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Published Online: October 17, 2011 Published in Print: October 19, 2011, as Crafting Your BYOT Policy For the small but passionate minority of school districts that are opening doors to student-owned mobile devices, there's a lot riding on how effective the policy shift turns out to be in improving teaching and learning. I will be looking strongly at this experiment to assist with the charter school district I am putting together.

I can understand a districts hesitance towards the BYOT because of its responsibility for and inability to control the accessing of inappropriate content on such devices. What I would like to see - even if in baby steps (which I know is occurring in small scale all over the country), is the creation and sharing of engaging lessons that encourage this BYOT movement and combat the urge for students to be inappropriate because of the level of motivation the lesson itself provides. And I would also like to see some of the responsibility shift from policy makers to the students for self moderation - they know what is right and wrong in an educational setting - why can't we hold THEM accountable more?

Article addresses policy challenges in implementing BYOT

Designing a blended learning classroom/school "More significant than the shift from print to digital will be the shift from cohort matriculation to individual progress. Personalized digital learning will increasingly enable competency-based progress-advancement based on demonstrated mastery."

A rubric (in progress) designed for educational apps by a doctoral student at John Hopkins University. For those hesitant to make the shift to mobile devices, how would rubrics like this impact policy making, especially in regards to accountability?

A growing number of kids at increasingly younger ages are engaging in online social networking today-a development that is leading to a surge of news stories, media attention, and economic investment. In this paper, produced with the generous support of Cisco Systems and the Digital Media and Learning Hub at the University of California, Irvine, scholars Sara Grimes and Deborah Fields argue that these shifts in usage and public discussion demand a better understanding of the ways that social networking sites mediate kids' socializing and the opportunities and limits they place on kids' participation, particularly for young children.

Interestingly demonstrating a shift of professor's point of view on social media from time consuming to educational.

Voters in Idaho voted 2:1 to repeal a RTTT-inspired state law that would have brought 1:1 laptop programs to all high schools and required all students to take 2 online or blended courses in order to graduate from high school. The public felt that the law would have "diverted taxpayer dollars to technology corporations and marginalized teachers."

Idaho voted down several education measures including one to require participation in an online course before high school graduation and a shift to 1-to-1 computing in schools.

Opinion article from Reynol Junco at Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet and Society on why most educational technology startups aren't that great...they don't base their products on research, proven pedagogy, or work with educators.

It does seem like there is a shift going on right now- more educators on start up teams and more interest in developing innovations from the educators themselves. That being said, the market continues to get flooded. I think in the long run this will be very good for teaching and learning, but I would not want to be an investor in this space.

I think that is great that more educators are getting on the teams...but yeah, there are a lot of very fragmented / disperse initiatives that make it hard to tell what will succeed or catch on.

The International Association for K-12 Online Learning (iNACOL) just released a new report arguing for changes in the metrics used to measure the quality of online learning. Like the Innosight Institute piece we read a few weeks ago advocates, they're advocating a shift from measuring inputs to tracking outcomes and making sure those outcomes are objective.

The important thing is not the use of technology, but the new types of content, pedagogy, assessment...

I just logged on to post the same article! The interesting perspective that I got from the article was that the teachers continued to harp on this idea that in order to retain student's attention they needed to constantly "tap-dance" for their class. Instead of learning from this attention shift, teachers are becoming annoyed by it. Use the technology to give the responsibility of engagement to the students and only wear the tap shoes when necessary to facilitate a deeper understanding etc.

http://www.ted.com At TEDIndia, Pranav Mistry demos several tools that help the physical world interact with the world of data -- including a deep look at his SixthSense device and a new, paradigm-shifting paper "laptop." In an onstage Q&A, Mistry says he'll open-source the software behind SixthSense, to open its possibilities to all.

Hi there Hongge, thanks for sharing this amazing video. He's managed to bridge certain key technologies and made them more intuitive for the daily user. It's great that he's made it open-source too! Maybe we could pay a visit to MIT to check it out? I wonder though, whether such a device would in the future not only project thoughts and programs but also capture user data and begin to 'suggest' or advertise certain things to you. Scary but the potential is enormous. Again, thanks!

Thanks, Matthew. That video was actually filmed three years ago (yes, even before iPhone 4) and I wonder if Pranav is still at MIT Media Lab. Maybe Karen knows more about him and could make an introduction for us? Machine learning and personalizing content for us is already happening. Personally, I like the idea of personalized content simply because nowadays we can be so easily info-overloaded. It is quite normal for CEOs and political leaders to digest pre-screened/selected info by their secretaries and/or advisers, right? And Google has been doing this for advertising to consumers. I don't mind the right ads appear at the right time when I need the product or service. What really strikes me about Pranav's idea is that it reminds me about the movie Inception, where you can transplant an idea into someone's mind and the distinction between reality and the virtual world is so blurry.

Founded in 1972 by Nolan Bushnell and Ted Dabney, Atari played a central role in the early history of video games, going on to create what are still some of the most recognizable arcade games on the planet, like Pac-Man and Pong, to name a few.

very interesting. With the rise and widepsread adoption of mobile devices as the gateway of choice for gaming, more and more game companies are jumping on the mobile app bandwagon. With Atari shifting its focus like this, it instantly makes me think what other founding game company have or will need to do. Sega, another big name in the early gaming days, eventually had to drop out of the hardware game because it couldn't compete. It now produces game content for its former competitor's gaming hardware. And Sega now even ports lots of its classic video games from the 80s and 90s to mobile devices like the iPhone and iPad. Nintendo is still in the hardware game, but it's portable gaming hardware is now competing with directly mobile devices (& apps) head on. Nintendo's revenue and userbase is shrinking, and most analysts and observers are pointing to the rise of iOS and other mobile devices as substitutes to dedicated gaming devices. Will Nintendo still stick around using its current model- making its own gaming hardware to sell its own (highly regarded) 1st-party properties, like Mario, Zelda etc? Lots are predicting (or even encouraging) Nintendo to drop making its own hardware, and to produce content with its prized properties onto mobile devices.

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.

One example of using Ipads instead of math books. There is a brief mention of incorporating video, but the article does not go into detail about the format of the digital text books

This video gives VERY interesting statistics about our future in information and education.

I would be for this. I could not believe a place so big on recycling (Harvard) murdered so many trees with the printing of course packs. I like this idea if you could get the material from other sources than just the school (say the author or publisher directly or something like Amazon). Otherwise, there is no opportunity for competition or bargaining.

Lots of pomp and circumstance about new initiatives -- but how much funding and political clout is really behind them.

Are you speaking of Digital Promise? It reminds me of whatworks.ed.gov but it looks like it might be designed better. I don't believe whatworks.ed.gov ever got much traction.