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The training of teachers is key, said Margaret Gayle, co-designer of the program and director of the American Association for Gifted Children at Duke. The program was designed to give teachers new skills tailored for advanced students. "They challenge students more; they do more with problem-based learning," she said. "They get a lot of higher-level instructional strategies, they know better how to motivate kids."

Eduardo M. Ochoa, assistant secretary for postsecondary education at the U.S. Department of Education, said at a panel session on Monday that "less labor-intensive" instruction methods will be required to increase the nation's number of college graduates. He conceded that technology presents upfront costs for colleges. But, he said, "eventually, the way things are done becomes qualitatively different."

While the course redesigns differ from campus to campus, they often involve the use of low-stakes online quizzes to promote student mastery of material. Such quizzes and other online tasks can replace the need for class time and reduce the number of professors required to teach a course, Ms. Twigg said. On average, the course redesigns reduce costs by 37 percent, she said.

Ms. Twigg has argued for more than a decade that, when used effectively, technology can both improve student achievement and reduce costs.

Evolving the E-Portfolio at Penn State By Bridget McCrea04/06/11 Pennsylvania State University's foray into e-portfolios started about 10 years ago, when static Web pages were used to store and display online versions of student resumes. Fairly innovative for their time, these early e-portfolios gave way to more dynamic versions of themselves a few years back as the university began rolling in Web 2.0 technologies. "When blogs, social networking and other interactive technologies came along, we tweaked our e-portfolio initiative," said Jeff Swain, innovation consultant for the university. "We wanted students to be able to develop interactive, online portfolios that would be able to stay and grow with them throughout their college careers, and beyond."

The learning commons, sometimes called an “information commons,” has evolved from a combination library and computer lab into a full-service learning, research, and project space. As a place where students can meet, talk, study, and use “borrowed” equipment, the learning commons brings together the functions of libraries, labs, lounges, and seminar areas in a single community gathering place. The cost of a learning commons can be an obstacle, but for institutions that invest in a sophisticated learning commons, the new and expanded partnerships across disciplines facilitate and promote greater levels of collaboration. The commons invites students to devise their own approaches to their work and to transfer what they learn in one course to the work they do for another.

Flat World Knowledge, the largest publisher of free and open college textbooks for students worldwide, today announced the release of a new platform called MIYO (Make It Your Own) (http://www.flatworldknowledge.com/miyo). The fully-automated system gives professors greater control over textbook content, and the ability, with one click, to make their modified book available to students free online or in multiple, low-cost digital and print formats.

The new system uses familiar drag-and-drop and click features that allow instructors to easily move or delete chapters and sections; upload Word and PDF documents; add notes and exercises; insert video and hyperlinks; edit sentences; and incorporate other content that is free to reuse under a Creative Commons open license.

“Students are totally shameless about how they use their computers in class,’’ said David Jones, an MIT professor. “I fantasize about having a Wi-Fi jammer in my lecture halls to block access to distractions.’’While MIT has yet to unwire a single lecture hall, some law schools, including the University of Chicago’s, have in recent years blocked wireless access in classrooms to keep students engaged in Socratic discussions instead of their classmates’ Groupon and eBay activitie

My sense, from my marketing experience, is that those providing some product or service too often wish to be the ones defining what a product is or how it is used. They forget that it's the user, and it can only be the user, each individual independent user, that defines a product's value. Therefore, whatever products, services, means, TLT hopes to provide to students and faculty is, to a great extent, out of our control. The final use, the final value, can only exist in the mind of the person served. Likewise the resulting network isn't something that's defined in advance, but one that develops from each person participating in conversation.

While certain metrics are valuable and have their place, number of workstations, number of log-ins, number of postings and comments on blogs, those things are and will remain items that are only important to TLT itself. What is more important, and much more difficult to define and measure, is how value in the mind of faculty and students is satisfied.

Kim told me he wants to enable anyone to build their own portfolio of educational content – to build hundreds of Khan Academies. That’s a goal that puts teacher- and student-generated content at the center of education, one enabled by a simple, but smoothly functioning app — all on a portable device.

At the same time as many educators are rethinking the hardware involved with instruction, some are rethinking other ways in technology can change the classroom. Some are experimenting with the “flipped classroom” — the idea, made quite famous lately thanks to Khan Academy, that videotaped instruction can be assigned as homework, while in-class time can be used for more personalized remediation, for collaboration among teachers and students, and for the types of exercises that have typically been seen as homework. A new app taps into both of these phenomena: bringing an interactive whiteboard-like experience to the iPad and to the Web and making it easy for iPad owners to create their own instructional videos.

It's all too easy to fall into the trap of seeing blogs as a substitute for online discussion boards or a new delivery system for traditional academic writing.

Below is the process we will follow for peer review in this class. This post will take you through the following steps: 1.) Emailing your draft to your peer reviewer 2.) Opening your peer's draft in iAnnotate and adding your comments 3.) Emailing your comments to your peer, and 4.) Turning in your commented draft.