Educational Technology

by Emory Bryan, News on 6

Students at Tulsa Community College can now get free textbooks online for some classes. This can save students several hundred dollars a semester. Biology Professor Jennifer Kneafsey has 24 years in the classroom and knows a thing or two about her students. “I used the traditional publisher’s books for many, many years, but I could see what a burden it was for my students to come up with the 200 or so dollars,” she said. So, after watching that struggle, she jumped at a new option. Kneafsey said, “When the students access the textbook online, it’s completely free.” The textbooks are from an online publisher named OpenStax.

http://www.newson6.com/story/32844649/tcc-offering-online-free-textbooks-for-some-classes

by Svetlana Dotsenko and Thomas Hwang, Forbes

Educational technology is booming. Technology is helping to redefine how we learn, obtain skills, and get credentialed. That value proposition has captured public attention and attracted record amounts of venture capital funding. But the vision for edtech is, and should be, much broader. After all, the education market serves not only to instruct but also to invent. And educational technology can transform the “other half” of this equation by streamlining the research process. The need for research innovation is arguably strongest at universities.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/ciocentral/2016/08/23/the-future-of-educational-technology-how-edtech-is-still-ignoring-its-biggest-market/#17d81cb3640b

By Charlie Chung, EdSurge

In a Meetup hosted by EdSurge on Aug. 17, more than 100 people gathered to hear speakers present how their organizations are embracing the future of digital learning. Held at NovoEd’s headquarters, five speakers gave their six-minute lightning talks and then led a smaller group discussion with attendees. Researcher Candace Thille of Stanford University, notable for developing the Open Learning Initiative at Carnegie-Mellon University, now at Stanford, emphasized starting with the learner when we consider edtech research and products. Collaborating with her Stanford colleagues, Thille has been looking for ways to take additional learner factors into account, particularly social-psychological components.

https://www.edsurge.com/news/2016-08-23-5-higher-ed-innovators-share-challenges-ideas-for-the-future-of-digital-learning

By Dian Schaffhauser, THE Journal

Minecraft just received another education boost. An ed tech startup that encourages students to build their own mods for the popular online virtual world game has received a second grant from the National Science Foundation that will enable it to continue development of its coding environment for novice programmers. ThoughtSTEM received its initial NSF funding in 2015 to test the use of its Minecraft extension, LearnToMod, for teaching rural middle school students how to program. During that phase, the company said it taught computer science (CS) concepts to “over 50,000 students,” who produced 1.5 million Minecraft mods. A mod is a customization to the block-oriented game that allows the player to add new characters, change the look of objects and modify the environment, among other activities.

https://thejournal.com/articles/2016/08/25/startup-receives-new-nsf-grant-to-expand-minecraft-student-reach.aspx

by Ed Cooke, Huffington Post

Edtech, it’s the new tech buzzword, and it’s growing – fast. According to a new report by Edtech UK, the global education technology sector was worth £45bn in 2015 and poised to reach £129bn by 2020. There are a lot of UK companies tackling digital education, and more specifically in our case the online language-learning space, and you can see why – technology offers us a completely new way of learning and exploits the brain’s capacity in a way that is far more fun and engaging than reading a textbook. Edtech is moving education out of the classroom and onto our mobile phones, making it accessible to anyone and everyone, and for little or no cost. With companies setting up new apps to help you revise and massive open online courses that allow you to complete an entire university-level course digitally, the possibilities for learning are now endless.

http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/ed-cooke/how-technology-is-revolut_b_11659018.html

By Corinne Hyde, Parent Herald

Social media has become a central part of our daily lives, and many conversations we have with friends, family members, and peers shift seamlessly between online and offline communication. With the surge of social media and digital communication, it’s no surprise that it has also made its mark in the classroom. In addition to social media, digital literacy-the ability to find, analyze, share, and create content using digital technology such as computers, tablets, phones, websites, and apps-has become a hot topic for educators over the past few years. Because of this shift in education, it’s crucial that all current and future educators become familiar with how to use social media and technology to meet learning objectives for students and become connected to the global education community. As the start of the school year nears, it’s an ideal time for teachers to start thinking about how to implement social media and technology into their classrooms so they can unlock their creative teaching potential.

http://www.parentherald.com/articles/63265/20160824/quick-tips-for-teachers-to-prep-their-classrooms-for-online-learning-and-engagement.htm