Group items tagged

Very relevant after today's class.

If you don't know Clay Shirky, you can find TED talks and books about technology and/or web 2.0. I recommend Cognitive Surplus if you want more.

"In the US, an undergraduate education used to be an option, one way to get into the middle class. Now it's a hostage situation, required to avoid falling out of it. And if some of the hostages having trouble coming up with the ransom conclude that our current system is a completely terrible idea, then learning will come unbundled from the pursuit of a degree just as as songs came unbundled from CDs."

We had a discussion in class a month back or so about standards and international performance versus U.S. One of the talking points was, what can the U.S. learn from other countries (or more appropriate, what is the U.S. willing to learn from other countries). Some people mentioned that the U.S. tends to show an aversion to learning from other countries, but this article notes that the Common Core State Standards is actually based on best practices from other leading countries like Singapore, China, and Finland. So maybe we're not as stubborn as we seem...

This consortium is charging more than $4,000 a course. Seems like a lot.

In an effort to increase meaningful engagement in class, The Center for Physics Education Research (CPER) at the Air Force Academy is developing a "technology based system for monitoring student participation in all classroom activities on a daily basis and providing real-time scoring data to instructors through a mobile device such as an iPad TM, iPod TouchTM, or AndroidTM based device. Students will be rewarded for showing evidence of classroom engagement."

Scientist discusses positive effects of action video games, suggests entertainment industry should join scientists to create engaging educational games.

Thanks for sharing Brandon. I like two things she said in particular 1) General wisdom often carries no weight 2) Like red wine, video games may be good when used appropriately. I'm convinced myself in the power of game-based learning but do agree that more work needs to be done in bringing good ones to the class.

"At a time when education technology is getting a lot of attention, there is no class time allocated to technology education."

This tool uses Google maps to link educators for the purposes of collaboration. A clever use of this affordance, and one that those of us in IB Connect (Dock's class) may want to consider.

The purpose of this exercise is to provide a vehicle for digital citizenship. Interesting followup to Monday's class.

Someone in class once mentioned the use of virtual tools to help medical students to learn more about the human anatomy. This table is not revolutionary but I think it still provides a nice introduction to the anatomy.

I was reading about using tech in elections and I ran across Hackpad. I had never heard of Hackpad, and this is a question for the teaching staff: Might this be a good option to have more of our class conversations in one place? I'd be curious to know how you think it compares as a discussion platform.

Article on how the government and philanthropies can support innovation in education.

What's the big barrier (besides government reluctance to spend money on education) to this? Historically, I thought that education funding was left to states as "states rights", hence the fact that the Federal government has even put up any money should be a step forward. I would be interested in hearing what people think are the levers for getting the Federal government to invest more...should education research be treated like NSF or NIH "basic research" and get core government support?

I believe that the federal government used to spend more dollars for basic research in education, but that number has been reduced dramatically over the years. I agree 100% that we need to increase this type of investment, and the federal government is the natural source. These social innovation funds are a separate type of investment, distinct from basic research. These grants are "translational" in that they seek to help commercialize promising research, but are not intended to fund the basic research. For a healthy and dynamic ecosystem of innovation in education, we need both.

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

Coursera announced Signature Track, a new option that will give students in select classes the opportunity to earn a Verified Certificate for completing their Coursera course. 30-100$ per course. Signature Track offers: Identity Verification. Verified Certificates. Sharable Course Records.

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.

''safe search for kids, by kids' - Kidrex (powered by Google). Wonder if there are any downside to using this vs regular Google in classrooms. (amount of the info limited? but safety assured due to filtering?)

Interesting - I understand the concern for safety but think that educators should also try and promote and support "safe googling" techniques. Here's a visual teachers can refer to or put up in their class (meant for older students I assume): http://www.freetech4teachers.com/2012/11/10-google-search-tips-all-students-can.html#.ULrCi6VRpUQ

Courtesy of the Innovation by Design class, a thoughtful review of the importance of failure in how people and organizations learn and improve, particularly when working on the cutting edge.

Kaggle is a platform for data prediction competitions that allows organizations to post their data and have it scrutinized by the public. In exchange for a prize, winning competitors provide the algorithms that beat all other methods of solving a data crunching problem. Kaggle is in Class is a statistical & data mining learning tool for students.