Diigo In Education

A free computer game for teenagers created with the help of former Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Connor has made its online debut. "Supreme Decision," the first of several planned web-based games, went online in August as part of a project called Our Courts. In it, students can play a Supreme Court law clerk helping a justice with a tie-breaking vote over a First Amendment case. Backed by the Sandra Day O'Connor College of Law at Arizona State University and Georgetown University, the Our Courts project is designed to teach middle school students about the Constitution and the courts. O'Connor, the first woman to serve on the Supreme Court, has said more people can name an "American Idol" judge than the three branches of government. Besides teaching about civics, she hopes the Our Courts project will help students learn how to analyze problems and develop arguments. In "Supreme Decision," students play a law clerk and must help fictional Justice Irene Waters write the majority opinion on whether a school can ban students from wearing music band T-shirts. Another game, called "Do I Have a Right," will be released soon. In that game, students will play the director of a constitutional law firm who must decide which amendment resolves a problem posed by a client.

Great video showing how much has changed and how much we continue to struggle with the same ideas. In October 1995, the House Committee Economic and Educational Opportunities and House Science Committees held a nearly three-hour hearing to examine "technological advances in education."

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"50 Twitter Feeds to Follow Higher Education News"

Education and Technology by Steve Dembo

Great resource for practicing dictation based on real news stories. Large library in English. Several other languages offered including Japanese, Hebrew, Polish, and many others.

Great resource for practicing dictation based on real news stories. Large library in English. Several other languages offered including Japanese, Hebrew, Polish, and many others.

Great resource for practicing dictation based on real news stories. Large library in English. Several other languages offered including Japanese, Hebrew, Polish, and many others.

Online File and Photo Sharing | Image Hosting | A nice alternative to scribd and offers storage and sharing of photo and audio as well.

A nice alternative to scribd and offers storage and sharing of photo and audio as well.

Fantastic resource

I think a big miss on this article is any discussion of content creation capabilities of netbooks and iPad. Kindle and Dead Tree books don't allow extensive content creation, the iPad has limited capabilities, but netbooks open up a whole range of creative possibility. Also, it's obvious this article is geared toward college students, not middle or high school.

Great collaborative project. Simple yet fun.

Keep in mind that this experiment was focused on "classroom use" of Kindles, not necessarily "library use." Libraries have never supplied the resources used directly in the classroom for literature study (students don't markup library books!). At Cushing Academy, we are using Kindles to support recreational and personal interest reading rather than directly supporting the curriculum. In that role, they have worked very well.

Well, maybe not just like plain old books. Ebooks have many nice advantages for libraries, such as 24/7 access, always pristine and readable copies for the user, built-in dictionary (which our students tell us they really like) and, for the library itself, very efficient use of space and staff time.

"Last fall, Princeton launched a small experiment, replacing traditional textbooks with the Kindle DX, Amazon's large e-book reader. Almost from the beginning, the 50 students participating in the pilot program expressed dissatisfaction with the devices. Yesterday, a university report offered some more definitive findings. On the upside, students using the Kindle DX ended up using far less paper. (Paper consumption was generally reduced by 54%.) On the downside, students complained that the Kindle was fundamentally "ill-suited for class readings.""

Shelley Rodrigo (rrodrigo@mesacc.edu)\nMesa Community College

Cool website that features "How to" videos on a variety of topics. Everything from auto repair to alegebra.

Computer programming tutorials