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eyes in the back of your head? One teacher thinks this is good idea.

Ed Murphy, vice president of business development at Learn360. "The recent adoption of both sets of new Standards affords Learn360 boundless opportunities to provide even more resources and tools to help students think critically, make informed decisions and ultimately make larger social contributions in a heavily wired world." Additionally, the 21st Century Learning Skills focus on helping students master the multi-dimensional abilities required of them in the future by blending specific skills, content-knowledge, expertise and literacy with innovative support systems"

MIT just appointed a new Director of Digital Learning. I guess edX and the impact of educational technology at MIT has become official and institutionalized--and probably not just a fad.

Hats off to MIT. I think they will reap huge benefits from putting an accomplished leader in charge of this endeavor. Not only does this appointment communicate how much value they place on digital learning, but it will likely lead to the development of a coherent vision, comprehensive strategy, and stream-lined effort to push MIT forward in the edtech scene. I haven't seen this same kind of commitment to edtech from Harvard. As HBS professor and author Clay Christensen so eloquently wrote, "you can talk all you want about having a strategy...but ultimately, this means nothing if you do not align those [strategies] with where you actually expend your time, money, and energy. In other words, how you allocate your resources is where the rubber meets the road."

Augmented reality - streaming to your eyes soon

One of the few uses of advanced technologies in the history curriculum

As delivery of history teaching to students becomes more and more realistic, it is more important than ever to ensure that we have in place a robust and diverse oversight network to ensure that the narrative being suggested is an accurate representation of the time and place, as opposed to a history-as-written-by-the-winners narrative, which is pervasive throughout many textbooks. For many students, this sort of immersion will overwhelm any alternative streams of knowledge coming from Harlem in the 20s, so it is vital that the VR be constructed in a way that captures the context of why it was such a dynamic time in New York. As for the creators of this technology having to turn to the porn industry for technical support, that should not come as a surprise, as many claim that porn has revolutionized, or at least been instrumental in, the emergence of many new industries from VHS to the internet.

I had a chance to do some research on these guys this past summer and it's pretty cool stuff. The TECHbooks (see what they did there...) are basically super intuitive tablets filled over 160,000 leveled lessons - all of which are aligned to Common Core State Standards (if you're in to that, as 45/50 states are). Combine them with a Discovery Streaming license and you get over 100,000 multimedia assets which are downloadable & accessible from anywhere. I wouldn't necessarily call it "transformative" just yet, but it presents a compelling case for digital in the print vs. digital debate.

Augmented Reality pioneers Metaio hardly qualify as a startup these days (being incorporated since 2003 and funded by a stream of project work from the likes of Volkswagen and IKEA), but they behave very much like a startup and are constantly inventing new systems for their considerable augmented reality SDK.

Very similar to the idea of teaching computer programming via storytelling/animation (Scratch)

I just watched this video and it's actually billed INCORRECTLY on that Ted.com description! The guy is *not* saying to teach math through teaching computer programming at'all!! He is simply advocating to use the power of the computer to teach math - i.e. using programs such as Mathematica. His slide says "Computer-based math: critical reform" -- so, he is saying that students should use the computer for the computing (which is for sure true) and teachers should teach with the students using this computing power asap (which I agree with) ... but he is *not* actually saying to teach computer programming ... p.s. This video is sweeping through the math teacher twitter streams and blogs right now (yes, there is such a community out there!) But, in my opinion, his idea is no big leap ...

Absolutely agree... the idea presented here is no big leap at all, especially to us who are following these advances pretty closely. I saw the parallels with scratch in terms of engaging the learner.

Interesting startup.  Building a learning tool based on the neuroscience concept of "confidence-based repetition."  

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

"President Obama will launch the "Educate to Innovate" campaign, a nationwide effort to help reach the administration's goal of moving American students from the middle of the pack to the front in science and math achievement over the next decade. The President will announce a series of partnerships involving leading companies, universities, foundations, non-profits, and organizations representing millions of scientists, engineers and teachers that will motivate and inspire young people across the country to excel in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM)."

Now this service/interface seems to offer real potential -- it's flexible, it's based on a dynamic interplay of different applications -- it's been around for a few years now -- anybody have first-hand experience with it?

Being a 2nd year part-time student, I already took David Rose's UDL course last spring. My group project for UDL was exploring VoiceThread-- understanding its current feautres and capabilities, testing it out in a real world situation with some students, and envisioning changes to fix shortcomings plus new features. Overall, we thought VoiceThread was really cool! Could allow students to communicate in different kinds of ways (text, voice, submitting video statements, drawing-- whatever someone preferred or was comfortable with) and enabled a growing transcript of student dialogue in reference to a piece of content. But there was a real learning curve- in figuring out how (as a 'teacher') to create an original VoiceThread using our media. And then students had to figure out the interface and tools available to them as they used VoiceThread to browse a stream we created and comment on it. As of last spring at least, I felt it was a bit cumbersome. Really wish it was more intuitive so both creators and viewers could jump right in and get right to communicating. Haven't gone back to using it as of late, but I hear they now have iPhone/iPad access!