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What technologies succeed in school purchases and why: The SMARTboard story.

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.

I've heard of 3D printers before. I thought it would be interesting to try out in schools. For example, if students were designing towns to learn volume and surface area. This could help with spatial learning, which is essential to understanding math. I don't know how feasible this it though...

Hi Irina, Yes! Nothing like seeing your ideas take a concrete shape. Looks like the cost of these printers is comparable to that of SmartBoards, so it may be feasible to try them out in classrooms pretty soon. That said, unless the projects are well integrated into the curriculum, they will end up as another fancy toy.

Harvey and I had a conversation about these last week - Harvey spoke of the way that these printers could open up opportunities for those who can visualize their creations in their heads, but have trouble putting those ideas in tangible form. We spoke of the potential in art and design.

Students are using "Smart bracelets" to carry makeup work from school to home.

I'm trying to figure out how this is different or value added from just giving every kid a $10 flash thumbdrive.

I read this article this afternoon, and thought of it when I was doing work for my wiki assignment. I am looking into the blog Teachers Love SMART Boards (http://smartboards.typepad.com/) and I saw that the author of the blog also works for Teacher Online Training, which offers courses (for a fee) for teachers interested in implementing technologies in their classroom, or using the technology they currently have in a more meaningful way. The majority of the blog was reviews of free sites or education-oriented tools from outside sources, but there were a few posts that dealt with the programs offered by TOT. It made me wonder whether the blog was intended to be impartial, or a form of advertising... He mentioned his job in the company at the beginning of most if not all of the posts that promoted their programs, but these new guidelines may put this blogger in a sticky situation.