the team plans to use the grant money to develop 35 new simulations specifically geared to middle school physical science education. The existing library of simulations targets concepts and applications generally used in high school- and college-level physics courses.
The PhET simulations allow us to conduct experiments, with students at the helm, that we wouldn't otherwise be able to stage or model in the classroom."
The grants will be used to develop resources to help "enhance secondary students' academic experiences and improve educators' abilities to engage and stimulate their students" in STEM subjects. All of the proposed programs focus particularly on NASA-themed content.
Interesting follow up to a previous post about open-source learning management systems (LMSs), the most popular of which is Moodle. Hawaii's Virtual Learning Network has decided to scrap Moodle and go with Blackboard, a commercial LMS. Moodle's really losing its lustre...
Interesting report on the slowing move to cloud-basted email. 3 reasons for this are inertia, lack of strategic value and disappointment w/ vendor offerings
A study being conducted in five universities in the midwest found that students "were basically clueless about the logic underlying how the search engine organizes and displays its results." They found college students poorly filtered results and had difficulty finding 'scholarly sources.' The article also notes a rift between professors and university libraries where professors don't encourage students to seek out research specialists. I've found Gutman's research staff incredibly helpful, specifically with tips on narrowing journal searches.
Logical Choice Technologies has released an update to Letters Alive, an augmented reality education app for kindergarten and preschool. Letters Alive is a reading curriculum for preschool and kindergarten (and grades 1 through 5 for remediation and ESL) that consists of augmented reality-infused animal cards, augmented reality-infused word cards, software, teacher resources, and student activity sheets.
This is incredible. They REALLY took the AR capabilities and built out a robust curriculum. They didn't just stop with what I have seen as a "typical" use of AR (making the image or the letter appear as 3D objects), rather, they made the cards interactive and educational with sounds, changing color, sentence structure, punctuation, etc. Incredible!