Educational Technology

by Didjitale

Coding is not a thing only for geeks anymore. It has become part of everything that surrounds us, and jobs of the present and the future are in direct connection to it. One of the best things in the recent years is that you can learn to code even for free. Here’s a list of 5 resources to learn coding for free.

http://digjitale.com/2015/12/5-sites-that-teach-you-coding-for-free/

by Kelly Walsh, University Business

Most campus leaders surveyed by UB expect tech spending to increase or stay the same. Today’s rapidly evolving technology has higher education on the move, literally and figuratively. Mobile devices are powering a shift to more learning on the go, driving increased video consumption and requiring IT to fund ongoing bandwidth and infrastructure expansion. Tech is enabling big changes in how colleges deliver academic programs and grant credentials. Increased automation allows differentiated instruction at a level never before possible. With professors and students taking advantage of these opportunities, technology budgets in support of academic initiatives should grow in 2016.

http://www.universitybusiness.com/article/outlook-technology-learning-shifts-infrastructure-lifts

By Jaime Adame, Arkansas Online

Expanded tutoring and other academic support are in the works for UA’s Center for Learning and Student Success, said Charlotte Lee, the center’s director. Two full-time assistant directors will be hired soon to help manage and train students like Khang to help their peers. This spring, a pilot program will begin offering online tutoring support for online classes, Lee said. The university may also expand academic coaching, which involves one-on-one sessions between students and professional staff members to improve study habits and deal with anxiety. Currently, the center employs two part-time academic coaches, Lee said.

http://www.arkansasonline.com/news/2015/dec/25/tutoring-to-grow-go-online-at-ua-201512-1/

by the Atlanta Journal Constitution

Forsyth County Schools officials have laid out their online learning plan for any weather-related school closings days this winter. The district said teachers will post all assignments by 9 a.m. on itslearning.com. Student work will be due in three days upon returning to school. Elementary schools will follow an “A” or “B” schedule to balance the student workload, but middle and high schools will follow the normal schedule for the day. Those students will finish lessons for classes they would have attended that day.

http://www.ajc.com/news/news/local/forsyth-schools-spell-out-learning-plans-for-close/npp5W/

by India Education Diary

The government of India has approved a scheme for Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) to provide best quality e-learning resources to students across country. An Indian platform called Study Webs of Active-Learning for Young Aspiring Minds (SWAYAM) is being developed for hosting of MOOCs. SWAYAM-MOOCs project is intended to address the needs of school level 9-12 to Under Graduate and Post Graduate students, covering all disciplines. About 2000 courses shall be launched, with a support from network/Cloud that can support 10 Lakh concurrent users and up to 3 Crores Learners.

http://indiaeducationdiary.in/Shownews.asp?newsid=36953

by GBTIMES BEIJING

As part of the smog red-alert in Beijing, and now Tianjin, online platforms have been helping to keep thousands of students in Beijing learning. “Li Ruohan, could you tell me how to solve this question?” “My answer is…” This back-and-forth has taken place during an online class between teacher Li Qiaomei and her student Li Ruohan, who are both from Beijing Jingshan School. Though the teacher has been unable to give guidance face-to-face over the past two days, it’s not a problem for Li Qiaomei, who is helping her students prepare for the upcoming college entrance exams in June.

http://gbtimes.com/china/classes-go-online-following-pollution-red-alert

By Will Knight, Technology Review

One researcher has developed a simple way to let robots generate remarkably sophisticated behaviors. If they are to become useful assistants and workmates, robots will need to figure out how to do complicated things in unfamiliar settings. For all the talk of machines becoming intelligent, getting a sophisticated robot to do anything complex, like grabbing a heavy object and moving it from one place to another, still requires many hours of careful, patient programming. Igor Mordatch, a postdoctoral fellow at the University of California, Berkeley, is working on a different approach–one that could help hasten the arrival of robot helpers, if not overlords. He gives a robot an end goal and an algorithm that lets it figure out how to achieve the goal for itself. That’s the kind of independence that will be necessary for, say, a home assistance bot to reliably fetch you a cup of coffee from the counter.

http://www.technologyreview.com/news/544521/a-master-algorithm-lets-robots-teach-themselves-to-perform-complex-tasks/

By Tara García Mathewson, Education Dive

The EQUIP experimental sites program may offer a more direct path for alternative programs to go mainstream. Schmidt sees dissonance with the traditional structures of the accreditation system, but he says the company is in talks with traditional colleges and universities about potential partnerships. “Envisioning a program that meets accreditation requirements can be very different than a program that meets the requirements of the marketplace, and we will maintain our focus on what the market requests,” Schmidt said. “If university partners can adapt their focus to ours, we are willing partners.” With exploding demand for software developers, there seems to be room — in the near-term at least — for training programs of all types. Providers like Bloc are aiming to provide additional skills typically found in four-year degrees.

http://www.educationdive.com/news/can-a-coding-bootcamp-replace-a-four-year-degree/410059/

By Roger Riddell, Education Dive

Everyone realizes when you get to the job market that networking and who you know matters, but the education system is sort of silent on that matter. You obviously have the luck of who you end up going to school with that may help you open doors, but we don’t organize students’ networks in a deliberate way from a young age, or even up through college. It’s sort of only when you go to the career office in college and there’s a list of alumni that you understand that there’s this idea of a network. I want to call out on two fronts, one, just the fact that we don’t tell kids this, and I think that’s a disservice. But from an equity perspective, the fact that we’re leaving this up to the luck of who you know through family connections or where you end up going to college, I think, is worrisome. And I think that the achievement gap conversation has gotten us a long way around content and skill gaps, but it’s ignoring this piece around networks.

http://www.educationdive.com/news/christensen-institutes-fisher-schools-must-expand-students-social-capita/411043/

By JACOB RYAN, WFLP

Through the online learning program called Treehouse, offered at no cost by the Louisville Free Public Library system, she began learning the basics of coding. “Just teaching myself,” she said. She liked it, so she enrolled in Code Louisville — a free 12-week online coding workshop that anyone with a Louisville Free Public Library card can access — to further her learning. Then, things started clicking. “I started finding my niche, and that was new to me,” she said. “It was easier to work on my self-confidence. My view about me started changing.” She kept enrolling in Code Louisville sessions to learn the finer points of frontend and backend web development. Becky Steele, project coordinator for Code Louisville, said many of the program participants are like Johnson. They want to reinvent themselves. But Steele said Johnson has more — an “insatiable desire to improve.”

http://wfpl.org/escape-public-housing-louisville-woman-turns-to-coding/

by Karis Hustad, Chicago Inno

Northwestern Kellogg professor Gad Allon has been quietly experimenting with ways to not only get students to sign up for these courses, but actually finish them. In addition to teaching operations courses at Kellogg, he teaches “Scaling Operations: Linking Strategy and Execution,” a MOOC through Coursera. It is a free course, but students can pay to get a certificate of accomplishment. Recently he and two other Kellogg researchers, Jan Van Mieghem and Dennis J. Zhang, tested out their hypothesis that emailed “nudges” could push students to talk with classmates and check out a discussion board. That, in turn, could help students stay engaged, and therefore be more likely to complete a course. This course had about 24,000 students and about 4,200 of them submitted at least one of the weekly quizzes.

http://chicagoinno.streetwise.co/2015/12/21/as-online-courses-evolve-could-a-nudge-help-people-finish-moocs/

by eSchool News

Chromebooks—the lightweight laptops that run software from the Internet instead of a local hard drive—have skyrocketed in popularity within the last few years. In the second half of 2014, Chromebooks surpassed iPads as the most popular devices sold to U.S. schools. Why have Chromebooks become so popular in education? What do you need to know before adopting chromebooks in your institution? Explore the information below to learn the greatest benefits and challenges to implementing Chromebooks in education—as well as best practices and keys to success.

http://www.eschoolnews.com/ercs/best-practices-for-chromebook-adoption/

by eSchoolNews

ParentSquare aims to improve communication, organization, and engagement between parents and schools. Parents can access posts, events, photos, files, and a directory on the site. School administrators and teachers can post polls and use two-way messaging via the Web, email, and text messages. For a fee, users can send voice messages via text to parents. In the posts, administrators can see how many parents viewed the post, ask for items, request volunteers, get RSVPs, or even fundraise. Events are integrated right into the school calendar.

http://www.eschoolnews.com/2015/12/21/app-of-the-week-one-stop-communication-tool-for-parents-and-schools/

by Jeffrey R. Young, Chronicle of Higher Ed

Concerns about Yik Yak and analysis of MOOCs and online teaching were among the most popular stories this past year on our Wired Campus blog. Each year we run the numbers to see which items drew the most reader attention, and this year’s list highlights a continuing interest in understanding how technology — and online education, in particular — might change college as we know it. And while massive open online courses have largely fallen out of the national headlines, three of the top 10 articles in 2015 involved MOOCs (in one case, charting their fade from prominence).

http://chronicle.com/blogs/wiredcampus/looking-back-at-the-year-in-ed-tech/57704

By Dian Schaffhauser, THE Journal

A public elementary and middle school has teamed up with a local college to deliver professional development to help teachers add computer science activities into their curriculum. Roosevelt Island Public School, a K-8 school, will begin working with Cornell Tech, a graduate school, to help deliver tech education to children in the New York City area. Teachers have already received a six-week introduction to computer science. And the two schools have co-hosted an event to introduce families of Roosevelt Island PS to the program and lay out the concepts their children would be learning. As part of that, family members took a coding workshop and learned how to create a holiday-themed game.

https://thejournal.com/articles/2015/12/17/k8-school-partners-with-university-to-boost-teacher-computer-science-skills.aspx

By Dian Schaffhauser, THE Journal

American teachers want much more say over what education technology comes into their classrooms. A survey conducted by a teacher marketplace and an education technology “accelerator” found that while only 38 percent of teachers currently have a role in the decision-making process of ed tech, 63 percent want to be in charge of those decisions. Right now, almost half say those choices are decided by education leaders at the school, district or regional levels. The survey was conducted among 4,300 teachers by TES Global, which runs tes.com, an online community and marketplace for teachers, and the Jefferson Education Accelerator, founded at the University of Virginia’s Curry School of Education to help develop and scale ed tech solutions.

https://thejournal.com/articles/2015/12/16/teachers-we-want-more-control-over-ed-tech-decisions.aspx

by Merris Stansbury, eCampus News

In the midst of low retention rates and lingering perceptions of faculty around the quality of online learning, it’s never been more important to identify what makes effective, and motivated, online faculty, says Dr. Lisa Marie Portugal, education professor at the University of Phoenix. Knowing what skills and motivations are needed by online faculty “may be useful to stakeholders such as administrators, faculty mentors, faculty trainers, and faculty interested in employment in the modality so that identifiable and realistic criteria may be available upon which to base future hiring standards, employment practices, training, and decisions about teaching online,” she explained. “Insights about procedures and practices have been identified that may be effective in helping to develop initial training programs, faculty mentor supports, administrative decisions, and on-going faculty training.

http://www.ecampusnews.com/uncategorized/popular-2015-skills-237/

by Amanda Bohman, News Miner

Melissa Harter, the new digital literacy librarian, teared up as she told the story. The task of finding the obituary was easy for Harter, who is well-versed in the digital world, but for many people, even in 2015, the Internet is a mystery. It’s Harter’s job to guide them. The daughter of a journalist, the 50-year-old mother of two is passionate about helping people find information. The library created the new digital literacy position in September after noticing a need. “People will buy their first laptop. They come in. They are not sure where to start,” Harter said. “You have to be ready to drop something at any moment and help people.” Those who need a digital literacy guide include job seekers, elders who want to take an online course and students working on a research project.

http://www.newsminer.com/news/local_news/library-focuses-on-digital-literacy/article_bb8fce6a-a6f2-11e5-a766-9bf30ec09ac8.html

by Allison Thompson, Sheboygan Press

Ask an adult what they wish they understood more clearly before heading into the real world, and many will answer how to better manage household finances. A quick glance at Americans’ collective debt, which totals more than $11.52 trillion, proves that there are lessons to be learned. To help improve that knowledge, Kohler Credit Union has partnered with some area middle and high school teachers to provide their classes access to Bonzai, an online education tool designed to introduce students to adult dilemmas such as managing debt, reconciling bank statements, balancing budgets and making tradeoffs. The program features real-life simulations that build financial knowledge in a format that is fun and easy to comprehend.

http://www.sheboyganpress.com/story/money/2015/12/19/students-learn-financial-literacy/77488184/

by Georgetown University

A new “Blended Classroom” allows students in the Master of Science in Finance (MSF) program at Georgetown University’s McDonough School of Business to participate either online or on campus during weekly live class sessions. The new @GeorgetownMSF blended classroom is the future of online, on-campus learning. While adding an on-campus component to what started as an online program might seem counterintuitive, it is the beginning of what MSF Director Allan Eberhart sees as the shape of classrooms to come – an environment where students work independently through the “Anytime Media” platform, complete with animated lectures and searchable transcripts, and then gather in the Blended Classroom for case discussions. On-campus students fill the first three rows and the online students “sit” in the “fourth row” — a large monitor that displays crisp, real-time videos of up to 40 students.

http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20151218006088/en/Georgetown-MSF-Technology-Shape-Future-Classroom-Learning