PSU TLT

Nothing too interesting here, but the instructions for resetting a chromebook so it can have a new "owner" is valuable. 

"Zohra Guisse, a lecturer in French and Arabic at Penn State Berks, is one of 11 faculty members selected across the University to participate in Penn State's Mobile Media Pilot program. The program, an initiative of the Penn State Media Commons, will explore how mobile devices can be used in students' media production workflow."

Writeup in Penn State Live about one of the faculty members who are using the video recording, editing, and posting capabilities of iPods for teaching and learning purposes.

well thought out and beautifully communicated vision for an educational blogging platform. Blogs@psu has had the motto, "create, reflect, connect". If I could take the liberty to translate Campbell's phrase into the lingo bandied about at PSU, it would be "reflect, meta-reflect, connect".

A project out of College of Ed that ETS collaborated on.  This group created some augmented reality apps for the iPod and iPad to help young students (I believe 3rd or 4th grade) learn about their natural environment, in particular how to identify trees.  Pretty cool stuff.

"During the event, faculty and staff led children through a variety of hands-on learning stations. For example, Zimmerman, along with Associate Professor of Education Susan Land and a team of six education graduate students, led a station titled, "Tree Investigators," in which they used iPads and iPods (provided by Penn State's Educational Technology Services) to give the kids an in-depth lesson on how to identify trees. "We used iPads to figure out what type of tree we were planting," said Collin Wayne, a student from Park Forest Elementary School, who attended the event. "We were in groups and we used a tree-finder app. You take a picture of a symbol and it tells you about the tree.""

Penn State Live article about a College of Education project. Elementary school students used iPads and iPod Touches to interact with data about trees in the arboretum. We talked with Susan Land and Heather Zimmerman about the project and helped out by loaning them some equipment. Future partnerships with them are in the works.

"Rows of desks, teacher lectures, and passive learning won't lift us into the future. We need a serious, national discussion on what the 21st century classroom can and should look like, acknowledging the variety of ways that students learn, the multitude of tools they use to interact with the world, and the growing use of online learning."

Exploring WP as a platform to support new teaching practice.

A nice summary with stats from Nick Smerker about the Media+Gaming event that was held at the Harrisburg campus. This is a good example of a lightweight debriefing report.

fruits of a weekend project from a team of developers. Cool idea and execution.

Update to google's Projeect Oxegen to include all the things they discovered.

A government commission that has been relatively unknown, but coud have dramatic effects on teaching and learning. 

"Requiring use of an emerging technology in a classroom environment when the technology is inaccessible to an entire population of individuals with disabilities - individuals with visual disabilities - is discrimination prohibited by the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990 (ADA) and Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973 (Section 504) unless those individuals are provided accommodations or modifications that permit them to receive all the educational benefits provided by the technology in an equally effective and equally integrated manner."

This was written specifically to address e-reader pilot programs. It doesn't specifically mean that you can never technologies that are not completely accessible, but it does set the bar pretty high to ensure that blind students would have an equivalent educational experience.