl K. Taft, eWeek

IBM took its Watson cognitive computing system on the road to the West Coast to tap students at the University of Southern California for new ideas and innovation based on the supercomputer’s capabilities. Two years after seeing it beat human competitors on the game show “Jeopardy,” IBM is putting Watson to work in ways that will change how business and health care leaders solve problems. While IBM researchers are developing new commercial applications for Watson, IBM is also turning to brilliant young minds in academia for big ideas on where the system should work next.
http://www.eweek.com/database/slideshows/ibms-watson-cognitive-computing-system-spurs-competition-at-usc/

By Sharon Dunten, Gainsville Times

It can be difficult to live in the world of high technology.Remember the cartoon characters the Jetsons? We don’t live that far off from that fantasy world of robots, television telephones, high-in-the-sky apartment living and walking the dog on a treadmill. Just ask Cesar Millan of the TV show “Dog Whisperer. ”The Hall County Schools and the Gainesville City Schools are among the best places to see technology. A new science, technology, engineering and mathematics school will be opening in the fall of 2013 at North Hall High School. In the new STEM wing, walls will be removed and glass walls will be installed. This will allow students to view others working on robotics, metal fabrication and computer technology. Remember, it is about Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics.

http://www.gainesvilletimes.com/section/6/article/80926/

By Chloe Albanesius, PC Magazine

Among the questions surrounding Google Glass is how it might work for those who currently wear glasses. Switch to contacts? Double up? Never fear. Google today said its glasses will be available in prescription form. “The Glass design is modular, so you will be able to add frames and lenses that match your prescription,” the Glass team said in a Google+ post. “We understand how important this is and we’ve been working hard on it. The post included a photo of Greg Priest-Dorman, a member of the Glass team and an early pioneer in wearable computing, wearing one of the prescription prototypes currently being tested by Google.

http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2416526,00.asp

By Jack Schofield, Jack’s Blog

Google’s Chrome browser generally consumes a lot of resources on today’s PCs, because users tend to open a lot of tabs, because it continues to run background processes, and in some cases, because users have installed numerous extensions. The OneTab extension solves the problem, at least temporarily, by converting all the open tabs to a single tab of bookmarks. This reduces Chrome’s memory use from a typical 1GB to 2GB to around 100MB. Individual links on the OneTab page can be restored by clicking on them, or they can all be restored by clicking “Restore All”. Sets of links can also be saved to disk or loaded using the Export/Import commands, or they can be shared by publishing them as a web page. Since the Export command produces a plain text file, it provides a simple way of copying a set of tabs from one PC to another.

http://www.zdnet.com/onetab-instantly-frees-up-to-95-percent-of-memory-in-google-chrome-7000012430/

By Miguel Guhlin, CIO Advisor

“It’s the economy, stupid!” is an exhortation that caught my ear. As one considers how leadership is handled in some school districts in regards to technology, it’s not an exaggeration to say to myself: “It’s the leadership, stupid!” Dr. Scott McLeod (Dangerously Irrelevant) makes a point that has finally come home for me in the last few months, and, at a deeper level than I understood it before. “…most of the leadership problems we run into regarding school technology implementation and integration have less to do with the technologies and more to do with failure to enact good leadership practices. It’s likely that if school leaders aren’t facilitating appropriate training or time or funding or support or policy for technology initiatives, they probably aren’t for most other, non-technology initiatives either.”

http://www.schoolcio.com/Default.aspx?tabid=136&entryid=5550