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""As much as we are here to serve the teachers, it is the students who ultimately benefit from the integration of technology in the classrooms," she said. "Students who once felt that they had to 'power down' to go to class, are now experiencing 21st century skills and styles of learning - because their teachers are better able to utilize the tools of the digital age.""

Not quite as dynamic as the school of one usage of data. Still, they offer individual and comparative data analysis for teachers to work with.

As a recent New York Times article wryly explains, it turns out that even the nation's technological elites-the same engineers, software designers, and idea people, who brought us Google, E-Bay, and Facebook-would prefer that their children grow up and learn in a technology-free environment. WOW -- SIMPLY WOW!! This is real food for thought. I completely challenged my thinking!!

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.

Going back to some of our earlier classes in which Prof. Dede discussed ways of using Kinect. It'll be interesting to see what choices Microsoft makes with Kinect...

Published Online: October 17, 2011 Published in Print: October 19, 2011, as When Educational Content Gets Blocked For most of last school year, Nowmee Shehab never thought twice about using school computers to pull up websites of the Trevor Project, the It Gets Better Project, or the Gay-Straight Alliance, as she searched for resources for her high school's own GSA club.

Carrying on from today's discussion on disruptive learning...

This article almost provides a nice gist of a lot of topics we've touched on in class.

Cool augmented reality demo from Ad Tech Tokyo 2011

Is this the start of a movement?

This is a "retweet" from Alex Shoenfeld but since he is not in this course I am posting it here.

I thought this was very reminiscent of the video that Prof. Dede showed early on in our class. Some parts are a little too "Big Brother" for my tastes, but the donation to the benefit concert just by holding a device up to the screen was fantastic...ease of use..."One-Click Wonders"...LOVE it!

Logical Choice Technologies has released an update to Letters Alive, an augmented reality education app for kindergarten and preschool. Letters Alive is a reading curriculum for preschool and kindergarten (and grades 1 through 5 for remediation and ESL) that consists of augmented reality-infused animal cards, augmented reality-infused word cards, software, teacher resources, and student activity sheets.

This is incredible. They REALLY took the AR capabilities and built out a robust curriculum. They didn't just stop with what I have seen as a "typical" use of AR (making the image or the letter appear as 3D objects), rather, they made the cards interactive and educational with sounds, changing color, sentence structure, punctuation, etc. Incredible!

Interesting, real-time, questions about the topics we are covering in T561. Illuminates some of the key pieces (and challenges there within) of the scaling process... "Wissahickon School District (WSD) board members are divided on how to meet educational technology goals that bridge the "digital divide" and foster 21st Century Learning skills for students. A "1:1" plan presented to board members calls for giving every secondary student a computer to bridge the digital divide for students who do not have a computer, and enhance learning for all."

While we are debating e-learning, developing countries are forging ahead, including engaging private sector, setting up long term strategy and policy, and starting Asia e University. "Think of it this way. We are preparing them for jobs that don't yet exist and for technologies that haven't been invented," Policarpio, Philippine Education Dept. official, says. He also compares what we do at Harvard stating that there is a big difference in accessing resources vs. e-learning., "For example, Harvard and Yale have an online portal for learning-a place where they can share their lectures and reports online. But those are just resources anyone can access. e-learning goes beyond that. It melds all kinds of academic activities with ICT (Information and Communication Technology)."

Another example of a one-to-one laptop program in schools. Interesting to think of this from the standpoints of the various stakeholders, and how awesome is it that we have so many representatives in our classroom alone - teachers, parents, siblings, caregivers, researchers, and of course, publishers :-) Sally Ryan for The New York Times MUNSTER, Ind. - Laura Norman used to ask her seventh-grade scientists to take out their and flip to Page Such-and-Such. Now, she tells them to take out their laptops.

Published Online: October 17, 2011 Published in Print: October 19, 2011, as No Longer Optional Two years ago, Tennessee's Putnam County school system adopted an online-learning graduation requirement for its high school students. But district officials realized that not all students had high-speed Internet access at home, or even computers, so they came up with a variety of options to allow students to fulfill the requirement.

"No one believes that learners don't need teachers. No one believes that engagement can only be found on a gadget. So why make that false distinction?" Perhaps blended learning is the perfect middle way between the two extremes.

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.