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I feel this author's envy/nostalgia. Oregon Trail was really popular during my grade school years

ITNews, an Australian business publication, is reporting that the Department of Education of the state of New South Wales is using a variety of management software and techniques 'to roll out 240,000 netbook computers into what CIO Stephen Wilson calls "the most hostile environment you can roll computers into" - the local high school.' Students are offered a netbook in 9th grade through 12th and can keep them if they graduate.

A highly amusing flash game for learning physics concepts. How might a teacher use this in class?

What age group would benefit most from this? What could the teacher do to make sure students learn about physics and not just learn how to manipulate the simulation?

I just played around with it a little bit, and I don't feel that I could use it effectively with grade 9th or grade 7th students that I was teaching last year. It is pretty much just a balancing game, but I don't think it can help learners understand any particular concepts like 'gravity' or the 'principle of moments'. For younger learners, like 6-year olds perhaps, it could help them develop an understanding of weights and balancing forces(?)... I don't know...

An article that advocates the use of social media in the classroom. It highlights one pilot program in Oregon.

Slate has asked for people to submit ideas on what the 21st century 5th grade classroom should look like. It will be interesting to see what suggestions show up on this website.

online school for grades K-8

A look at Radio Instruction for pre-school children in Zanzibar.

MOOCs, or "Massive Open Online Courses", are a relatively new model of distance e-learning where hundreds and sometimes thousands of participants all take an online course together. The instructional mode of the courses is fairly decentralized; since there are so many participants in the course, the individual students cannot typically expect to have much individual interaction with the professors running the course. As a result, individual members of the MOOCs take on roles of peer teachers, and these roles are assumed organically (i.e. nobody invites them to become teachers in the course, they simply step up and take the reins). The assessment of MOOCs is extremely flexible; there are no grades and people only participate in what they want to participate in. The theory is that the MOOC creators put the learning environment into place, and the participants learn what they want to learn; less participation simply means that they will not learn as much. Thought this was a though-provoking model of eLearning and the changing role of the instructor in an eLearning environment.

High tech or no-tech - debate continues in Canadian schools. While schools introduce technology from Grades 3 ,4,or 5, Waldorf schools are growing too, 24 affiliated schools with students from K-12, and is growing.

Games as constant assessment, and textbooks as tools for problem-solving

The issue

HGSET561

This is a really interesting article, and coupled with the edX / Anant Agarwal article below from Douglas, I think it brings up additional questions. Even with all the features that Anant says will be added to edX, I feel like they are all just part of the "convenience" factor and in many cases (like grading, discussion forum), more convenience for the teaching staff than the students. It is convenient for the students to do online labwork instead of going to a physical lab, for example. So I wonder if that type of convenience is enough to convince more students to sign up to MOOCs, or if they have to fundamentally change to add more types of value?

"65% of today's grade-school children will end up at jobs that haven't been invented yet." Infographic detailing some possible future directions for educational technology including gamification, digital classrooms and novel computing methods.

Interesting article - highlights the growth of virtual training tools and their capacity to improve real world tasks. Example: "The amazing results of the training and simulation program have led to significantly improved grades on students' critical skills tests, taking scores from a 56% success in 2007, to 95% at the end of 2008 after the simulation was instituted."

How test designers are trying to move away from standardized tests to computer programs that can measure a myriad of skills simultaneously through simulations and "stealth monitoring."  Both Chris Dede and Howard Gardner are mentioned.

In recent years there has been a major push to equip classrooms with technology, including laptops, overhead projectors, interactive white boards and tablets. It has become big business. But there are questions about whether the investment is paying off. This series explores the push to digitize the American classroom and whether the promises are being fulfilled.

This comment from a reader on one of the articles (Inflating the Software Report Card) sums it up rather nicely: "Data-driven, individualized instruction aimed at identifying a student's strengths and weaknesses, is not perfect, nor can it replace great teachers. But it can and does allow gifted students to zoom ahead, average students to keep up, and struggling students to catch up. If we really want math education to become part of the fabric of our kids' lives, not just raising their scores on a standardized test, but helping them become more competent and effective adults, we need to take advantage of all of the technology available".

The trend: They already help teach kids the alphabet, sentence construction and how to graph equations. Now, iPads are being studied as a tool for students with autism and physical disabilities. University of Toronto professor Rhonda McEwen is researching how students at Toronto's Beverley School - which teaches special needs kids from kindergarten to Grade 8 - learn with iPad apps and games that require touch. In addition, the link from the smartboard section of the article, leads to a very interesting TED Talk about how to make smartboards.

Canada's report card on schools will be handed out to the provinces Monday, revealing growing struggles in science and reading for boys across the country. Once every three years, the Pan-Canadian Assessment Program, or PCAP, measures the reading, math and science proficiency of Grade 8 students in every province and the Yukon.

From the Orlando Sentinel, 1985: Although they have not solved how to keep students interested in certain subjects, computers are proving to be highly acceptable motivational tools in all grades at Seminole County schools. Unlike video games that provide only entertainment, computers in the classroom are used as a teaching resource to reinforce development skills for elementary and middle school students and for those with learning deficiencies....