Group items tagged

These glasses remind me of Parisa's thread about foreign language translating.

Lubbock School District in Texas are investing $28 million in technology. "SMART Document Camera 330 in all classrooms where core subjects, such as science, math, language arts or social studies, are taught. Additionally, the district is installing 75 SMART Height-Adjustable Wall Mounts in pre-kindergarten classrooms to ensure that younger students have easy access to the interactive whiteboard to engage with digital content."

Key concerns about the sudden rush to dump textbooks for open source content

This transition will happen relatively quickly given the current cost of textbooks and the low cost of tablets. Fortunately, I think we will find that the digital textbooks and other features on the tablets will be far more engaging and effective teaching tools than the traditional textbook. The ability of the digital text to read aloud (in several languages) and provide visual support including high def color diagrams, animation, and video, as well as create intuitive links to vocabulary and 'checking for understanding' will be a great support to students and teachers.

About Duolingo using croudsourcing to make language learning free

This article relating to speech and literacy discusses the possibility of an interactive system, Technology Assisted Reading Acquisition, to allow children to acquire literacy naturally as opposed to the traditional way of "teaching" reading.

Related to section on how iPads are currently being used in a California school. making short videos to taking photos of complex formulas displayed on a blackboard for later review. Language students record themselves reciting lessons, and then upload the files to their teachers' drop boxes for critique. And math teachers use iPads to videotape students working through problems, explaining how they arrived at the solution and thereby demonstrating mastery of a lesson.

Here's the blog from the school's iLab http://hillbrookilab.com/

I loved this Ted Talk and the implications it has for learning languages.

The headline promises more than the article delivers. It mainly identifies the limited effectiveness that the federal government can have. There are no specific "how to's" here and no mention of technology whatsoever, perhaps because that would be too specific a focus for the scope of the article. These are prominent figures in a prominent publication having a conversation that could have taken place in 1980. How do we change that? The absence of real civic engagement on issues about education is the missing link in education reform. I wonder if we can organize public discourse on the internet more effectively to have formal impact on civic activism and administration.

This is an RSA I shared with the blog class I teach. I think the event of "shared knowledge" and its effect on groups dynamics is very interesting. The prompt I used is below: Here are the three questions asked by James Surowiecki in the post below. Please consider them and answer one or all three in a comment. What does the blogosphere tell us about what we believe motivates people to do what they do? Do blogs have the possibility of accessing a collective intelligence that has previously remained untapped? What are the potential problems of blogs as we know them?

And other assessment tools.

The app only contains Math and Language Arts.

Great place for teachers and districts to share and discover common formative assessments and track mastery of state and Common Core standards.

As blended learning continues to expand across the K-12 sector, definitions are important to help people talk about the new phenomena. This white paper refines our previous work in helping to create a shared language for the emerging field so that innovators can build upon each other's ideas, rather than talk past each other.

This site lists educational games by category. There is no feed for updates (at least, I haven't found one) and games listed vary greatly in quality and educational merit. The site is hard to navigate due to poor design and doesn't seem to update very frequently

Cool Site! What an easy way to see what has been explored and was in the works. It seemed as though Health and Language acquisition were big topics.

Indian college classrooms have not integrated technology into learning and teaching, so private companies - teaching the skills needed to perform in their specific career paths - are taking the lead, showing that universities need to catch up.

Scratch isn't the only game in town :-) Note that I've already posted about App Inventor here (which is another "dive right in" programming environ)

"School of One uses technology to develop a unique learning path for each student and to provide a significant portion of the instruction that is both individualized and differentiated." I liked the definitions of individualized (pacing), differentiated (learning preferences/methods), and personalized (pacing, preferences, and content/objectives).