beyondwebct

hybrid class that incorporated instructional technology with in-class lectures scored a letter grade higher on average than their counterparts who took the same class in a more traditional format.

the hybrid class met once a week for traditional 90-minute lectures augmented with in-class response after doing 90 minutes of online work, which included a quiz that could be taken twice.

Students who attended the hybrid course received final grades that were 10% higher than those who attended the traditional class, which translated to a full letter grade increase."Presumably, this increase is due to the fact that students were able to increase their exposure to course content via access to material on WebCT," McFarlin writes in his report,

educational game

Students, teachers, and administrators also expressed interest in online learning. Forty-three percent of high school students said they were interested in it for earning college credit, and 39 percent of middle school students said they were interested in it as a way to get "extra help in a subject.

"More than 33 percent of high school students, 24 percent of middle school students, and 19 percent of [students in grades 3 through 5] with no previous online class experience stated said they would like to take an online class, with girls having a slightly stronger interest than boys.

both district leaders and parents are open to believing that social networking could be such a tool--as long as there are reasonable parameters of use in place. Moreover, social networking is increasingly used as a communications and collaboration tool of choice in businesses and higher education. As such, it would be wise for schools, whose responsibility it is to prepare students to transition to adult life with the skills they need to succeed in both arenas, to reckon with it."

he majority of middle and high school students (51 percent of students in grades 6 through 12) indicated that "games make it easier to understand difficult concepts.

Teachers

a large portion of students say teachers and school IT departments are doing just that: throwing up barriers to learning with the very technology that's supposed to facilitate it. And teachers, administrators, and parents seem to be largely unaware of this, according to the results of the 2007 Speak Up survey released Tuesday by Project Tomorrow.

Among middle and high school students, 40 percent indicated that teachers are limiting their use of technology in schools, and 45 percent said that school "security" practices, such as Web filtering, were limiting their ability to take advantage of technology for learning

Among students, more than half said they would "use technology more easily at school if they could use their own laptop, cell phone or mobile device to work on projects, access related software applications and the Internet, and communicate with classmates,"

Here are the top-3 technologies teachers and administrators chose to equip the "ultimate school for 21st century learners."

Most high school students (67 percent) and middle school students (52 percent) have cell phones. And 75 percent of middle and high school students have a digital media player.

The results of this year's survey were unveiled in a Congressional briefing Tuesday morning sponsored by Rep. Lucille Roybal-Allard of California, an advocate of technology in education.

Campuses have adopted these programs on a wide scale, yet few studies have looked at how the design and use of a CMS affects pedagogy, and instructors rarely discuss how a CMS affects their teaching.

Decisions about which learning software to use on campus are often made by campus technologists and administrators rather than faculty.

The construction of the course syllabus, a natural beginning point for most instructors, is a good example of how the software imposes limitations. When they first enter a CMS, new instructors see the default buttons of the course menu, which are based on type rather than purpose: Announcements, Course Content, Discussion, even Syllabus.

Lee Bryant, one of the founders of Headshift, says the network effect is the difference. Traditional applications, such as groupware, became slower the more people used them, he says. With Web 2.0 applications the reverse is true: the more people use them, the more effective they become.

“You influence each other, so that if you use a social tagging system, for example, themes start to emerge and other people pick up on them and you get these positive feedback loops. It is that difference that leads to the network effect.”

These technologies are mostly just HTML and Javascript web pages designed to offer a more streamlined user experience, sitting atop a relational data layer used to feed back user-contributed data in new ways.

Rather than investing in expensive infrastructure, universities are beginning to turn to services like YouTube and iTunes U to host their video content for them. As a result, students—whether on campus or across the globe—have access to an unprecedented and growing range of educational video content from small segments on specific topics to full lectures, all available online.

Video capture, in the hands of an entire class, can be a very efficient data collection strategy for field work, or as a way to document service learning projects. Video papers and projects are increasingly common assignments. Student-produced clips on current topics are an avenue for students to research and develop an idea, design and execute the visual form, and broadcast their opinion beyond the walls of their classroom.

social networking communities that have evolved around video

Half of U.S. adults use social media.

Combined

n the 18-34 year-old demographic

Doesn’t Pink talk about this in A Whole New Mind?  Here’s a quote: “While detailed knowledge of a single area once guaranteed success, today the top rewards go to those who can operate with equal aplomb in starkly different realms. I call these people “boundary crossers.” They develop expertise in multiple spheres, they speak in different languages, and they find joy in the rich variety of human experience. They live multi lives—because that’s more interesting, and nowadays more effective.” (Kindle Location 1692)

Recently, I've tinkered with a system to assess my students' participation in Voicethread conversations.  Essentially mirroring the reflective aspects of Konrad's blogging handouts, I've decided to ask my students the following four questions while we're working with a new Voicethread: Highlight a comment from our Voicethread conversation that closely matches your own thinking.   Why does this comment resonate---or make sense to---you? Highlight a comment from our Voicethread conversation that you respectfully disagree with.  If you were to engage in a conversation with the commenter, what evidence/argument would you use to persuade them to change their point of view? Highlight a comment from our Voicethread conversation that challenged your thinking in a good way and/or made you rethink one of your original ideas.  What about the new comment was challenging?  What are you going to do now that your original belief was challenged?  Will you change yoru mind?  Will you do more researching/thinking/talking with others?

The cool part about assessing Voicethread presentations this way is that each question essenitally forces my students to interact with our conversation in a really meaningful way.  To craft careful answers, they must truly consider the comments of others---an essential skill for promoting collaborative versus competitive dialogue---and compare those comments against their own beliefs and preconceived notions.  That's metacognition at its best! What's even better is that when students know that these questions form the basis of our Voicethread assessment from the beginning of a conversation, participation level rise remarkably.  While students are looking for project reflection comments, they often end up highly motivated to share their thinking with peers. 

Would we experience an educational revolution where children learned to create their own knowledge and make connections between classmates across continents?

Would new discoveries be made by curious kids who were "unleashed" for the first time, free to explore? Or would classrooms remain teacher-paced and highly directed, with students exploring the same site on the same day at the same time as their peers?  Would we end up with far more Power Point presentations than any one child should ever produce?  Would computer use remain limited--as it so often is--to word processing and basic research?

Parents that understand technology see the value of Web 2.0 in the classroom, but teachers are less certain according to research.

Security and a lack of understanding are the major obstacles for teachers accepting Web 2.0, said the report.

In contrast two thirds of parents questioned said Web 2.0 is a positive addition to the classroom. And children themselves are already using the technologies.

Taken as a set, our research indicates that all six of these technologies will significantly impact the choices of learning-focused organizations within the next five years.

The essential ingredient of next generation social networking, social operating systems, is that they will base the organization of the network around people, rather than around content. This simple conceptual shift promises profound implications for the academy, and for the ways in which we think about knowledge and learning.

New displays and interfaces make it possible to use mobiles to access almost any Internet content—content that can be delivered over either a broadband cellular network or a local wireless network.

This is more than merely an expectation to provide content: this is an opportunity for higher education to reach its constituents wherever they may be.

the challenge faced by the educational community is to seize those opportunities and develop effective ways to measure academic progress as it happens.

We need new and expanded definitions of these literacies that are based on mastering underlying concepts rather than on specialized skill sets, and we need to develop and establish methods for teaching and evaluating these critical literacies at all levels of education.

A wide variety of webware applications exist to manage the creation and workflow of rich media projects

In contrast to productivity applications, which enable users to perform a specific task or create a particular product, collaborative workspaces are “places” where groups of people gather resources or information related to their personal or professional lives.

highly flexible

O'Reilly identified Google as "the standard bearer for Web 2.0", and pointed out the differences between it and predecessors such as Netscape, which tried to adapt for the web the business model established by Microsoft and other PC software suppliers.

Google "began its life as a native web application, never sold or packaged, but delivered as a service, with customers paying, directly or indirectly.

perpetual beta, as O'Reilly later dubbed it

unless you visited each friend’s page every day, it might be days or weeks before you noticed the news, or you might miss it entirely.

He developed something he called News Feed, a built-in service that would actively broadcast changes in a user’s page to every one of his or her friends.

Instead, they would just log into Facebook, and News Feed would appear: a single page that — like a social gazette from the 18th century — delivered a long list of up-to-the-minute gossip about their friends, around the clock, all in one place. “A stream of everything that’s going on in their lives,” as Zuckerberg put it.

“Facebook has always tried to push the envelope,” he said. “And at times that means stretching people and getting them to be comfortable with things they aren’t yet comfortable with. A lot of this is just social norms catching up with what technology is capable of.”

when they experienced this sort of omnipresent knowledge, they found it intriguing and addictive. Why?

Social scientists have a name for this sort of incessant online contact. They call it “ambient awareness.” It is, they say, very much like being physically near someone and picking up on his mood through the little things he does — body language, sighs, stray comments — out of the corner of your eye. Facebook is no longer alone in offering this sort of interaction online.