Group items tagged

Digital Textbooks

The flipped classroom in Review for 2012

"We need high-quality education for the fraction of the cost and to give anyone a chance to learn throughout their lifetime."

The report, titled "Conducting and Reporting Product Evaluation Research: Guidelines and Considerations for Educational Technology Publishers and Developers," is authored by Denis Newman, CEO of Empirical Education Inc., and produced by the Software & Information Industry Association (SIIA). It's based on Empirical Education's many years of conducting this kind of research, both for publishers and for the U.S. Department of Education (ED). A working group of industry experts also was established for evaluation, and it met monthly for more than a year to sort through the issues and draft a set of considerations.

webinars on ed tech

Naomi S. Baron, a linguistics professor at American University, studies how cell phones and online messaging change social interactions. She talks to the Tech Therapy team about her concern that colleges push too much technology on students and professors. Should colleges encourage e-mail-free Fridays?

Interesting to think about technology saturation is impacting college students. Some college professors are even resisting technology integration in the classroom because of it - if you're interested in Higher Ed, the Chronicle of Higher Education has many interesting articles about technology in university settings.

"I think education is probably the largest, most important, and most screwed up part of the American society and economy,"

Review of edtech development

The Federal Trade Commission is working on updates to COPPA (Children's Online Privacy Protection Act) with implications for how children's data can be collected online. Is this an opportunity for a new generation of ed tech to use student data in more comprehensive and smarter ways, or a threat to children's privacy?

Seems like a cool and useful product for teachers: aggregating the data gathered by the many apps and ed tech tools teachers use in the classroom in a single platform, with data visualization support

This article highlights movement towards learning by creating and outlines some platforms that are designed to facilitate that.

Because it is not every day you get to link to poetryfoundation.org for an ed tech course...

Some ed tech bloggers to keep a pulse on!

A look at how ed tech has evolved from 2011 - 2012.

This is a truly dumb set of definitions that of course are being widely publicized by the media (sigh)

"Social Learning: Using social media as part of class. Who said that Twitter was just for Justin Bieber?"

I have revisited this over and over - but each time I realize that no, I'm not hallucinating. They do indeed endorse 1:1 laptop/iPad, as they are "way cooler than stickers." Obviously, they don't have access to the right stickers.

Good discussion on how distance education and other ed-tech are tools for educators, but don't really replace the in-person education experience.

Opinion article from Reynol Junco at Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet and Society on why most educational technology startups aren't that great...they don't base their products on research, proven pedagogy, or work with educators.

It does seem like there is a shift going on right now- more educators on start up teams and more interest in developing innovations from the educators themselves. That being said, the market continues to get flooded. I think in the long run this will be very good for teaching and learning, but I would not want to be an investor in this space.

I think that is great that more educators are getting on the teams...but yeah, there are a lot of very fragmented / disperse initiatives that make it hard to tell what will succeed or catch on.

JumpStart will now sell educational games aligned with Dreamworks themes...is this the start of large-scaled commercialization of educational games? Is this one way that ed tech companies can become profitable, via advertising tie-ins?