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When a brain scientist got a stroke, she got the opportunity to study her own experience. She found this remarkable ability of her mind to enter the conscious and sub-conscious realms, accessing information on different levels all the time. I wonder if artificial intelligence would ever have this ability, to think and feel on their own...

Article illustrates how adept kids are with technology and what they can take away from it even when informally introduced. The article discusses a mobile tech experiment in Ethiopia. Really interesting outcome!!!

Great article originally posted by Lindsey Dunn on the discussion boar, about what children can do with technology. Is this the major difference that needs to be made in OLPC in order for it to be successful?

Educational Arcade paper from MIT focusing on: "the background and affordances of Simulations, Digital Games, and Social Networking, the cognitive implications of these technologies, specific challenges with using these tools in the classroom, as well as strategies for overcoming these challenges in order to achieve successful learning experiences, and the future of these technologies and their impact and learning and teaching."

simSchool is a classroom simulation that supports the rapid accumulation of a teacher's experience in analyzing student differences, adapting instruction to individual learner needs, gathering data about the impacts of instruction, and seeing the results of their teaching. It's a virtual learning environment where instructors can explore instructional strategies, examine classroom management techniques, and practice building relationships with students that will translate into increased learning.

Interested in researching more what we talked about in class today, I found that some universities are actively trying to promote civic engagement in youth. Illinois State University students created a documentary to help them reflect on their learning. This is not at K-12, and maybe shows that (as we talked about in class), districts have less freedom to implement things like this...

Through optimizing the power of digital footprint in the classroom, students transform from passive to active learners. When incorporating technology within core curriculum, students' prior knowledge and experiences (PKE) with content are leveraged. They can then build learning communities, or personal learning networks, within and outside the classroom.

His ideas is to empower teachers and students to experiment with learning software by giving small grants to teachers.The point is to incentivize the use of technology at the teacher, student and classroom level.

Quick BBC audio segment about the experiences of 2 Ethiopian villages with OLPC's new tablets

Very cool embodied learning experience. Checkout the videos

This is really cool. I think there are opportunities in this for math learning, and maybe even connecting physics to math. For example, I could see embedded learning being used for mathematical modeling, but I have not seen it being done yet.

Notes from a conference on emerging technologies (not sure if Professor Dede was there or not). Count me as a skeptic re: OLPC's Ethiopia experiment, but the Institute of Play/EA partnership is an interesting one. 

I was at EmTech  at MIT during this panel discussion.

Thanks for sharing Mohit. I think the implementation of OLPC in numerous countries have been beneficial and a step in the right direction. Maybe if you do place a laptop in a child's hands, he/she could learn certain basic skills (like what the article suggested). But to go beyond that to higher-order thinking skills, a robust curriculum would be needed to complement the technology. Still, credit to these folks for reaching out to the children in need.

Have we posted/discussed this? A system such as this (see following post) would work well in one of the distributive models of teaching and learning we worked with last week. I am considering integrating into my charter school and would be curious to know people's experience and thoughts...

Article from July 2011 that is an example of how to transistion to a BYOD school.

I like it that "the district has focused on making sure that technical staff understand the educational goals of the initiative and that educators understand the technical challenges to enabling it". I my previous experience in non-educational settings, whenever the user community and the technology community were aligned and focused on solving a 'business' problem it was likely to lead to a successful conclusion.

New AR capabilities in Sony's about to be released PlayStation Vita. Very cool

I've never seen something that can take objects form the real world and make it part of the game experience for characters to jump off and bullets can ricochet off of real worl items.

Fantastic possibilities for entertainment and gaming. I can imagine doing a Parcour in my living room :-) It will be interesting to see who will invest the money and effort to bring this incredible technology to the educational area on portable gaming devices.

Technology in the classroom --> only works with parental participation. This is an angle that has not been covered much in our class. But, my experience tells me it is more important than whether technology helps pedagogy.

Disruptive or Transformative? Katy Culver, a faculty associate at the University of Wisconsin, Madison in the School of Journalism and Mass Communication, uses the iPad in her magazine publishing class, and says overall, it has been a positive experience in her class since it has not made significant changes to the syllabus. New bottle, old wine?

This is a bit of an older article, but I think it's a great illustration of the way that 'gamification' can transform the exploration of a real-world conundrum into an engaging, appealing experience (with very practical applications).

Also a neat example of the ability of modern formats to draw upon the expertise and skills of an enormous (but broadly distributed and amorphous) community

Washington University is trying to design video courses that can closely reflect the classroom experience.

Brings up the interesting issue of physical space in 21st century classrooms. Should schools of the future look like the way they do now (ie. desks and chairs, albeit with iPads/laptops atop desks)? How can we match the shift in pedagogical thinking with what our physical spaces of classrooms look like? On a related note, a colleague at an international school in Mumbai showed me around their new K-12 school recently (K-12 1:1 laptop program, phenomenal tech integration program)... and they no longer have walls to demarcate classrooms across the entire school. Instead of classrooms, they have "learning pods." So, imagine you're a third grade teacher--you have four slidable "walls" that you can open up to collaborate with the adjacent third grade section for social studies. Or perhaps you notice that the fifth grade science experiment seems to align with what you're doing today so you walk over to see if they'd be up for sharing what they're doing. Their idea is that the physical space needs to reflect the same environment of open education and collaborative learning that we're promoting in our classrooms.