Educational Technology

By Mary Claudia, Edudemic

The 21st Century has opened the flood gates for newer learning tools. Among the better known tools are Google apps – they are powerful, allow you to work out a strategy for learning and generally enhance students’ classroom experiences. Here are some tips that will not only bring cheer to your students but also to you.

http://www.edudemic.com/google-apps-in-the-classroom/

By Paolo Leva, Edudemic

The number of popular social networks may seem overwhelming. We can share links, ideas, comments, jokes, pictures and everything else, and new social media options seem to pop-up everyday. This may discourage learners, teachers, instructional designers and eLearning professionals from using the fantastic benefits of a social presence on the internet. Social media may overlap – and they often do in some ways – but they are not equivalent. Each offers its own unique set of attributes. Some of them focus on identity, some on topics, some on sharing feelings. And within each group there are many important and crucial nuances to keep them apart.

http://www.edudemic.com/8-questions-answered-by-popular-social-networks/

by Carl Straumsheim, Inside Higher Ed

Despite the buzz about cloud computing and massive open online courses in the last year, colleges and universities are either slow to adopt these technologies or skeptical of their potential to provide a sustainable future for higher education, according to the findings in the 2013 Campus Computing Survey. Four of the top five issues chosen by the CIOs, CTOs and other high-ranking IT officials surveyed all relate to IT as a service, from helping faculty use technology in the classroom to leveraging resources to help students succeed. Those findings may indicate that colleges and universities are moving away from focusing on specific products and vendors and toward a more holistic view of technology. Institutions across the spectrum rate faculty training as the most pressing issue, with the lone exception of community colleges, which singled out student success.

http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2013/10/17/survey-shows-it-service-dominates-top-priorities-among-university-it-officials

by Jeff Dunn, Edudemic

When you start bringing iPads, iPhones, and iPod Touches into your classroom, you’re opening up a Pandora’s Box of potential problems. For starters, you might not be totally sure which apps are the best ones to install at the start. You may not be sure which games are useful or which productivity apps are worth their salt. I’ve recently stumbled across an effective chart that actually ranks education apps according to a few critical criteria. The visual from Grasping For Objectivity details 29 different ‘edutainment’ apps that are both free and paid. I like how each one is laid out and ranked accordingly. The apps are each given an overall score and it’s based on a plethora of criteria:

http://www.edudemic.com/effective-education-apps/

By Miguel Guhlin, CIO Advisor

Last December, Jean Tower (director of technology for Northborough-Southborough Public Schools in MA) shared a description of what would be discussed at CoSN’s CTO Forum, naming it “The Undiscussables of Technology Leadership”: If your people are too afraid to talk to you about what’s happening, challenge your thinking, then the group is broken. When I tweeted a question about this and posted it in the Google+ Community Scott McLeod started on School Leadership, Scott asked, What do you mean by undiscussables? To this question, Jean replied: The undiscussables are the conversations that take real courage to initiate. When we want to really challenge the status quo. We sometimes need to go after the sacred cow practices and those are tough discussions – almost, undiscussable.

http://www.schoolcio.com/Default.aspx?tabid=136&entryid=6523

by School CIO

Whether you’re new to Twitter or have 5,000 LinkedIn connections, one thing’s for sure: social media keeps getting more popular and more powerful. If you haven’t used it for your own professional development, what are you waiting for? Too overwhelming? We get that. To help you start, we gathered advice from some expert users.

http://www.schoolcio.com/cio-feature-articles/0109/school-cio-using-social-media-as-a-professional-learning-tool/54291

by James G. Mazoue, Educause

Among the widely debated list of transgressions, MOOCs:

• Fail to engage students in effective pedagogical practices
• Deny students mentoring experiences with scholars passionate about their research
• Lack the rigor of an on-campus curriculum
• Provide, at best, superficial and narrowly defined training rather than deep understanding
• Are an attempt to replace faculty

http://www.educause.edu/ero/article/five-myths-about-moocs

By Hannah Winston, Chronicle of Higher Ed

As professors step out from behind lecterns to stand beside laptops or in front of cameras—or both—the top concern for campus information-technology departments across the country is how they can help faculty members move smoothly into the digital age of learning. That’s one finding of the Campus Computing Project’s annual survey of senior technology administrators, released on Thursday. The survey found that as technology continues to grow on campuses—through both online classes and the increasing ubiquity of mobile devices—the ability of faculty members to use and integrate technology is a big concern. Another worry is the effectiveness of information-technology spending.

http://chronicle.com/article/Helping-Faculty-Members-Use/142377/

by Technology Review

The length of the messages we send on Twitter is getting shorter, raising important questions about how the social messaging service is changing the way we communicate, say researchers. Back in the old days, say in 2009, Twitter was a relatively unknown social network that was beginnign to spread like wildfire. In 2007, Twitter users posted some 400,000 tweets per quarter, by June 2010, they were posting 65 million each day. Today, there are 200 million registered users who send around 400 million tweets every day.
http://www.technologyreview.com/view/520311/tweets-have-become-shorter-since-2009-say-computer-scientists/

By Samit Sarkar, Polygon

The Penn State University professors behind a massive open online course (MOOC) on infectious-disease epidemics are running an online game, Moocdemic, that will allow players to see how a disease spreads across the globe. Moocdemic is tied to “Epidemics – the dynamics of infectious diseases,” a free, eight-week online course offered by Penn State. More than 27,000 students have registered for the sessions, according to Marcel Salathé, an infectious disease biologist at the university’s Center for Infectious Disease Dynamics and one of the instructors of the course. “We’re going to run a massive online epidemic here in parallel to this course with you, the participants — virtually, of course,” said Salathé.

http://www.polygon.com/2013/10/14/4837524/moocdemic-virtual-disease-epidemic-online-mobile-game

BY EVAN DRAIM, Daily Princetonian

Former University President William G. Bowen GS ’58 argued that “online education is here to stay” in a lecture in McCosh 50 on Monday night, saying that universities must work to find solutions to the challenges posed by technological advances. The national discourse surrounding the growing prevalence of massive open online courses, or MOOCs, has become increasingly relevant to the University in recent years, where several professors have adopted Coursera, a massive online education platform that allows professors to offer online courses to students off-campus.

http://dailyprincetonian.com/news/2013/10/former-u-president-bowen-gs-58-argues-online-education-is-here-to-stay/

by Lydia Saad, Brandon Busteed, and Mitchell Ogisi, Gallup
Still something of a novelty, online education is seen relatively positively by Americans for giving students a wide range of curricula options and for providing good value for the money. However, Americans tend to think it provides less rigorous testing and grading, less qualified instructors, and has less credence with employers compared with traditional, classroom-based education.

http://www.gallup.com/poll/165425/online-education-rated-best-value-options.aspx

by NINA FOWLER, Venture Village

There are now at least six organisations in Europe that host MOOCs – UnX, Miríada X, OpenupEd, OpenCourseWorld, Iversity and FutureLearn. Since there are no geographic barriers for MOOCs, they compete directly with other providers around the world. Coursera, the largest provider worldwide, hit four million student sign-ups in July 2013 (less impressive than it sounds as MOOC providers tend to experience high drop-out rates). It offers 460 courses in 13 languages – though the bulk are in English – in partnership with about 80 education institutions, including top-end universities in Europe.

http://venturevillage.eu/europe-mooc-berlin-iversity

By Derek Myers, Fayette Observer

Six MOOCs are available from iversity at launch, with its initial curriculum spanning 24 courses in total (15 of which are in English, with the rest in German). The other courses will start at later dates this year and on into 2014. iversity originally planned to finance 10 MOOCs at launch. Riecke said it’s been able to co-finance “some” of the additional 14 in its curriculum out of existing budgets, but the “bulk of financing” came from the universities and individual professors who are offering the course content. The MOOCs are being provided by a range of continental European universities, including Hamburg University and the University of Osnabrück, and individual professors from Europe and the U.S.

http://fayetteadvocate.com/archives/11325/2013/10/14/europes-iversity-launches-1st-moocs-with-100k-students-curriculum-of-24-courses/

by Christina Quattrocchi, EdSurge

Pair MOOC provider, Coursera, with teacher training experts at the New Teacher Center, and you get a different breed of professional development–one where teachers choose and there are options for everyone. This is in stark contrast to the one-size-fits-all trainings typically mandated by districts. Coursera began its foray into the teacher professional development world last May when it launched new partnerships with the likes of John Hopkins University School of Education, Relay Graduate School, and the New Teacher Center. Now after the first three teacher PD courses have wrapped up, EdSurge takes a look at what happened, who showed up, and what teacher PD really looks like when it gets MOOC’ed.

https://www.edsurge.com/n/2013-10-14-coursera-teaches-teachers-anywhere-anytime

By Katie Lepi, Edudemic

Every teacher has a technology wishlist. Whether you have one computer in your classroom or thirty iPads, there’s always a little something that we wish we had to make something a little more fun or a little easier. Sometimes, our really slow computers or lack of resources really make us wish for a technology makeover. This fun infographic from We Are Teachers showcases seven tongue-in-cheek signs that your school might need a technology makeover. They created this awhile back when they were running a contest for a technology makeover, but the humor in them still rings true today. For those of you dealing with eight year old computers and chalk boards that use real chalk in your classrooms, you’ll surely get a laugh.

http://www.edudemic.com/7-signs-school-needs-technology-makeover/

By Scott O’Connell, The MetroWest Daily News

Posing it as an alternative for districts wary of the coming public virtual schools in the state, Virtual High School is now offering a fully online course-load for students at its member schools. The Maynard-based collaborative, which offers online courses to hundreds of schools across the country, including several in MetroWest, has already enrolled 15 students in a pilot of the new full-time program, according to chief operating officer Carol Ribeiro, and is accepting more signups for the spring. Unlike the state’s Commonwealth Virtual Schools, which are autonomous, VHS’s program allows students to remain part of their home districts. “It’s an alternative for schools that want to keep students in their districts, and an alternative for kids who want to stay in their districts,” said Ribeiro, who added those schools, and not VHS, will still solely have the ability to grant degrees to students enrolled in the online program.

http://www.metrowestdailynews.com/news/x1155177413/Virtual-High-School-offering-full-time-program

By Kirstin Bernabe, Philippine Daily Inquirer

Technology is changing different aspects of life and education is no exception. In the Grade 10 science class of Ilah Yumul at Xavier School, students follow her PowerPoint lecture on the discovery of DNA through their tablets. They swipe and scroll down their e-books, type e-notes and highlight information with an e-Stabilo. With the Xavier’s one-to-one program that started in 2007, each high school student brings to class a device loaded with applications and e-textbooks. The gadgets of choice are tabs for freshmen, sophomores and juniors, and laptops for seniors. Initially, the goal was simply to eliminate the need to carry so many heavy books by having digital versions in mobile devices. But, as e-learning picked up steam, teachers and students realized technology offered more than mobility.

http://newsinfo.inquirer.net/506769/balancing-high-tech-and-old-fashioned-mentoring

by Gina Sipley, PolicyMic

Queens Borough Public Library, alongside the Chicago Public Library and the Scottsdale Public Library, are reimagining the library as a digital space; one where books will no longer be the focal point. The libraries of tomorrow might be digital, but too often going digital, like going green, simply means reducing costs and cutting public services. With more and more millennials enrolled in on-line courses, MOOCS, distance degree programs, and other higher education opportunities not tied to a university campus, the public library is a central site of learning and innovation. As the books slowly disappear, and the university campus becomes virtual, it is essential that digital libraries maintain a prominent public space for local collaboration.

http://www.policymic.com/articles/67457/surprise-it-s-the-golden-age-of-libraries

By Aviva Hope Rutkin, Technology Review

Scot Osterweil is the creative director of the Education Arcade and a professor at the MIT Media Lab. He spoke at MIT Technology Review’s EmTech conference about why educators need to encourage more creativity—and how that could help us build a better, more leisurely future. What we need to do, to some degree, is sort of return to an era of free-range children, where there’s more play, more discovery. The problem in America right now is that kids are having less time to explore and invent and discover. The one space where I think kids are still being as adventuresome as they ever were is in the space of games. I don’t mean to say that all education could be done through games, but I think we can look at what happens in game play and we should try to model that and make more of our education system like that, where we present kids with authentic challenges, give them freedom to really explore those challenges and invent solutions.

http://www.technologyreview.com/news/520216/three-questions-for-tech-education-pioneer-scot-osterweil/

by Virtual College

The Virtual College team keep a close eye on the latest trends in e-learning, so we can advise our clients on any interesting developments. One trend we have been examining recently is ‘Open Badges’. We have noted a growing interest in Open Badges and thought it would be useful to offer a simple comparison between e-portfolios and Open Badges and take a look at how they will interact.

http://www.virtual-college.co.uk/news/EPortfolios-and-Open-Badges-newsitems-118.aspx