Innovative learning environments are found only in isolated pockets and not widespread - a finding in a conference of educators and researchers from seven different countries in New Zealand. "The recurring theme of Partners in Learning is that schools, even those well equipped with technology, are not providing for a 21st century workforce."
it is really dramatic the fact that there are still teachers who are using traditional methods . i really do not know while the benefits of technology for education are very clear ,what is the reason for people who insist on not to use it
Study with 350 children, ages 8-12, from Australia, France, Germany, South Africa, the United Kingdom, and the United States, suggests that Robots may inspire new learning and creativity possibilities.
Mark Reford, who heads the school, and Michael Zeigler, the school's technology director and a teacher, said a new course marries the worlds of art and technology for middle school students, promotes higher-order thinking and gives kids insight into the future of manufacturing.
3D printers are not new but If you 've never heard of them it is a fun technology to investigate.
Technology isn't explicit in this article, but it is ever-present in regards to this author's re-thinking of the classic book report. Instead of "same old, same old", this article suggests that students should be remixing the information they gather from books and recreating it in different ways - 21st century skills!!!
"Below, we present some alternatives to that classic classroom assignment, the book report. All of our ideas are inspired by The New York Times in some way, either because we've adapted an interesting format, or because we were inspired by an article, review, essay, interview or multimedia feature."
Over 6 million students are learning online. More importantly, the rate of growth is 10% per year compared to 2% student population growth in higher education.
LearningSpace, a new tool from ePals that is also COPPA (Children's Online Privacy Protection Act) and FERPA (Family Educational Rights
and Privacy Act) compliant, provides K-12 appropriate selective access to the applications within a protected, customizable social learning environment. Schools and districts can customize the rules and policies that determine which groups, classes and projects have access to third-party applications.
"Meet Salman Khan, your child's new teacher. If you haven't heard of Khan, rest assured that your son or daughter is in good hands. He has four degrees from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and Harvard. He got a perfect score on the math portion of his SAT."
This article describes a new early detection method that uses eye-tracking technologies to gauge babies' social engagement skills and reliably measure their risk of developing autism.
"The ability to tilt along multiple axes distinguishes our display from previous actuatable displays. Such screen versatility opens a range of opportunities for providing an additional integrated information channel to the user.
"These opportunities include collaboration, terrain modeling, 3D video that is beyond auto-stereoscopic 3D and tangible gaming. We can imagine many scenarios that would benefit from the physicality offered by Tilt Displays. However, we need to establish whether users can relate to the new experiences and advantages of using such a device."
Did some digging into the Quest for Learning school that was mentioned in the Connected Learning reading. They're about average on test scores in 2012 (found here: http://projects.nytimes.com/new-york-schools-test-scores/counties/new-york/districts/new-york-city-district-2/schools/quest-to-learn), which could be cited to support arguments on both side the 'gaming v traditional learning' coin with regards to standardized tests. It will certainly be interesting to see how their graduates fair over the next decade or so.
Well spotted, Ms. Laura. Schools like this really do take some leap of faith. Even parents/students/administrators/teachers who really believe in the ideals must realize that the students do not exist in a vacuum and that if/when their kids take the SATs, apply to college, etc., they are buying into the system that they are trying to reject/amend earlier in the students life.