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Students around the world join together to solve global issues, such as the environment, energy, and the global recession, via Webcasts, the Internet, and VChat.

My Wife's friend is a principal in this district. I am still incredulous at the fact that schools can require students to use electronic textbooks without providing laptops or e-readers to each student. But then again, where would the money come from? On a related note, the federal government seems to be sinking an awful lot of money into solar energy, despite the fact that a lot of these companies are folding. Wouldn't education be a better investment?

Stephen, In my opinion, the government is not sinking enough money into renewable energy. I am sure we have 'sunk' much more money into education over the last few decades and continue to do so. I don't think it is an either/ or.

This is a flash game where the player manipulates variables related to a trebuchet to meet various challenges. It involves concepts of momentum, angle of release, gravity, wind, potential energy, etc.

Another fun physics game. Use a trebuchet to hit targets, demolish walls, or just go for distance.

UC Irvine's TLTC frontpage linked to this archived Google presentation on how teachers can use Google apps in Higher Education. Almost felt sales-pitchy and I wondered how much time and energy faculty are willing to invest in configuring and setting that stuff up for their own class, as opposed to using whatever the university's IT team has set up and standardized around.

MIT just appointed a new Director of Digital Learning. I guess edX and the impact of educational technology at MIT has become official and institutionalized--and probably not just a fad.

Hats off to MIT. I think they will reap huge benefits from putting an accomplished leader in charge of this endeavor. Not only does this appointment communicate how much value they place on digital learning, but it will likely lead to the development of a coherent vision, comprehensive strategy, and stream-lined effort to push MIT forward in the edtech scene. I haven't seen this same kind of commitment to edtech from Harvard. As HBS professor and author Clay Christensen so eloquently wrote, "you can talk all you want about having a strategy...but ultimately, this means nothing if you do not align those [strategies] with where you actually expend your time, money, and energy. In other words, how you allocate your resources is where the rubber meets the road."

Professor Dede had pointed out that mobile phones may hold the key to improving access to educational technology. One of the bottlenecks seem to be access to power in remote areas. This invention seems to be promising in renewable 'human powered' energy. Granted that any new invention has to go a long way before it becomes commercially viable, but I was a bit disappointed at the flippant tone of the author towards the end of the article.

For those of you interested in trying out a bit of augmented reality at home, try out this green energy augmented reality application available from the GE web site. You will need a printout of the glyph (the black square design provided on the web site) and a webcam in order to get this to work. Audio volume adjust according to the distance of the glyph away from the webcam. This little AR app was designed using ARToolKit originally created by Dr. Hirokazu Kato.

Augmented Reality Sample created for General Electric using ARToolKit. You will need a webcam and a printout of the glyph (the black box design that the AR object will need to anchor to).\n\nI can't directly anchor to the augmented reality sample, so please bring your mouse pointer down to the bottom of the browser window to where it says, "Navigate the Smart Grid," and click the augmented reality icon on the far right of the navigation bar that appears.

I especially love the last quote of this interesting article: "... Now, it's all about penetrating these weird markets that we can't even fully fathom yet." Maybe the ARM chip will be behind a disruptive innovation - it's fun to think about the possibilities

We have a reading on "ubiquitous computing" later in the semester that gets into these fascinating issues and how they might affect education.

Can social networks be an instructive technology? Since social networks are so popular, if their features can be used in education, there would be interesting results. However, nowadays, most of them are for entertainment uses.

I love competative learning labs. I wish this project based co-opetition model were a standard in our schools. Innovation and team dynamics are mindsets and skills that need to be developed in our kids.