Educational Technology

By Toni Fuhrman, Campus Technology

In a recent webinar, Gartner research director Chris Silva discussed key strategies to take mobile into the future, including flexibility, general-purpose mobility and unified endpoint management. Ask the right questions. Phase in your mobile implementations. Keep your eye on a unified endpoint management goal. That’s Gartner’s advice to organizations – including colleges and universities – supporting mobile in the IT environment. In a recent public webinar, available as a recording, Gartner research director Chris Silva discussed these and other strategies for keeping up with mobile trends in the coming years.

http://campustechnology.com/articles/2015/04/27/key-strategies-to-take-mobile-beyond-2015.aspx

by University Business

To begin using Turnitin Scoring Engine, institutions provide their existing rubrics, along with a seed set of de-identified student essays and reliable existing scores. These texts are analyzed to build a custom scoring model for each new writing context. Turnitin Scoring Engine learns to value the same aspects of writing as the instructors at an institution. Turnitin Scoring Engine also automatically tests itself for reliability by comparing the scores it generates to the instructors’ original scores. When this test is passed, the program is easily embedded into existing institutional assessment environments, ready to score any number of new essays or writing submissions. Each student can receive automated scoring for any number of submissions per assignment or writing task.

http://www.universitybusiness.com/content/turnitin-announces-availability-turnitin-scoring-engine-automated-writing-assessment

by Jeffrey R. Young, Chronicle of Higher Ed

The experiment will begin this summer, with eight Apple Watches the university purchased for the project. Penn State plans to expand the research to more students in the fall. We caught up with Kyle Bowen, director of education-technology services at Penn State, to hear more about the project, and his thoughts on the possible role of wearables in teaching and learning. Linked below is an edited version of the conversation.

http://chronicle.com/blogs/wiredcampus/wearable-teaching-college-to-experiment-with-apple-watch-as-learning-tool/56459

By Tara García Mathewson, Education Dive

Arizona State University announced its new Global Freshman Academy last week, offering students anywhere in the world the chance to take their freshman year in a massive open online course format —​ but with a catch. The academy, a partnership with edX, will have eight courses, all with final exams and the option to pay no more than $800 per course for credit, but the students will not be eligible for financial aid, The Chronicle of Higher Education reports. According to Inside Higher Ed, the ASU initiative may also face accreditation troubles because of the massive projected growth of its freshman student population, the evaluation methods for the course, and the potential differences in the quality of the course compared to on-campus freshman classes.

http://www.educationdive.com/news/no-aid-for-students-in-asus-for-credit-moocs/391114/

by Tim Dodd, AFR News

As calls grow for more widespread knowledge of computer coding – the latest from Business Council of Australia president Catherine Livingstone – the University of Adelaide has launched its latest MOOC Think. Create. Code. through MOOC provider edX. The course shows learners how to code by creating artistic images and animations, which will develop computational thinking skills and teach concepts which can be transferred to other coding environments. “For many of us, barely a day goes past without recording a video, taking and editing photos, and sharing digital content across multiple applications. But how well do we understand the technology we’re using, and how is digital information created and manipulated?” the course designers ask. Over 18,000 students have enrolled in the course which started on April 30. But it’s not too late to join.

http://www.afr.com/news/policy/education/learn-the-artistic-side-of-computer-coding-20150501-1mwemk

By TIM LLOYD, St. Louis Pubic Radio

Whether it’s maintaining privacy online, or knowing how connected students are at home, even well-funded school districts can have a hard time keeping up with the speed of digital change. With that in mind, superintendents and administrators from more than 35 districts across the Midwest will gather for The Future Ready Regional Summit in St. Louis Tuesday to share ideas on how to weave technology into classroom instruction. “We do not believe that computers will replace teachers,” said Tom Murray, director of state and district digital learning for the Washington D.C.-based non-profit Alliance for Excellent Education. “But we believe teachers using high quality digital learning will replace teachers that do not.”

http://news.stlpublicradio.org/post/school-superintendents-gather-share-ideas-keeping-pace-digital-changes

By Kristen Hicks, Edudemic

While for some teachers, iPads in the classroom are already a familiar part of everyday life, as of Pearson’s 2014 Student Mobile Device Survey, only 16% of students attended schools that provide tablets 1:1. For all the news stories and chatter in the educational industry about using iPads in education, many teachers haven’t gotten a good look at just what the technology can do for their students. But there’s reason to believe that could well change in coming years. The same Pearson report found that:

51% of students think their school should be providing them with tablets.

89% say tablets make learning more fun.

81% say using a tablet in the classroom allows them to learn in the way that’s best for them.

71% believe tablets help students perform better in class.

http://www.edudemic.com/ipad-tips-classroom/

by Samantha Cowan, TakePart

Although India boasts the fastest-growing economy in the world, recent headlines have shed light on a darker side of the country: its sexual assault epidemic. High-profile cases—including that of a woman allegedly attacked by her Uber driver, and the government’s decision to ban the film India’s Daughter, centering on the 2012 fatal attack of a 23-year-old woman on a bus in Delhi—have made women’s safety an urgent issue. While the government has developed harsher punishments to discourage assailants and protect women, a group of young engineers is working to create a new, online solution that can help prevent assault from occurring in the first place. Known as “We Are Women,” five female students from India’s Amrita University—Anjana S, Athira S, Durga S, Pooja Prakash and Sreedevi Pillai—have developed a virtual self-defense game to teach women and girls how to respond when they feel threatened.

https://www.takepart.com/article/2015/04/25/india-sexual-assault-prevention-game

by Thibaud Andre, Tech.co

E-learning has been one of the biggest recent online trends. China is currently the market showing the biggest growth. Among all the questions related to open educational resources and e-learning, the most important one remains how technology will affect learning processes and the way students are trained. There are Already 100 Million E-learners in China! For students around the world, and especially in China, the development of the Internet usage has been an opportunity to get access to a limitless amount of information. Nowadays, the training and development of students require learning processes beyond traditional academics. This has led to the rise of a multitude of platforms dedicated to a new e-learning market. The global E-learning market is expected to continue its rapid growth in the coming years. As shown in this Docebo report, the last five years have seen an inflow of $6 billion investment in the E-learning industry worldwide. The global market will generate revenues of more than $15 billion by 2016.

http://tech.co/e-learning-changing-education-processes-china-2015-04