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"The Instructional Assessment Resources (IAR) Web site is a comprehensive resource to assist you in assessing student learning, classroom teaching, and instructional technology. The site also provides resources for conducting program evaluations and educational research."

"the Gates Foundation released a report surveying 3,100+ teachers (and 1,250+ students) on what they want from digital instructional tools. The report, entitled "Teachers Know Best: What Educators Want From Digital Instructional Tools," suggests that while many teachers support tech, only 55% of teachers reported available resources sufficient in helping students meet college- and career-ready standards. Educators also spoke to four instructional areas that lack usable digital tools..."

One of the perplexing things that teachers and educators encounter when trying to understand educational technology and leverage it to their classrooms is the abundance of those baffling techy terms. Blended Learning is different from Differentiated Learning, Educational Technology might not be necessarily Instructional Technology, a Virtual Classroom is different from an Electronic Classroom or Flipped Classroom; There is also asynchronous, synchronous, and personalized learning, these and many more are but some examples of the growing terminology in this field.

"According to Andreas Schleicher, there is no evidence from the PISA data yet of a consistent relationship between the use of education technology and superior student performance.  That, however, certainly does not mean that no such relationship will exist in the future, just that it hasn't happened yet, at least not at the scale required to show up in the PISA surveys. "

"My prediction is that if dictation technologies become less expensive and more widely available, and if it becomes normal to use them for everyday writing (such as email and text messaging), then students will grow disinclined to type their writing assignments, preferring instead to rattle off their compositions by voice. Educators will thus be confronting inescapable decisions about how they should respond to students' inclinations to write with dictation technologies."

"The teachers who instruct the most advanced American secondary school students render mixed verdicts about students' research habits and the impact of technology on their studies. Some 77% of advanced placement (AP) and National Writing Project (NWP) teachers surveyed say that the internet and digital search tools have had a "mostly positive" impact on their students' research work. But 87% say these technologies are creating an "easily distracted generation with short attention spans" and 64% say today's digital technologies "do more to distract students than to help them academically.""

"Technology, as an instructional tool, can be especially powerful when used to conduct formative assessments because technology has the ability to provide feedback in a very timely manner"

As digital transactions become the definitive method of purchasing goods and services, leading eCommerce firms are exploring how AI can enhance brand competitiveness and customer loyalty. Artificial Intelligence is set to be a game-changer to shape the next stage of the e-commerce evolution. Artificial intelligence provides passel of opportunities to the e-commerce industry where retailers compete to provide the maximum customer convenience, by providing the ultimate shopping experience. With continuous advances in digital voice technology, AI tools such as Alexa, Cortana, and Watson, are gracing headlines almost daily, hinting at the wide scope of opportunities it has to revolutionize eCommerce stores. Here we show 6 amazing applications to use Artificial Intelligence in eCommerce. * Create customer-centric search- By implementing Artificial intelligence in Magento creates purchase assistants that target the right users, with the right messages at the right time.AI programs can rely on self-learning algorithms to deconstruct Bigdata of thousands of customers and create targeted user experiences, hence ruling out any human-bias or error. * Context-based search- Product Search functionality is an integral part of a Magento store as the shopping process begins with the search for relevant products. If Magento individualizes some impressive extensions, they might be nothing as compared to the effectiveness of AI-powered searches. Here usual searches rely on the Keywords entered by the user and only when there is a correct match, your searches will dish out the right search results. But AI-powered product searches will look for the context of the search, utilize the capability of Natural Language Process to generate context-based search terms rather than typical keywords. * Facilitate Purchase Decisions- Purchase Assistants are something that is still not fully released. Using the concept of virtual Purchase assistant we can cut down the time spent by shoppers

"This story is incredible, and admittedly, unfinished. There's much more we need to learn that hasn't been told yet, but what we do know c(sh)ould change things. Maybe even a whole lot of things. Recently, the OLPC organization took boxes of tablets, carefully and tightly taped up, and dropped them in two remote villages of Ethiopia. There were no instructions. No teachers. Nothing but a group of first grade-aged students for whom the tablets were intended. Students who couldn't read, couldn't identify the single form of a letter, had never before seen any kind of technology."

Below you will find a collaboratively written document produced in Bangkok, Thailand, at the March 28-31 teacher's meeting of EARCOS, the East Asia Regional Council of Schools.  EARCOS is an organization of 130 primary and secondary schools that primarily use English as the language of instruction.  These include AP and IB schools and a number of other private schools.  We produced the document below on a public Google doc at a workshop, which I structured on the model of an "innovation challenge" of the kind that web developers use to bring together communities to complete a project.  We hope this guide will be useful to any teacher confronting the challenges of introducing new technologies into the K-12 classroom in meaningful, inventive, productive, creative, and connected ways.

"The teachers who instruct the most advanced American secondary school students render mixed verdicts about students' research habits and the impact of technology on their studies."

How to make ... stuff!

As our students grow dependant on Internet being a primary source for their  information, it becomes of urgent necessity that we, as teachers and educators, should know how to evaluate web content and decipher credible resources from spam and irrelevant ones. Regrettably enough, some of the teachers who are using technology in their instruction still don't come to grips with  the mechanisms used to sift through internet content. There is a crude analogy to this situation . A teacher who does not evaluate the web content he shares with his students is like a person driving a car without having a driver license, he can still drive his car  but he does not know the real dangers he is putting himself to in doing so.

"Back to the title: was the SMART Board a dumb choice?  I'm going to say yes, only because of the way that it was brought to bear.  Without a plan, without training, and without supplement, it was nothing more than an expensive, fancy toy for teachers (and the occasional student).  If we are to justify the funds that we need for instructional technology, we must be smarter about how we approach and implement them.  We must be ready to show real power to boost student achievement and motivation using these magnificent tools.  To do so, we must be prepared to use these tools in the same ways that our colleges and top employers are using them-to solve real problems."

Filament Games is a game production studio that exclusively creates learning games. Our core competency is producing games that combine best practices in commercial game development with key concepts from the learning sciences. Accordingly, our senior staff is comprised of individuals who are equal parts game and instructional designers; a "dual literacy" that allows us to engineer authentic gameplay mechanics (rules and interactions that directly correlate with specific learning objectives). Filament Games was founded in 2005 by education technology expert Dan White, game designer Dan Norton, and software engineer Alex Stone. In the time since, Filament has developed over 30 educational games for clients ranging from National Geographic's JASON Science to Justice Sandra Day O'Connor's iCivics Inc.

"Our reporter builds a handcrafted cellphone using widely available parts and online instructions"

"MORE Australians are eschewing traditional textbooks to seek out online instructional videos on everything from science to cooking. The trend is driving a new wave of Aussie "internet-preneurs", savvy YouTube stars who are raking in cash for clicks and ditching their regular jobs for a life of internet fame."

Reverse instruction is a hot news topic these days. Here's 15 news stories from the last month about flipping the classroom.