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from the article: "...students don't think of programming as a whole separate world the way older adults tend to, but as a tool they can use to explore their interests." The article also identifies several trends in EdTech including ATT, GeorgiaTech and Udacity's partnership to provide an online masters in Computer Science.

This talks about the practices at some programs that are known for educating innovators:  "The culture of learning in programs that excel at educating for innovation emphasize what I call the three P's-play, passion and purpose. The play is discovery-based learning that leads young people to find and pursue a passion, which evolves, over time, into a deeper sense of purpose."

A new program will allow students to help their teachers better integrate technology in the classroom. As mentioned in the article, this will help students develop technology and critical thinking skills along with communication and service learning.

This is great! Teaching kids at a very young age that computers are not just smart but are programmed to be smart can be very valuable. So many new tools and technologies these days are completely abstracting how they actually work, which makes me worry that kids just think computers are magical.

So true! Clearly, it's the people who create the technologies that are magical. =p

"The program ... pairs up teams of five high school-age girls with female technology entrepreneurs as mentors. In addition, the program brings in guest lecturers throughout the 10-week program to talk with the girls about opening their own businesses in the technology field". I love the idea of grooming high school girls in technology entrepreneurship.

Interesting idea, I wonder if the children were motivated enough to start programing outside the game too. Thanks for sharing!

Disney's Connected Learning program has been developing games for 6 years now, the most popular title being Club Penguin. They are currently planning to roll out several pre-school titles and are also capturing data on the games effects on learning outcomes. Interesting to see Disney attracting top talent from the gaming industry to help develop games and also not shying away from doing the research to investigate educational outcomes.

FYI. Great speakers and program last year. Although not education focused, ways to apply to teaching/learning and many education related workshops.

If computers can score writing, of course the first use will be for assessment. No surprise there. But how might we use this more creatively?

I tried to bring an scoring software program into my school. Nobody liked it except for myself. I thought the objective measure would be more motivating to students. But the other teachers thought that the students should have more practice with rubrics themselves. My school focused heavily on peer editing and scoring. Also, when teachers see such a large number of average scores they tend to disbelieve the results. For example, when I score the essays, there may be a lot of 'B's but I've sees the difference in between Betty's 'B' and Joe's 'B'. The grade is more of a reminder of my experience scoring Betty's writing. When the software scores it, I haven't necessarily seen the essay therefore the score doesn't mean as much. Of course the scoring makes much more sense for official assessments. Open Ended Responses are a much better measure of a student's understanding than multiple choice, if the software is able to distinguish the nuance of language. Some programs are scoring grammatical patterns, sentence length, and paragraph length; therefore, a student can be totally off topic and get a high score. I'm curious if this latest software corrected for this.

The Nature Conservancy and Discovery Education today launched Nature Works Everywhere, a partnership designed to help students learn the science behind how nature helps our everyday existence and the importance of environmental conservation.

I wonder if the instant feedback and scoring feature helps these kids go into a state of flow more easily while learning an instrument. The experience provides the beginner with all the requirements for flow: clear goals, right level of challenge, and instant feedback

A brief interview with L. Rafael Reif, MIT's provost, and Anant Agarwal, director of MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory about MITx, a new/developing online certificate program. Interesting how much they can not anticipate how/what this will impact (re: education, jobs, higher ed market).

"Kodu lets kids create games on the PC and XBox via a simple visual programming language."

I am going to try to use Kodu. If a 4th grader can use it..... :)

Interesting article and video about a new way of teaching children to program. A credit-card sized computer designed to help teach children to code has gone on sale for the first time. The Raspberry Pi is a bare-bones, low-cost computer created by volunteers mostly drawn from academia and the UK tech industry.

I just heard about this from a friend and then stumbled across your link - and then wound up on the Raspberry Pi website to try to find out more about the education component of it (which is supposedly the whole motivation). Right now, the website is focused on showcasing the capabilities of the device and the hardware/software choices that they made. I was disappointed to find, when looking through their FAQ, that there is only one small blurb about educational material in which they vaguely state that support resources are currently under development. No doubt they are allowing a greater number of people access to a cheap Linux machine, but that does not mean those people are going to use it to learn to program. I'll be interested to see if the focus really does shift to education as the resources come together... right now it just seems like a cool new toy for a Linux geek (with the potential to be so much more!)

- background info on Summer 2012 launch of Scratch Jr. - to promote social interaction in learning the designers want to build a digital playground. "A good playground will have swing sets and slides for the kids, as well as benches and tables and chairs for the parents. The designers of Scratch Jr are figuring out how to embed the digital equivalent of those tables and chairs. "

This article proposes that one of the reasons to integrate technology into the curriculum is to support active engagement in learning.  

Here's some more stuff on technology and STEM, but as it pertains to professional development. The question is how does this program motivate teachers other than the extrinsic reward of professional development points???

SETDA's "National Educational Technology Trends Report" spotlights state efforts to boost learning through the federal Enhancing Education Through Technology program