PSU TLT

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."

The iPad is being trialled in a large number of schools and educational settings across Australia. This theme page provides links to school trials, app review sites, blogs by teachers using iPads and a range of other useful resources for iPads in and out of the classroom.

This site is being used to explore to affordances of WordPress as a platform as it relates to teaching, learning, and research. We are just getting started, so expect things to change rapidly or to encounter the occasional glitch. You can use the “Log In” link in the horizontal menu bar at the very top of the page to get started.

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."

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.

A seventh-grader from Milwaukee Montessori School is among the winners of a nationwide video game design challenge launched at the White House last fall. Shireen Zaineb created a game called "Discover.." that earned her a victory in the National STEM Video Game Challenge, which was designed to generate interest in science, technology, engineering and math, also known as STEM. Zaineb's Web-based game teaches players about concepts such as mass, friction, weight and gravity through a series of platforming challenges in which players must jump a character through 2-D environments and collect items.

“Ultimately, we want ideas from the symposium to have a broad impact across the university,” he said.

Despite the iPad's popularity—Apple has sold nearly 15 million of them and just came out with the iPad2; and there are dozens of competitors, like the Samsung Galaxy—early studies indicate that these finger-based tablets are passive devices that have limited use in higher education. They are great for viewing media and allow students to share readings. But professors cannot use them to mark up material on the fly and show changes to students in response to their questions, a type of interactivity that has been a major thrust in pedagogy.

Google also tries to point out predictable traps in performance reviews, which are often done with input from a group. The company has compiled a list of “cognitive biases” for employees to keep handy during these discussions. For example, somebody may have just had a bad experience with the person being reviewed, and that one experience inevitably trumps recollections of all the good work that person has done in recent months. There’s also the “halo/horns” effect, in which a single personality trait skews someone’s perception of a colleague’s performance.