Group items tagged

real-world examples of social media use in schools, most in conjunction with BYOD policies 

Interesting to compare this article to the CoSN Horizon Report 

Articles on media literacy -  an excerpt from their newsletter:  Here's how George Mason history professor Mills Kelly teaches media literacy. "'We will work together as a group to create an online historical hoax that we will then turn loose on the internet to see if we can actually fool anyone.'" His students have created stories that have fooled Wikipedia (but not Reddit) and provoked the ire of Jimmy Wales himself. We're delightedly amused at this intriguing piece from Brendan Fitzgerald, which examines the tradition of published hoaxes within the larger discussion over media transparency and credibility. While we agree that planting deliberate lies makes our job a little tougher, there's definitely value in its effort to challenge the largely assumed reliability of Wikipedia and other crowdsourcing efforts. It begs the question: are today's kids digital natives or "digital naives?"

iPad deployment program

Thoughtful piece about keeping a grounded historical perspective when analyzing edtech innovations.

Michael Horn weighs in with a piece diametrically opposed to the previous post, calling out the end of the "old-edtech mindset".

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.

A couple of youth-oriented websites settled with the government recently because of COPPA (law that protects children's private information online, if they are under 13yo). Now legislatures want to expand COPPA, so it may significantly impact learning games developers, too.

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?

I agree with this view that the Edtech market is getting very frothy. Huge valuations for businesses without revenues - eerily reminsicient of the dotcom and scoial media bubbles...

@Komal and Steve - article about MOOC meet ups 

Minnesota reverses decision to ban Coursera after "a staggering amount of backlash" 

Why Khan Academy and similar approaches are not transformative

How can you leverage the power of the future using just your smartphone or tablet? Grab any of these apps and prepare to take your students on an adventure where they never look at their surroundings the same way again.

report from T-Mobile + infographic on mlearning 

related to massively online open courses as mentioned in Dede's article for 9/10

A pilot program in NYC for personalizing education in the classroom

Seems like a not-too-instrusive way to bring technology to the classroom--mostly behind the scenes.

Great video about the 21st century student!

That was an interesting video, though I'm a little skeptical about all the "qualities" they promote about digital native students. It made me feel like students just want connectivity to the internet 24/7 ("when I can Google the best place to buy shoes, I will also be able to Google where to get the best education" really?)...which to me, doesn't speak much to how technology will help them learn or master content better? It's like some of the other articles people have posted that talk about how introducing technology into the classroom doesn't really help learning--giving kids access to the internet may not be enough. I do think technology has a great role to play, but I feel like the video really glosses over the topic and presents it in a "marketing" way...