Group items tagged

in response to Jen Lavalle's post about games having to go cross-platform to survive. Adobe, makes of the Flash platform, have announced they are stopping further development of the plugin for mobile devices. They are instead now going to focus on open standards (like HTML5), to allow content to be viewed on all modern devices (mobile and computers) with no plug in required. They will also focus on tools to allow developers to push content speciically to the app stores of today's most popular mobile devices. This is a good & bad sign for app developers who use Flash (lots of them, it's been an industry standard for years. Flash has suffered from terrible performance on mobile devices, so it's good to see Adobe acknowledging the need to do something different for their mobile strategy. But what this means for the tools developers will (need to learn to) use? TBD...

The Univ of Pittsburg is becoming an ed tech incubator.  They're starting with two products:  SWord a cloud-based peer review program and CE Agent a smart phone app that manages nurses' continuing ed credits.

The role technology can play in expanding the time during which learning can take place.

Another article about "expanded learning time" both online and via community-based "brick and mortar" locations like libraries, YMCA, and Boys & Girls Clubs. "Out-of-school programs can be strong partners for schools who want to leverage expanded learning time to help their students achieve global competence. Youth-serving organizations share the broad mission to promote student success in work and life in the 21st century. Out-of-school program organization and management is often based on an asset model that values diversity. In order to attract and retain participants, out-of-school programs are centered around youth engagement through hands-on and experiential learning, often with a focus on 21st century skills, service learning, science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) education, and others."

I wonder what Helen Haste would think of this organization . . .

We live in digital and mobile world. Mobile learning forces us to rethink how to best utilize our time in school. We can focus more on questions that require collaboration, synthesis, critical thinking and creativity, and not just memorization of facts.

Educational technology predictions for 2012. Seems to be focus is on better assessment, bring your own device (BYOD), and free quality content.

"The event is expected to focus on iTunes U and electronic textbooks/' iTunes U has been offering free educational videos and recorded lectures for years. I wonder what they'll unveil on Thursday the 19th re: e-textbooks

Nice contrast - one company believes in design and the other in data.

I'm intrigued by the writer's argument that a focus on data (Google) helps make the existing technologies more effective and powerful, while the focus on design (Apple) helps create new technologies and bring about revolutions in technology usage. It seems to me that we must have both existing to reap maximum benefit, but it's not clear whether the two ideologies together will be as effective as they are apart.

CNN on "Fixing Education." Secrets of Seoul and Mr. Bill Gates focus on teachers.

Secretary of Education Arne Duncan leads a team to State Educational Technology Directors Association (SETDA) Leadership Summit, "Leveraging Technology for Learning." Th panels focus on making shift to digital textbook, increasing broadband access, STEM, assessment, and improving teacher effectiveness - many of these we discussed in our T561 class.

When we think about education reform, we usually focus on teacher quality. The big battleground in education revolves around holding teachers accountable for their performance. With all the focus on teachers, however, one group that is often forgotten as a key learning resource are the students themselves.

perspective on how the rush to collect and use data should focus on how it could help school administrator, not teachers. 

Contains many arguments for rewriting AUPs, with insight on how to make the policies work. For example, there is a focus on implementing acceptable use lessons, focusing on web safety, in classes.

Here is the link to the archived version of the SIIA webinar I posted about a few days ago: "The Learning Resource Metadata Initiative (LRMI) is working to create a standard metadata framework for tagging educational resources on the web to enhance search, discovery and delivery of educational content. The project is funded by the Gates and Hewlett Foundations, administered through AEP and Creative Commons, and builds on the broader Schema.org project by leading search engines Bing, Google, and Yahoo! This webinar provides an overview of the LRMI goals and deliverables, an update on progress and timelines, a look at the technical specifications, and a discussion of its implementation and impact with a focus on content publishers, aggregators and other digital learning providers."

Article discussing Dede's research in augmented reality with a focus on place-independent scenarios.

Clickers have been popular in Northwestern University and Harvard. In this report, clickers are not only regarded as a device that improves teaching quality, but also a means that helps teachers know how many students are present and helps students focus more and read more.

Interesting article onshifting the focus to teaching a math curriculum that can be applied to real-life situations.

Interesting article onshifting the focus to teaching a math curriculum that can be applied to real-life situations.

The White House announces the creation of a national center called Digital Promise that will focus on transforming education through learning technologies.