Educational Technology

by Dawn Casey-Rowe, Edudemic

Commit to exploring computer science, no matter what age group you teach. This week’s Learnist feature includes resources for the very young through to the adult level. Once you try coding and make your first simple creation, you’ll be hooked. Even if you’re hesitant, promise yourself the “Hour of Code” at the very least. If you’re currently in the classroom, dedicate one hour to your students as well. Please comment–tell the world how it went, and if you’re hooked, too. We’d be interested to hear via Twitter as well. Tag us at @Edudemic, contact me @runningdmc, or comment directly on the Learnist boards or and by following @LearnistTweets. I’d love to continue the conversation on this all-important issue.

http://www.edudemic.com/learning-how-to-code/

by Katie Lepi, Edudemic

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, two of the fastest-growing occupations are in computer science and related fields ­­– expected to grow 53.4% by 2018. Nearly 90 percent of high school graduates say they’re not interested in a career or a college major involving science, technology, engineering or math, according to a survey of over one million students who take the ACT test. The number of students who want to pursue engineering or computer science jobs is actually falling, precipitously, at just the moment when the need for those workers is soaring. (Within five years, there will be 2.4 million STEM job openings.) This crisis has even caught the attention of the White House. In November, President Obama announced a new grant program to encourage more high schools to offer job-oriented STEM education.

http://www.edudemic.com/joy-code-video/

By Nancy Revie, Guelph Mercury

In our advanced technology age, we have to go to school to learn how to go to school, all without leaving home. I know, it’s mind boggling. One thing is for certain in today’s world — not only is a field of study a part of education, but so is the delivery. Lifelong learners like me are blessed to be part of this amazing realm. No more hickory sticks; no more pencils; no more books; no more teacher’s dirty looks and if you have to go the bathroom, don’t raise your hand — just hit the pause button, if you can find it!

http://www.guelphmercury.com/living-story/4266280-learning-how-to-learn-with-technology/

By Alexander Baron, Digital Journal

If programmes of this nature are mainly US-oriented, they won’t be for long; on-line learning is not only here to stay, it is a global phenomenon, even for those who are not interested in learning either formally or less formally through a MOOC. At one time in order to do serious research you needed access to a major archive like the British Library, the Library Of Congress or at the very least a major university library. Now all that is on your desktop and more. Back in the 1990s, the British Library was adding around 5 shelf miles of material every year. Today, one website – the Internet Archive – is currently boasting 368,000,000,000 pages. Even allowing for duplication, this is staggering. Combine this with the ad hoc University of YouTube, and all the other archives on your desktop – and there is now no excuse for ignorance. If only!

http://www.digitaljournal.com/article/363699

By VOLANDES, KENNEDY AND DAVIS, the Health Care blog

Today, Khan Academy has provided over 240 million online lessons around the world in over 4000 topics. Stanford, MIT, and other universities now offer massive open online courses (MOOCs) by top professors to all comers. In fact, Harvard Business School no longer offers an introductory accounting class due to the availability of an exceptional online course from Brigham Young University. With high-quality content readily available online, the student-teacher dynamic is changing. Students are expecting excellent instruction and teachers are expecting students to be increasingly knowledgeable about subjects from online viewing. These reciprocal heightened expectations have the potential to create a more dynamic and interactive classroom experience. These innovations can also transform patient education by bringing patients into the circle of learning.

http://thehealthcareblog.com/blog/2013/12/11/the-new-tools-what-21st-century-education-can-teach-us/

by Jennifer Howard, Chronicle of Higher Ed

The early signs are promising. After only seven months, the Digital Public Library of America, or DPLA, serves as the central link in an expanding network of cultural institutions that want to make their holdings more visible to the public. It has attracted financial support from foundations and government agencies, among them the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, and, mostly recently, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. And it’s begun to attract not only users in search of far-flung information but also developers who want to build new tools and applications on its open-source platform. But its small staff also has a lot of work to do before the digital library fully realizes the vision that brought it to life.

http://chronicle.com/article/Digital-Library-of-America/143489/

by Donald Clark, Plan B

When you consider the rationale for corporate MOOCs, Udacity’s move in that direction doesn’t seem so surprising. They have forged a relationship with Google, Autodesk, and other tech companies and this is fine. EdX is being used by the steel manufacturer Tenaris in its Tenaris University to deliver learning to 27,000 employees. Udemy and others already serve this market. McAfee use MOOCs for sales training, essentially a flipped classroom model. MOOCs are no longer just an HE issue. Once an innovative digital genie escapes from the bottle, all sorts of people want to see what it can offer, and corporates are no slouches when it comes to innovation, especially when that innovation offers very low costs, quick access and global, online reach.

http://donaldclarkplanb.blogspot.com/2013/12/10-big-reasons-for-rise-of-corporate.html

by Rykesha Hudson, the Voice

The initiative is the brainchild of Hearts & Minds Challenge – a charity dedicated to helping families of children with autism. By donating old mobile phones to the charity, they can go towards an exchange for an iPad. The charity needs to collect at least 185 old, broken, damaged or unwanted mobile phones in exchange for a brand new iPad with autism-friendly apps and features. Grasmere Primary School is well known for its inclusivity for children with complex special educational needs and its close working relationship with external professionals supporting children. The scheme has already been rolled out in other areas such as Manchester, Nottingham and Ipswich where it has had great success.

http://voice-online.co.uk/article/ipads-kids-learning-difficulties

by Peter High, Forbes

PH: What do you see the impact of Udacity here in America on higher education as well as what sort of evolution do you see happening in the field?

ST: Two things, really. First is access and second is the quality of the experience. It’s really hard for people in the world to partake in higher education. They are excluded because they don’t get admitted. There is a financial barrier, and there is also a demographic barrier for entry for people in mid-career. It is important to stay up to-date in your skills and that skill set changes rapidly over time. We must be able to stay employed and when you need to find your next job, or advance in your career, this really requires more of a life-long learning perspective. So there is an access problem that Udacity addresses to give higher education to people of all ages and at all points in their life.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/peterhigh/2013/12/09/udacity-ceo-sebastian-thrun-on-the-future-of-education/

By MARK ELLERS, Athens Banner-Herald

In restaurants the raucous protests of hungry toddlers are muted. On long car rides, threats to turn the car around forgotten. Capturing the attention of so many of these tykes, while providing their moms and dads respites, are mobile applications, more commonly referred to as an apps. Apps for GPS-guided directions and online banking are helpful tools to get through the day. In recent years, though, more parents are turning over their tablets and smart phones to entertain and educate their children.

http://onlineathens.com/local-news/2013-12-08/mobile-apps-useful-learning-tools-within-limits

By AMNA H. HASHMI, Harvard Crimson

In its first explicit attempt to attract high school students, edX will collaborate with College Board and Davidson College professors to create online mini-courses in calculus, physics, and macroeconomics based on difficult topics in the Advanced Placement curriculum. Davidson professors will analyze data from College Board to create the courses. EdX, the virtual learning platform founded over a year ago by Harvard and MIT, will provide the technological tools to make these courses available to high school students, who constitute five to ten percent of its learners. “The College Board has a huge amount of data on AP scores, so Davidson scholars looked at the data and said where [students are] having the most difficulty on exams,” said edX President Anant Agarwal.

http://www.thecrimson.com/article/2013/12/9/edX-supplement-high-school/

by Karen and Kathy, Blooms Digital Web Tools

This site is created by two dedicated teachers who have identified apps and tools that can be applied at the various levels of Bloom’s Digital Taxonomy. Many resources are collected at this site.

https://sites.google.com/site/bloomsdigitalwebtool/home

By Susan Parrish, Columbian

The demand for highly trained workers in STEM fields — science, technology, engineering and math — has created a need for advanced STEM training in high school classrooms. But finding highly qualified teachers with real-world STEM experience is challenging. One key reason is that STEM salaries are considerably higher than teacher salaries. In Clark County high school classrooms, engineers and other STEM professionals are meeting the demand by volunteering in advanced STEM classes. Leading the charge to connect STEM volunteers with classroom teachers is nConnect, the educational nonprofit founded by Scott Keeney, cofounder and president of nLight, a Vancouver semiconductor laser manufacturer.

http://www.columbian.com/news/2013/dec/08/mentors-aid-stem-push/

by Malavika Velayanikal, Your Story

In the 21st century, where technology has opened up an array of opportunities for education startups, those operating in this space have to constantly think of “what can we do beyond what we had earlier”, Sachin Kelkar said. The startups have to think on the lines of continuous learning, emphasis on communication skills, critical thinking, collaboration, and digital literacy, he added. In his keynote address, he remarked that the pedagogy — the method and practice of teaching, especially as an academic subject or theoretical concept – itself has evolved. This, he said, demands that in order to succeed in this space, startups have to focus on new learning and education needs, inclusive business models, open platforms, think as disruptors and address the scale challenge.

http://yourstory.com/2013/12/education-edustars-finale/

by Larry Ferlazzo, Ferlazzo Blog

It’s time for my most popular post each year — the one on new Web 2.0 applications. There are over 1,200 lists now that are categorize and updated regularly. You can see them all here. As usual, in order to make this list, a site had to be:

* accessible to English Language Learners and non-tech savvy users.

* free-of-charge.

* appropriate for classroom use.

* completely browser-based with no download required (I occasionally make an exception to this rule).

It’s possible that a few of these sites began in 2012, but, if so, I’m including them in this list because they were “new to me” in 2013.

http://larryferlazzo.edublogs.org/2013/12/07/the-best-web-2-0-applications-for-education-in-2013/

by Bjorn Carey, Stanford

The virtual labs are Hesselink’s latest effort to bring advanced laboratories to the masses online, an approach he pioneered in 1996. That first version included several then-new features, such as remote control and scheduling of the lab, chat, faculty support and an electronic notebook. The most recent “lab in a box” generation of iLabs involved automated hardware that students could access through the Internet and control remotely from anywhere in the world. The labs took up only a few cubic feet of space, which significantly lowered operating costs compared to traditional setups.

http://news.stanford.edu/news/2013/december/lab-ina-box-120613.html

by Linda Catoe, Guilfordian

In her October 6, 2010 article, “Schools Urged To Teach Youth Digital Citizenship,” Nancy Solomon addressed the need to get youth back on the digital ethics track on NPR’s “All Things Considered” program. Solomon cited John Palfrey, of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society, who said, “We need education; we need mentoring; we need parenting …We need to have social workers figure out how to reach out in cyberspace, as well as in real space … It’s an all-hands-on-deck kind of issue.” Solomon offered solutions for a digital citizenship education campaign. Her article spotlighted Common Sense Media, a nonprofit source for kids’ movies, video games and technology information, who had gone as far as to write a digital citizenship curriculum to assist schools in teaching children “to think critically about the Internet and make ethical decisions about its use.”

http://www.guilfordian.com/features/2013/12/06/out-of-control-online-behavior-calls-for-in-school-digital-citizenship-campaign/

by Vinton Cerf, Project-Syndicate

Once students are online, there is no limit to what they can do with the vast amount of information available to them or how they will collaborate with and learn from one another. Imagine students in Malaysia working with students around the world on a weather project. They could conduct virtual experiments, work simultaneously to update data in a spreadsheet or document, and create a shared final presentation. Where desktop or laptop computers are not widely available, students might use smartphones or tablets to augment their learning. For example, they could turn to sophisticated mobile biology apps that let them interact with a 3D version of a cell, or polling apps that they could use to conduct a psychology experiment.

http://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/vint-cerf-goes-inside-the-online-revolution-in-education

By Katie Lepi, Edudemic

Interactive whiteboards are a great classroom tool. Many teachers use them to project and capture images – basically as a high tech, connected chalkboard. While definitely useful in these ways, the handy infographic below describes using your interactive white board that way as letting it go ‘underused’. So how do you ensure that this great piece of classroom technology isn’t underused? The graphic below outlines eight different ways to ‘exploit the pedagogical potential’ of this tool. Whether a whiteboard is a new tool to you or you’re looking to use yours in different ways, keep reading to find some new ideas!

http://www.edudemic.com/power-of-interactive-whiteboard/

By Colleen Lee, Edudemic

most-shared-tweetsSo you listened to all those people who go on and on about their personal learning network (PLN) and signed up for Twitter. You still aren’t sure ‘this is for you’ and so there you sit – with your ‘egg’ profile picture, following 5 or 6 people and you’re thinking “What’s the deal?” How do you make the leap from admittedly passive Twitter newbie to ‘active’ participant? This post deals with some things to keep in mind as you work to get better at Twitter and grow your PLN.

http://www.edudemic.com/get-better-at-twitter/

by AZOM

The UK National Physical Laboratory (NPL) has just launched a new e-Learning course, Introduction to Metrology, which will make a range of measurement expertise available to trainees through their computers, tablets and smartphones. Measurement expertise at the click of a button. NPL is uniquely positioned as a world-leading centre of excellence in developing and applying the most accurate measurement standards, science and technology, and has a track record of delivering on-site measurement training with real business impact. The e-Learning courses are made up of a series of video modules with printable slides, self-paced exercises and a selection of additional content. The courses are accessible across multiple devices, allowing trainees to get training on demand and at their own convenience.

http://www.azom.com/news.aspx?newsID=39311