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Award winning global collaborators Julie Lindsay and Vicki Davis (co founders of the Flat Classroom Project) are excited to announce the 2012 NetGenEd Project, another global collaboration to envision the future of education and social action by inspiring today's students to study leading technology trends and create their vision for the future. In this project, students will study and "mash up" the results of the 2012 Horizon Report from the New Media Consortium and Educause and Tapscott's book Grown Up Digital: How the Net Generation is Changing Your World. Students will study the current research and create wiki-reports with their student partners around the world analyzing current trends and projecting future happenings based upon this collaborative analysis. This project is managed by the students who assume roles such as project manager, assistant project manager, and editors of the various wikis. After compiling their wiki reports based upon current research, and encouraged by "expert advisors" (subject matter experts in the industry), students will then create a video based upon their research in current global technological trends. Applications open now: http://www.netgened.org/apply.html February 1 deadline extended for interested ITGS classes. Contact julie@flatclassroom.org

"Now that Google has conquered a majority of the earth's major streets with its Google Street View project, the company is starting to move inside. It's creating the Google Art Project, a virtual equivalent of 17 major art museums, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art and Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Tate Britain and National Gallery in London, and the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, among many others. Amit Sood, director of the project, said in a company blog post that the documentation of major museums began when a small group of Google employees with a passion for art started wondering how they could make major art museums, and the works they house, more accessible to people worldwide."

When a malaria research project in Uganda was expanded into a full-fledged malaria case-tracking effort across the country in 2006, health officials saw the move as a great opportunity to save lives... But after starting with such promise, the project quickly became mired in a series of technology shortcomings... It finally all came together this spring after the introduction of a few key high-tech tools -- a modern relational database, nine smartphones and a remote-access software application that was originally meant for a completely different use.

"10 Takeaway Tips for Project-Based Learning"

The annual Horizon Report describes the continuing work of the New Media Consortium's Horizon Project, a qualitative research project established in 2002 that identifies and describes emerging technologies likely to have a large impact on teaching, learning, or creative inquiry on college and university campuses within the next five years. The 2010 Horizon Report is the seventh in the series and is produced as part of an ongoing collaboration between the New Media Consortium (NMC) and the EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative (ELI), an EDUCAUSE program.

A Dutch schoolteacher with no formal training in astronomy, Ms. van Arkel had joined tens of thousands of other Web volunteers to help classify photographs taken by deep-space telescopes. Stumped by the unusual image on her computer screen, she e-mailed the project staff for guidance. Staff members were stumped, too. And thus was christened the celestial body now known to astronomers worldwide as Hanny's Voorwerp (Dutch for "object"). Stories like Ms. van Arkel's are becoming more common, as the Internet opens up new opportunities for so-called citizen scientists. And as millions of people get involved in these participatory projects, scientists are grappling with how best to harness the amateurs' enthusiasm.

Discusses the drawbacks of Gantt charts in project management.

Scenerio: Consultants have a tough enough time managing a team when everyone is on site. Scatter your project members to various locations, and it's even harder to stay on track. One consultant shares his experience and the lessons he learned on the way to success.

Article on digital citizenship by Julie Lindsay and Vicki Davis. Reviews current Flat Classroom Projects. How can we teach digital citizenship when the digital landscape is changing so rapidly? How can we teach proper online social interactions when the students are outside our classroom and thus outside our control? Will encouraging students to engage in global collaborative environments land teachers in hot water? These are the questions we hear from our peers around the world who are grappling with such issues in administrative offices and teachers' meetings every day. Digital citizenship is far more than digital literacy, just as 21st-century skills encompass much more than simply "skills." Digital citizenship is not about creating a list of things to do or a stagnant curriculum that you can use for the next 10 years. It's about transforming yourself into a professional who can effectively research technology trends, monitor the uses of technology in your school or district, avoid the fear factor that can easily paralyze you, and empower student-centered learning to create vibrant, exciting learning projects. As you embark on the path to becoming a digital teacher, we offer some advice to consider and pitfalls to avoid.

By combining advances in educational technology with improved understanding of young children's cognitive development, the Evolution Readiness project is producing an empirically validated curriculum for introducing evolution in the elementary grades. We are using computer-based, manipulable models of interacting organisms and their environments to help fourth grade students learn Darwin's model of natural selection as the process primarily responsible for evolution.

Outlines benefits and drawbacks of using Gantt Charts in project planning.

Poor project planning of major educational database causes delays and reliability problems. (Old article) 

"Printed-on-demand robots might be a reality before the end of the decade if a US-based project achieves its goals. Researchers aim to build a desktop technology that would allow an average person to design and print a machine within 24 hours. The team says that making it easier to create specialised robots could have a "profound impact on society"."

"WE LIVE IN AN AGE of increasingly smart machines. In recent years, engineers have pushed into areas, from voice recognition to robotics to search engines, that once seemed to be the preserve of humans. But I.B.M. has a particular knack for pitting man against machine. In 1997, the company's supercomputer Deep Blue famously beat the grandmaster Garry Kasparov at chess, a feat that generated enormous publicity for I.B.M. It did not, however, produce a marketable product; the technical accomplishment - playing chess really well - didn't translate to real-world business problems and so produced little direct profit for I.B.M. In the mid '00s, the company's top executives were looking for another high-profile project that would provide a similar flood of global publicity. But this time, they wanted a "grand challenge" (as they call it internally), that would meet a real-world need. "

This is a project that will allow researchers to explore the breain by recreating brain structure within a computer

Outstanding description of Denmark's use of electronic health records and telemedicine projects. Specific examples. Identifies the technology used. Students will need to research/learn how the technology works.

Flat Classroom Project, 2010

"How can we teach digital citizenship when the digital landscape is changing so rapidly? How can we teach proper online social interactions when the students are outside our classroom and thus outside our control? Will encouraging students to engage in global collaborative environments land teachers in hot water? These are the questions we hear from our peers around the world who are grappling with such issues in administrative offices and teachers' meetings every day. Digital citizenship is far more than digital literacy, just as 21st-century skills encompass much more than simply "skills." Digital citizenship is not about creating a list of things to do or a stagnant curriculum that you can use for the next 10 years. It's about transforming yourself into a professional who can effectively research technology trends, monitor the uses of technology in your school or district, avoid the fear factor that can easily paralyze you, and empower student-centered learning to create vibrant, exciting learning projects. As you embark on the path to becoming a digital teacher, we offer some advice to consider and pitfalls to avoid."