Educational Technology

by Mark Rowh, University Business

Tackle issues head-on and promptly. This may be especially important for tech staff who ignore policies, fail to carry their load or can’t seem to get along with co-workers. “Don’t let the bad behavior of a few poison those who want to work,” says CIO Yvette Brown Koottungal at Barry University in Florida. She is also vice president for technology at the university, where she manages a team of 63.

https://www.universitybusiness.com/article/seven-strategies-minimizing-tech-services-staff-issues

By Dian Schaffhauser, THE Journal
VictoryVR, a company that creates virtual reality curriculum for grades 5–12, will be making its science content available for the Oculus Go beginning this summer.
VictoryVR, a company that creates virtual reality curriculum for grades 5–12, will be making its science content available for the Oculus Go beginning this summer. At $199 for the 32 GB edition, the Go is being promoted as “VR for everyone,” serving as an entry-level alternative to pricier options, including the Oculus Rift, which sells for $399. A 64 GB version of the Go is $249.

https://thejournal.com/articles/2018/05/09/vr-ed-company-targets-low-cost-oculus-go-for-science-units.aspx

By Dian Schaffhauser, THE Journal

The use of gaming for student-centered learning eliminates constraints, increases engagement, boosts collaboration and empowers students to find answers through deep and rich experiences. The idea of using games to facilitate student-centered learning doesn’t eliminate “good teaching,” said Meenoo Rami, author, trainer and teacher and, currently, manager for Minecraft: Education Edition. “The content doesn’t go away. It’s more about meeting the students where they are, taking their passion and turning it into an opportunity for learning.”

https://thejournal.com/articles/2018/05/23/how-to-use-games-to-juice-up-science-lessons.aspx

By Joshua Bolkan, THE Journal
Worldwide shipments of smartphones grew 1.3 percent, year over year, in the first quarter of 2018 following a decline in sales the previous quarter, according to a report from Gartner. Smartphones made up 84 percent of the total mobile phone market, accounting for nearly 384 million of the 455 million units sold. Much of that good news came at the low end of the market, however. “Demand for premium and high-end smartphones continued to suffer due to marginal incremental benefits during upgrade,” said Anshul Gupta, research director at Gartner, in a prepared statement.

https://thejournal.com/articles/2018/05/30/report-smartphone-sales-swing-up-following-decline.aspx

Michael Horn , Forbes
With the rise of online learning in schools—what educators call blended learning—what teachers do daily is changing in big and small ways.  A central question is what will teaching look like in the future, as online learning can increasingly help students learn knowledge personalized to their specific learning need. Enter a new research paper titled “Innovative Staffing to Personalize Learning: How new teaching roles and blended learning help students succeed” from Public Impact and the Clayton Christensen Institute.  Today’s traditional teaching role asks a lot of teachers. It creates a job that is not that supportive of teachers or their practice. In the future though, there are ample opportunities to leverage blended learning and change the status quo to create more sustainable teaching jobs that also better serve students.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/michaelhorn/2018/05/29/teachers-shouldnt-have-to-work-alone-and-now-they-dont-have-to/#1bc4bf9b6157

by Cindi May, Scientific American

A recent review of the scientific literature on learning styles found scant evidence to clearly support the idea that outcomes are best when instructional techniques align with individuals’ learning styles. In fact, there are several studies that contradict this belief. It is clear that people have a strong sense of their own learning preferences (e.g., visual, kinesthetic, intuitive), but it is less clear that these preferences matter. Research by Polly Hussman and Valerie Dean O’Loughlin at Indiana University takes a new look at this important question. Most previous investigations on learning styles focused on classroom learning, and assessed whether instructional style impacted outcomes for different types of learners. Some might argue that, in this era of flipped classrooms and online course materials, students master more of the information on their own. That might explain why instructional style in the classroom matters little. It also raises the possibility that learning styles do matter—perhaps a match between students’ individual learning styles and their study strategies is the key to optimal outcomes.

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-problem-with-learning-styles/

by Matthew Lynch, Tech Edvocate

Google Slides is a presentation product; it is quite similar to the more-familiar PowerPoint. But since it is part of the Google suite of products, it is free to use. It can be a powerful classroom resource. Here are six ways to use Google Slides in the classroom: First, there is simply no justification for giving a lecture in the age of Google Slides. Teachers can supplement what they are saying with a visual presentation that, research shows, will make it far more likely that students will remember what they have been taught since they will not only have heard but also have seen the information. Visual aids can also be added.

http://www.thetechedvocate.org/how-to-use-google-slides-in-the-classroom/

by RICK WAGNER, Kingsport Times-News
rwagner@timesnews.net
Is your child’s teacher a holder of at least one micro-credential and/or certified proficient with Google tools?  If so, he or she may be part of two overlapping groups of educators in Kingsport City Schools. The micro-credential educators in Kingsport City Schools and across Tennessee are in a pilot program of the state Department of Education, which two local educators said is designed to help teachers improve their ability to teach.

http://www.timesnews.net/Education/2018/05/27/Teacher-professional-development-includes-Micro-Credentials-and-Google

By Rami Tabari. Laptop
If you’ve ever gone to college, you might know the pain of being a broke college student. That pain gets even sharper the moment your professor tells you need to cough up several hundred dollars for a super-specific textbook. Now replace “textbook” with “laptop,” and you know how our forum member The Phoenix is feeling. Aside from the touch screen and price limit, The Phoenix has a few more requirements for their notebook. They also want a system with at least a 2.0-GHz dual-core or 1.6-GHz quad-core processor, 4GB of RAM and a 32GB SSD with upgradable storage.

https://www.laptopmag.com/articles/best-touchscreen-chromebook

by Matthew Lynch, Tech Edvocate

It takes time and attention it takes to get your digital network functioning seamlessly, but this investment is not just important for today but for the future as well. We can be sure that technology will continue to change, but if a basic tenant of your network is that all content and systems adheres to inoperability standards like the one created by the IMS Global Learning Consortium, then wherever the future leads us, your system will be able to follow. The Houston Independent School District (HISD) had a hodgepodge of separate systems in use and digital content from a variety of publishers with proprietary data formats and unique usernames and passwords. While they were in the process of purchasing a new Teaching and Learning System (TLS), they came across the concept of interoperability and decided to make it a district goal. They wanted teachers and students to be able to purchase content from different publishers but to have it all available in one location, one central “hub.”

http://www.thetechedvocate.org/how-to-future-proof-your-school-districts-digital-ecosystem/

By Anna Quinn, News Times

Virtual learning and at-home assignments may change the way kids see snow days in Connecticut.  Danbury-area students have spent nearly two weeks or more out of the classroom this year due to snow and storm school closures.  Ridgefield, for example, has requested a waiver from the state to end the year with 179 days — one day short of the required 180 — due to a record-breaking 14 school closures caused by three March snowstorms and the recent macroburst that left thousands without power for days. Other local districts have also requested state waivers.

https://www.newstimes.com/local/article/Virtual-learning-could-help-solve-school-closures-12944984.php

By Kari Bray, Herald Net

This is the school’s second year. It is publicly funded through a partnership with the Mary M. Knight School District north of Elma, and considered an alternative learning experience by the state. The program must meet the same standards — including certified teachers and standardized tests — as other public schools. There were 1,037 students enrolled statewide as of Jan. 31, including 105 from Snohomish County. Enrollment has more than doubled from last year. The online program started with kindergarten through 8th grade and is gradually adding high school levels. By 2020, Washington Connections Academy expects to have its first graduating class, Principal Michael Lunde said.

‘Square pegs’ avoid ‘round holes’ at online school

by Matthew Lynch, Tech Edvocate

Flipping the classroom is a simple concept. While a traditional model involves students learning new material during class time and then practicing it at home, a flipped classroom reverses things so that students learn new material at home—typically by watching a video or other presentation–and then practice during class time. There are two main advantages to flipping the classroom: students seem to be more engaged with their homework when it is a video than when it is a worksheet and, secondly, practice is normally more productive when the teacher is available to helps students who need guidance. Of course, this is a radically different approach to instruction, and adopting it requires significant effort on the part of the teacher.

http://www.thetechedvocate.org/using-google-classroom-to-flip-your-lessons/

By David Nagel, THE Journal
With only three exceptions, salaries are up across the board for technology professionals in K–12 education in the last two years. The biggest gripe continues to be (not terribly surprisingly) budgets. For technology professionals, education has been a rewarding place to work over the last year. Salaries are up for the most part; job satisfaction is high; and the outlook for the future is positive — these according to the results of our third-annual K–12 IT Salary & Job Satisfaction Survey. Overall, the average salary for technology professional in education (excluding classroom teachers) was $66,640 in 2017 — up about $3,000 from 2015 (fig. 1, click to enlarge).   While C-level salaries were up on the whole ($100,400 in 2017 versus $99,045 in 2015), CIO salaries themselves declined from $105,469 in 2015 to an even $100,000 in 2017. That, however, is a slight recovery from 2016’s average of $99,583. (C-level includes CIO, CSO, CTO and CDO.)

https://thejournal.com/articles/2018/05/24/it-salary-job-satisfaction-survey.aspx

By Mike Elgan, ComputerWorld

Google’s slow, limited, browser-only, cloud-centric laptop platform is now the most powerful and capable user platform on the planet. Yeah, I said it. Apple fans laugh at this idea, saying that a MacBook Pro can run the Chrome browser and gain all the benefits of a Chromebook, as well as all the benefits and leading-edge content-creation tools of a far more elegant, better designed and better engineered device.  Windows users carp that Chromebooks are cute, but not serious business tools. The Surface Book 2 is also a tiny laptop, they say, but a real computer. Linux developers concede Chromebooks are interesting but argue they can’t be used for software development. But these obsolete stereotypes are not compatible with the new reality of Chromebooks.

https://www.computerworld.com/article/3276329/chrome-os/everything-you-knew-about-chromebooks-is-wrong.html

BY W. TYLER WHITEHEAD, eSchool News
Sartell High School will feature cutting-edge Learning Labs, makerspaces, and more to empower students and spark creativity.  Sartell-St. Stephen Independent School District, located in central Minnesota, is one of many school districts across the country that recognized a need to dramatically evolve traditional classrooms to create a variety of specialized and flexible learning environments to meet the needs of next-century learners. Cuningham Group Architecture, in collaboration with engineering and architecture firm IIW-Minnesota, is designing a new 1,350-student high school that is scheduled to open in the fall of 2019.

Designing a school for next-century learning

By Rhea Kelly, Campus Technology
North Carolina State University is joining the IBM Q Network, a collaboration of companies, academic institutions and national research labs working to advance quantum computing, making it the first university-based IBM Q Hub in North America. Members of the network get early access to IBM Q commercial quantum computing systems for research purposes, via the IBM Cloud. The goal: exploring practical applications important to business and science, according to a news announcement. “Hubs within the network are critical for accelerated industry collaborations, learning, skills development and implementation of quantum computing, globally,” the announcement explained.

https://campustechnology.com/articles/2018/05/24/nc-state-to-work-with-ibm-on-quantum-computing-research.aspx

by Matthew Lynch, Tech Edvocate

For students with Down Syndrome, assistive technology provides adaptations that make accessing curriculum goals and completing tasks easier.  Assistive technology allows Down Syndrome students to complete assignments quicker than if they had tried the tasks on their own. Other benefits include

Giving students control of their learning
Promoting success rather than focusing on failure
Offering individualized adaptability
Providing control over pace and number of tasks
Encouraging both verbal and nonverbal responses

http://www.thetechedvocate.org/assistive-technology-to-help-students-with-down-syndrome-succeed-academically/

BY THOMAS ARNETT, eSchool News

Personalized learning’s rationale has strong intuitive appeal: We can all remember feeling bored, confused, frustrated, or lost in school when our classes didn’t spark our interests or address our learning needs. But an intuitive rationale doesn’t clearly translate to effective practice. For personalized learning to actually move the needle on improving student experiences and elevating student outcomes, the question of how schools and teachers personalize is just as important as why. So how do schools effectively personalize learning? Is it through online learning? Mastery-based learning? Project-based learning? Exploratory learning? Each of these common approaches offers a unique dimension of personalization

How team teaching (and other innovations) can impact blended learning

by MIT Technology Review

A new machine-learning system tries to predict whether an online conversation is going to get nasty right from the get-go. How it works: Researchers gathered more than 1,200 exchanges from the discussion sections of Wikipedia Talk pages. They went through and labeled different “linguistic cues” in the conversations, including attempts at politeness, like using “please” and “thanks,” or other phrases suggesting that debate was welcome, like “I believe” or “I think.” Using the tagged threads, they then trained a system to predict from the first comment if a conversation was going to go south. Results: Humans were successful about 72 percent of the time at the task, compared with 61.6 percent for the algorithm. Not great, but the work uncovered some trends.

https://www.technologyreview.com/the-download/611207/machine-learning-could-stop-an-online-war-of-words-before-it-starts/

by Matthew Lynch, Tech Edvocate

The hottest trend in education is personalized learning, where studies are individualized according to interest and competency, learning happens not only in the classroom but beyond the confines of the school walls and bell schedule, and students take ownership of their courses of study. Teachers have long been aware that no two children learn the same way, have the same interests, or even demonstrate the same needs when it comes to instruction. For many teachers, the only way to address the variety of needs in the classroom and deliver personalized instruction is with technology. Emerging technologies are meeting the demands of teachers and their students in surprisingly individualized ways. Some of the new technologies scaffold learning in a predictable pattern leading to skill mastery and others allow for more creative exploration.

http://www.thetechedvocate.org/emerging-technologies-supporting-personalized-learning/