...yet another reason why we need to equip students with information literacy skills! ><

Sounds promising!

Fun predictions for technologies and cultural trends that will go extinct over the next several decades.

Intrigued to see what comes of this

Great post about the ways that books and video games are actually quite similar. My favorites: "1. Books are a powerful technology. They can lead to aggression and violence (witness the Bible, the Koran, and the Turner Diaries in the wrong hands). Nazi Germany was a highly literate society. Games, so far, do not have this much power, but some day they may. 4. Books can make you stupid by not questioning what they say. 8. Just giving people books does not make them smarter; it all depends on what they do with them and who they do it with. For young people, it depends, too, on how much and how well they get mentored. Mentoring is, in fact, crucial."

Another article looks at the fundamental flaws behind the OLPC vision, planning, and implementation.

Apparently their new strategy is to "airdrop" OLPC laptops into communities and let students teach themselves. Now, I'm all for students learning by creating and constructivist pedagogy... but this seems altogether irresponsible. Also, seems like we're promoting different standards for students in low income/low resource settings vs. students in resource rich settings through initiatives like this--and not in a good way. =/

I can see where several of his arguments are coming from, but I don't necessarily agree with completely banning Wikipedia from schools.

Similar to MIT's Scratch, Globaloria positions itself as helping students develop STEM knowledge, digital literacy skills, and college readiness through game design. The program markets itself as a blended learning model.

Website to teach kids the information literacy skills they need to approach the job search process--interesting concept

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.

This game encourages students to use Minecraft to build their own cities and engage in critical thinking about urban planning. The partnership with the UN will mean that students' engagement in the project will have real world application and consequences as urban planners consider their ideas and plans. Quote: "The first pilot project is already in the planning phase: Kibera, one of Nairobi's slums, is already being translated into Minecraft by builder group FyreUK"

This infographic is especially interesting because, as far as I saw it, most of these "innovative" approaches didn't actually seem all that extraordinary. More generally, it's puzzling (and troubling, really) that despite advances in ed-tech in primary and secondary school, higher education institutions are quite far behind the curve as far as innovative uses of technology goes.

Thought this may be of interest to those in the research team looking at PD and social media.

While I understand the reasons behind designing tablets like these, that monitor the content kids consume really carefully, it does bring up the larger issue of how do you really want to introduce kids to the internet. Do you shelter them by only letting them use kid-friendly apps, search engines, etc. or do you teach them early about smart and safe digital practices? There are of course plenty of safety reasons to go with the former, but I'm also interested in seeing how the latter might look.

The last point this article makes is an interesting one: clearly the gaming folks were at the table when the iPhone 5 was designed but what about the education people? What would it look like if the new version of iOS had a learning management system embedded within the OS?

A high school student devised an augmented reality interface to transform medical education--the phrase "kids these days" doesn't even begin to cover it.