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Liz B. Davis 5:22 "Titled, In Classroom of the Future, Stagnant Scores , the article describes a school in Arizona where, despite a huge investment in technology, there hasn't been an increase in test scores. The article is based on one school in one town in Arizona, hardly a statistically significant sample. Larry Cuban, an outspoken critic of technology in schools since the early 1990s, is quoted multiple times. Not one of the many experts in the field of educational technology, whom we know and love, was interviewed (or at least quoted) in the article. The only reason given for the failure of technology is a lack of increase in test scores in a district that already had high test scores. Finally, there was no test comparing the technology skills of students in this school to any other school in the state. "

This post is about the same http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/04/technology/technology-in-schools-faces-questions-on-value.html article by Matt Richtel, of which Jim Shimabukuro reviewed a shorter version http://www.bendbulletin.com/article/20110905/NEWS0107/109050315/ in http://etcjournal.com/2011/09/05/a-lesson-from-the-kyrene-school-district-technology-alone-is-not-the-answer/

About the same NYT article by Matt Richtel, a shorter and later version of which Jim Shimabukuro reviewed in http://etcjournal.com/2011/09/05/a-lesson-from-the-kyrene-school-district-technology-alone-is-not-the-answer/

"In the summer of 2010, Peter Mosinskis from CSU Channel Islands assembled a team of approximately fifteen volunteers from seven different CSU campuses and one from the UC system to evaluate the accessibility of Google Apps. The team also recruited student volunteers and screen reader users to assist with the testing. Automated, manual, and screen reader testing began the first week of January 2011 and was completed February 4th. The report has been completed and posted here for your review. The CSU Accessible Technology Initiative (ATI) Staff, ATI Leadership Council, and Google have reviewed the Google Apps Accessibility Evaluation report. We discovered a number of accessibility issues during our testing. These issues are outlined in the report as well as "workarounds" that can be used to improve the user experience for persons with disabilities. When campuses choose to use Google Apps, they are required to provide an equally effective service for people with disabilities and it is critical for campuses to ensure that the "workarounds" meet the educational needs of the student and/or faculty. The March 15, 2011 USA TODAY online news article "Complaint: Google programs hard for blind students" illustrates possible legal problems that may result from adopting the Google Apps for Education suite. Questions or Comments about this report may be directed to CSU ATI Staff"

Table of Contents Print Complete BookPrint This Chapter Next ATI Google Apps Accessibility Evaluation Section 1. Executive Summary Section 2. About the Project Section 3. Findings Section 4. Workarounds, Accommodations and Best Practices Summary and Conclusions Authors Note Appendices A - E

Posted on Mon, May. 30, 2011 Teachers give a gold star to a free-for-all education camp By Adrienne Lu Inquirer Staff Writer For many teachers, the phrase professional development conjures up mandatory, snooze-inducing, school-sponsored lectures. EdCamp, an "unconference" for educators that was conceived in the Philadelphia region last year, was designed to be the exact opposite: the free events are participant-driven and attendance is strictly voluntary.

"It's clear that the world is moving faster than it ever has before. This infographic below, produced by Knewton, an adaptive technology platform based in New York City, tells us that education is a 7 trillion dollar industry, 570 times the size of the online advertising market. In a time when 30% of students in the U.S. fail out of high school, our current education system is broken, from the bottom up. But the landscape is changing. The Internet is bringing us digital content, mass distribution and personalized learning. Check it out here and click the image to enlarge."

June 21, 2011, 8:00 am By Prof. Hacker Lewis Carroll's logic game[This is a guest post by Anastasia Salter, Assistant Professor at the University of Baltimore in the school of Information Arts and Technologies. Her academic work focuses on storytelling in new media; she also writes the Future Fragments column for CinCity. Follow her on Twitter at AnaSalter.--@jbj] "...With that said, perhaps the most important takeaway from LEEF is that it's not all about expensive toys. Learning games don't have to be hi-tech to be effective. There's a lot to be learned from Space Vikings, the conference's ARG-that's alternate reality game, not its augmented reality cousin. Unlike augmented reality, which requires technology to mediate an environment, alternate reality is a playful imposition of story onto a physical space. In Space Vikings, a number of us dedicated conference attendees were drawn into a mission to save our tribes from a "pedagogical wasteland." How did we accomplish this feat? By hunting down "anomalies"-read masking tape clues, QR codes and posters-with answers to questions to submit in a digital educational games theory scavenger hunt. This is just one example of a conference ARG, and designers were at LEEF to report on lessons learned from others like DevLearn's Zombie Apocalypse. (For more ideas on educational uses of Alternate Reality, check out Think Transmedia.) These same ideas can scale and transform to a number of settings. For example, Melissa Peterson's Elmwood Park Zoo ARG is currently a project conducted with paper (though imagined for smartphones), and it's already doubling the engagement time of visitors to the local zoo. And on the other side, games like the Giskin Anomaly in Balboa Park are adding new layers of narrative to a popular and culturally rich tourist destination. And these games don't have to be location dependent. Case studies like the Radford Outdoor ARG Outbreak, a social inquiry game that puts st

"New world report shows more than 1 billion people with disabilities face substantial barriers in their daily lives Governments should step up efforts to enable access to mainstream services and to invest in specialized programmes to unlock the vast potential of people with disabilities News release 9 June 2011 | New York - WHO and the World Bank today revealed new global estimates that more than one billion people experience some form of disability. They urged governments to step up efforts to enable access to mainstream services and to invest in specialized programmes to unlock the vast potential of people with disabilities. World report on disability provides global estimates The first-ever World report on disability provides the first global estimates of persons with disabilities in 40 years and an overview of the status of disability in the world. New research shows that almost one-fifth of the estimated global total of persons living with disabilities, or between 110-190 million, encounter significant difficulties. The report stresses that few countries have adequate mechanisms in place to respond to the needs of people with disabilities. Barriers include stigma and discrimination, lack of adequate health care and rehabilitation services; and inaccessible transport, buildings and information and communication technologies. As a result, people with disabilities experience poorer health, lower educational achievements, fewer economic opportunities and higher rates of poverty than people without disabilities. "Disability is part of the human condition," says WHO Director-General Dr Margaret Chan. "Almost every one of us will be permanently or temporarily disabled at some point in life. We must do more to break the barriers which segregate people with disabilities, in many cases forcing them to the margins of society.""

Direct link to the report download page: http://www.who.int/entity/disabilities/world_report/2011/en/index.html

"Posted on August 1, 2011 by Claude Almansi In 2006, Copiepresse, the rights managing society of Belgian publishers of French- and German-language daily newspapers, sued Google about the snippets shown in Google News and about the cached versions displayed in Google Search. On May 5, 2011, a decision of the Brussels appeal court slightly reworded but basically confirmed the 2007 judgment of the first instance court : (...) This decision of the Brussels Court of Appeals is therefore important for legal studies: not only because of the doubt about what it actually ordered, but also because its long and detailed initial considerations illustrate several differences between the US and European legal cultures. Until recently, this decision was only available as a photographic PDF on Scribd. This meant that it was inaccessible to blind people and awkward to study for everybody. Fortunately, the BJ Institute of Hyderabad, India, has now made it available as accessible PDF and DOC files. This is the version I used for the above quotation. Thanks to the collaborators of the BJ Institute for their very accurate work."

"Uploaded by whitehouse on Sep 16, 2011 Digital Promise is a new national center founded to spur breakthrough technologies that can help transform the way teachers teach and students learn. September 16, 2011." With captions and interactive transcript.

Captions and transcript can be downloaded from http://www.universalsubtitles.org/en/videos/CkPFLh8Tp91i/en/169009/

Ernesto Priego, Sept 12, 2011 "Social media is becoming increasingly important in teaching and research work but tutors must remember, it's a conversation not a lecture, says Ernesto Priego"