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" Rocketship schools have made it their mission to close the achievement gap that holds back students in under-served communities. They practice what they call the "Rocketship Hybrid School Model," which combines traditional classroom instruction with individualized instruction through online technology and tutors in a "Learning Lab." "

High-lites the "Digital Promise" federal initiative. It is based on the idea of harboring new educational technologies based around a business model that rewards entrepreneurship

Tying into discussions this week about bringing access to mobile devices to all via non-prohibitive costs, while still reaching a set of bare-minmum technical specs for actual use: India's "$35 tablet" has been a pipedream in the tech blog-o-sphere for awhile now, but it's finally available (though for a price of roughly $60). Still though, as an actual Android color touch tablet, with WiFi and cellular data capability - I'm curious to see how it's received and if it's adopted in any sort of large scale

I had heard months ago that India was creating this, but was not going to offer it commercially - rather, just for its own country. Just like the Little Professor (Prof Dede) calculator, when tablets get this affordable, educational systems can afford classroom sets of them and then use them regularly. But to Prof Dede's point - can they do everything that more expensive tablets can do? Or better yet - do they HAVE to?

I think this is what they're aiming to do - all classrooms/students across the country having this particular tablet. They won't be able to do everything today's expensive tablets can do, but I think they'll still be able too to do plenty. This $35 tablet's specs are comparable to the mobile devices we had here in the US in 2008/2009. Even back then, we were able to web browse, check email, use social networking (sharing pics and video too), watching streaming online video, and play basic 2D games. But even beyond those basic features, I think this tablet will be able to do more than we expect from something at this price point and basic hardware, for 2 reasons: 1. Wide-spread adoption of a single hardware. If this thing truly does become THE tablet for India's students, it will have such a massive userbase that software developers and designers who create educational software will have to cater to it. They will have to study this tablet and learn the ins-and-outs of its hardware in order to deliver content for it. "Underpowered" hardware is able to deliver experiences well beyond what would normally be expected from it when developers are able to optimize heavily for that particular set of components. This is why software for Apple's iPhone and iPad, and games for video game consoles (xbox, PS3, wii) are so polished. For the consoles especially, all the users have the same exact hardware, with the same features and components. Developers are able to create software that is very specialized for that hardware- opposed to spending their resources and time making sure the software works on a wide variety of hardware (like in the PC world). With this development style in mind, and with a fixed hardware model remaining widely used in the market for many years- the resultant software is very polished and goes beyond what users expect from it. This is why today's game consoles, which have been around since 2005/6, produce visuals that are still really impressive and sta

More fears of publishers who hold the rights to intellectual property. Folks, you think health care is a big debate? Wait until our patent system changes - that will be a gladiator battle with everyone in the world (free and not free) participating... "As digital collections grow, Mr. Sargent said he feared a world in which "pretty soon you're not paying for anything." Partly because of such concerns, Macmillan does not allowits e-books to be offered in public libraries. Simon & Schuster, whose authors include Stephen King and Bob Woodward, has also refrained from distributing its e-books to public libraries. "We have not found a business model that works for us and our authors," said Adam Rothberg, a spokesman."

See a need, build something to meet the need, and go from there... StudyBoost is the result of a brother watching his brother and friend try to study for the GMAT without carrying around the book. Born: an IM client that allows for collaboration on questions and answers applicable to the test by both students and teachers - wherever and whenever. For Wiske's class - wouldn't this fit nicely into the CoI and PI models? If so, why wouldn't school embrace this use instead of worrying about inappropriate use of phones in class? Make the lesson or assignment engaging enough - generative enough - to hook and sustain appropriate interaction on the device that 93% of children have ACCESS to? Sounds like a win-win?

A contrarian view. "Some education experts say that the push to equip classrooms with computers is unwarranted because studies do not clearly show that this leads to better test scores or other measurable gains."

First of all - the girl in the picture of this article is reading Nancy Drew - who else spent most of their childhood with their head buried in a mystery series? :-) Secondly, I cannot tell you how valuable mud was to my childhood. Had I not been at a camp every summer where I was able to play around in mud and run through the woods all day, I would not be the person I am today. I think I did most of my growing and much of my learning in informal environments such as camp. It sounds to me like this school is trying to replicate those learning experiences...in a classroom. Not saying it's the way to go...but certainly an interesting model. Thanks for sharing!

Waldorf philosophy is different approach. For example, children learn to write first before they learn to read. As a result children may learn to read as late as 8 or 9. It's based on the anthroposophy philosophy. Children's who parents value these things will do well in a school without technology. Children who are plugged in at home would have a difficult time. This is effective for private school but not public school.

Using Podcast and Youtube as a method for instructing students has picked up a lot of attention among teachers. But, as our conversation with the School of One shows, the methods for demonstrating the effectiveness of this teaching tool needs a lot of work. This article discuss some of the potential issues with using technology resources to create lessons for students as oppose to traditional teacher lecture.

I applaud this article and its poignant way of explaining how this model defeats the best practices of interactive classrooms and takes us BACKWARDS in our thinking rather than forward.

This article profiles a school in Arizona that has adopted a blended learning model.

Isabel, Chris M., Stephen B., and I are at MassCUE today watching Yong Zhao's keynote.  You can find a copy of his presentation here at this website.

I saw Zhao speak yesterday at the MassCUE conference (with James, Chris McEnroe and Isabel Schwartzman). His message was provocative: the United States did not do well on the TIMSS test, but the US has never done well on this type of testing even way back to the 1950s. Therefore, Zhao thinks that these tests are not good indicators of educational quality, but that the things that the US does right are fostering creativity, building in tolerance and forgiveness into the educational system, and stressing problem-solving and collaborative learning.

This relates to part of the discussion in class today. I've seen him speak about the irony that Chinese schools, which are outperforming US schools on PISA and TIMMS, are actually trying to model their systems more on US pedagogy. See his latest book or look for him on TED.

This company seems to package much of the free software for social networks within a company. They present an interesting vision of how it all might work as people collaborate on a project and utilized the system to find the right human resources. This looks sort of like the descriptions of what networked learning should (kind of) look like in schools. This is the industry model. Here's the video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wkP49rBrq68&feature=player_embedded

We referenced this philosophy earlier and I thought that others might be interested to hear about a trend that may counter our program. It reminds me a bit of the "Having wonderful Ideas" course.