Educational Technology

By MIKE BURNHAM, Utah State University Statesman

“I know there are some universities that have literally banned computers from classrooms,but here it is left to the teacher to decide,” said Veronica Ward, a professor of political science who does not allow computers in her undergraduate courses. The student code of conduct, under section V-3, prohibits the use of computers “which interferes with or disrupts the work of another student, faculty member, or University official.” Michael Lyons, political science professor, said he requires his students receive verbal consent from him before they use computers in his larger classes. Though he established this rule, he said it is regularly violated. “When I walk by classrooms, particularly large lecture halls, typically I find that only a minority of the students are using their computers to take notes,” Lyons said.

http://www.usustatesman.com/mobile/classroom-laptop-policy-uncertain-1.2333339

by University Business Buzz

New ideas and discussions about the challenges of today and in the future for online education were the focus of last week’s conference on “Shaping the Future: New Possibilities for Online Learning.” The one-day event, presented by Post University (Conn.) and sponsored by Blackboard and Pearson Learning Solutions, took place at The Mattatuck Museum in Waterbury, Conn. In a session on closing the cyber gap in eLearning to increase motivation, Post’s director of instructional design, Mark P. Fazioli, discussed how instructors could use elements of immediacy and social presence to increase motivation for those taking online courses. People work harder to understand material when they feel they’re in a conversation rather than simply receivers of information, argued.

http://blogs.universitybusiness.com/2010/09/shaping-the-future-with-online-learning.html

by Kathryn Marion, Examiner

One of the keys to long-term career success is continually adding to your skill mix and improving the skills you have. Some skills will help you do your current job better while others will qualify you for the position or promotion you want. Either way, you need to think of yourself as a lifelong student of sorts—but that doesn’t mean you have to go back to school and start paying tuition all over again. And you can even get an Ivy League education right here in Denver!

http://www.examiner.com/job-search-in-denver/boost-your-job-skills-with-free-online-classes-from-ivy-league-schools

by Kevin Kelly, NY Times

Even so, as technology floods the rest of our lives, one of the chief habits a student needs to acquire is technological literacy — and we made sure it was part of our curriculum. By technological literacy, I mean the latest in a series of proficiencies children should accumulate in school. Students begin with mastering the alphabet and numbers, then transition into critical thinking, logic and absorption of the scientific method. Technological literacy is something different: proficiency with the larger system of our invented world. It is close to an intuitive sense of how you add up, or parse, the manufactured realm. We don’t need expertise with every invention; that is not only impossible, it’s not very useful. Rather, we need to be literate in the complexities of technology in general, as if it were a second nature.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/19/magazine/19FOB-WWLN-Kelly-t.html

By CARLO ROTELLA, NY Times

Karen Cator, director of the office of education technology at the U.S. Department of Education, says she thinks of online learning this way: “If students have their own computer, it can travel with them from home to school. There can be software programs that help the student, or there can be an online teacher, but the technology can also augment a teacher in a face-to-face classroom.” According to a study by the Sloan Consortium, at the K-12 level, there were 50,000 students enrolled in wholly or partly online courses in 2000. By 2008, there were more than a million.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/19/magazine/19Essays-online-t.html

by DEBORAH SOLOMON, New York Times

This interview is for a special issue on education and technology, so let me start by asking you about computers in classrooms.  As the secretary of education, do you think every kid in America needs a computer?

I think every student needs access to technology, and I think technology can be a hugely important vehicle to help level the playing field. Whether it’s in an inner-city school or a rural community, I want those students to have a chance to take A.P. biology and A.P. physics and marine biology.

What does that have to do with having a computer?

We have thousands of students today taking online classes. We actually have virtual schools today.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/19/magazine/19fob-q4-t.html?_r=1

By Bridget McCrea, THE Journal

High school teachers use wikis to manage their classrooms and create online collaboration opportunities. With wikis, their students can complete assignments, learn from each other, and communicate with their peers from around the world. Vicki Davis has a technology-centric classroom where pretty much everything revolves around the multiple wikis that she’s set up over the last five years. A computer science teacher at Westwood Schools in Camilla, GA., Davis said her own “wiki fever” has since spread to other classrooms throughout the school, where she teaches technology to students in grades 8 through 12. “It all started in my classroom,” said Davis. “Today, we have wiki-centric projects going on all over campus.”

http://thejournal.com/articles/2010/09/15/wiki-centric-learning.aspx

By Ryan Blackburn, Athens Banner-Herald

Five years ago, three University of Georgia graduate students set out to restore a heap of old, unused computers to give some of Athens’ poor access to the Internet. Sponsored by the nonprofit Common Ground, they named their effort FreeIT Athens and went to work on computers donated from local businesses. The finished product would go to other nonprofit agencies or individuals who donated $25 or agreed to pay back with 12 hours of volunteer work.

http://www.onlineathens.com/stories/091610/new_708296077.shtml

by Morris Daily Herald

The students on Saratoga School’s Tech Team are, as one might surmise, pretty smart cookies. They love technology and learn even more about it through the team. But perhaps even more importantly, they use their skills and new-found knowledge to be of service to others. Through their extracurricular activities, members on the team make Saratoga a better place for both students and teachers.

http://www.morrisdailyherald.com/articles/2010/09/10/01532977/index.xml

By JAYE C. BAUTISTA, Mainila Bulletin

In some parts of the world, like in Britain, almost half of the people who play computer games are women. The difference lies in what types of games we play. This past week I had asked around 100 school students to rate the way they used cell phones. The result was that both the girls and boys used their cell phones to talk and text, but, the boys, in addition to talking and texting, also used the phones to “play games, share photos and videos, listen to music and send e-mails.” It’s also interesting to note how popular gaming has become among women of all ages.” Gaming seems to provide “a channel for communications” for women. The survey shows that, in the 12-19 age groups, the percentage of females playing electronic games “only slightly lags behind the numbers of male players.” In the 20-49 age groups, the percentage of women is also fairly close. In the 50-plus age group, the percentages are almost the same.

http://www.mb.com.ph/articles/276812/computer-games-big-business-even-women

By Frank Konkel, DAILY PRESS & ARGUS

Pinckney New Technology High School students were provided laptop computers they’ll use until they graduate, but only after they signed a “digital constitution” they created themselves. Students spent the first week of school writing a digital constitution, or what Principal Stephen Keskes explained is a set of rules, rights and responsibilities regarding technological policy. Each of the more than 230 freshmen and sophomores in the New Technology High School’s inaugural year in Pinckney Community Schools signed the agreement last week at a ratification ceremony.

http://www.livingstondaily.com/article/20100913/NEWS01/9130310

by Peter Halacsy, San Francisco Chronicle

If you don’t mind a new San Franciscan’s point of view, what I see behind the faltering outcomes of American education is a failure to communicate. American schools are using two-dimensional communication in a 3-D world. All one needs to do is view the YouTube video of a toddler quickly mastering an iPad to understand the problem, and the solution.American education is linear, but the rest of a student’s world isn’t. Watch young people hunting knowledge at a computer, and you won’t see them moving along a straight line (as textbooks or slide presentations do). You’ll see them zooming in and out, leaping from hyperlink to hyperlink, remixing knowledge on the fly.

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2010/09/13/ED3H1FD3HR.DTL

by Rory Carroll, the Guardian

Jorge Rodriguez clambers on to a stool in a grittyMexico City neighbourhood, logs on to a computer, checks his email, googles awhile, then with a pencil and jotter starts transcribing parts of a New York Times article translated into Spanish. Jorge is six years old. The scene encapsulates the thinking behind MDG8, which, among other aspirations, urged countries to “make available the benefits of new technologies, especially information and communications”. There is just one problem. Jorge is not typical. His computer-assisted learning is not part of a nationwide scheme or even a local school initiative. Neither exists. Jorge’s luck is to have parents who run a cyber-cafe and who give him internet-related homework. He is a glimpse of what millions of poor Mexican children are missing out on.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/global-development/2010/sep/14/mdg8-mexico-it

By MARISA TAYLOR, Wall Street Journal

The products and end results of information technology are a part of our daily lives, whether it’s the operating systems on mobile phones, the computer networks that automate everyday financial transactions, or the reams of information sought and found on the Internet. So it should come as no surprise that careers in the IT field are expected to grow significantly in the next decade—jobs in computer software engineering, for example, are expected to grow by 32% by 2018, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704358904575478133397664058.html

by Lucianoken, CSRwire

Bernardine Dias has a big goal; she wants to connect the people of the world using technology–all of the people of the world, especially the poor and the underserved. As a result, this Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) Robotics professor, a woman of action, created a research group called, appropriately, “TechBridgeWorld,” to help communities in some of the most underserved locations in the world.

http://news.yourolivebranch.org/2010/09/10/professor-uses-robotics-to-help-the-poor/

By D. Aileen Dodd, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

Jeffrey Johnson had better odds of going to prison in handcuffs than to college on scholarship. Yet, today, at 19, he is a carefree sophomore at the University of Pennsylvania — an alternate reality from his childhood in southeast Atlanta. In the hard-scrabble hood where Johnson grew up, high fives swapped cash for crack, gunfire settled gang beefs and poverty was the heirloom passed down to generations. For Jeff Johnson, not even home offered much refuge.

http://www.ajc.com/news/education-from-cradle-to-610937.html

By Scott Aronowitz, THE Journal

New Millennium Secondary School (NMSS) of Carson, CA, has reported that its use of Web-based communications management system eChalk has resulted in improved student and teacher communication and greater parental involvement in the education process. The public charter school was founded in 2008 as part of the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) to help prepare its predominantly black student population for both higher education and the competitive workforce in the 21st century. Technology is a critical tool for the school in fulfilling its mission, said NMSS Executive Director Tony Kline, and eChalk is an important part of that technology.

http://thejournal.com/articles/2010/09/10/california-high-school-credits-technology-with-improving-educational-experience.aspx

by Glenda Cooper, the Guardian

As more cities start to realise the benefits of using technology to improve areas as diverse as healthcare, education and crime prevention, we are beginning to edge closer to a more socially inclusive ‘e-topia’ Cutting the cost of looking after older people by a fifth. Bringing down violent crime outside pubs and bars by a third. Being able to diagnose diseases at patients’ bedsides just by having them breathe into a machine. These are all ways that smart cities in Britain are transforming the lives of ordinary citizens.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/smarter-cities/smarter-cities-new-technology-social-improvements

Education notebook

Students from the Montgomery County Students Information Technology Foundation Inc. at Thomas Edison High School of Technology in Wheaton will donate a complete computer lab consisting of six computers with operating systems, monitors, keyboards, mice and a printer, to a nonprofit charitable organization in Montgomery County. The project provides an opportunity for the ITF students to practice their skills refurbishing computers while earning community service hours and developing an appreciation for the concepts of charity and community involvement. “They are very proud to be a part of the process. It is exactly what the state wants to see in terms of student service hours,” said John Brewer, Information Technology Foundation specialist.

http://www.gazette.net/stories/09082010/montsch82238_32534.php

BY MAX FREUND, the Daily Iowan

Third-grader Kelsey Tweden, dressed in her favorite purple shirt, diligently moved a large yellow mouse across her desk, typing out her daily spelling words. The 9-year-old Lemme Elementary student who has cerebral palsy uses assistive technology to make learning easier. Much of the technology used to help people with disabilities learn is new, and many teachers aren’t yet familiar with it. But the Iowa Center for Assistive Technology Education and Research is working toward educating future teachers about the latest tools available by teaching part

http://www.dailyiowan.com/2010/09/08/Metro/18636.html

By ANNE LOUISE MUNROE, the LEDGER

Laptops, net books, or cell phones with data plans, technology and access to the Internet has fast become woven into the fabric of our everyday life. Increasingly kids are granted freedoms with their own Internet-accessible computers in their rooms. This is seen by some parents as a necessity given the amount of homework requiring not only that research be completed online, but that assignments be submitted electronically.

http://www.theledger.com/article/20100907/NEWS/9075002/1021