It's the schools that give each student an iPad tend to make headlines nowadays. No doubt, more schools are investigating tablets - Apple or otherwise - as part of their one-to-one computing initiatives, looking to replace not just desktop PCs but to replace laptops and netbooks as well. Despite the buzz about iPads, Chromebooks, and the like, one laptop (or tablet) per child is still far from a reality in most schools. And while the iPad is dominating the tablet market among consumers, it's hardly the most popular, the only or even the best option for schools which are considering mobile device implementations.
That being said, the education technology market is booming, and many schools are seeing the value in equipping their students with their own personal computing devices.
I've had the opportunity to test-drive two of the student-oriented PCs on the market - the Intel-powered Classmate PC and Google's Chromebook - for the past few weeks. In lieu of a traditional "under the hood" review, where I just compare the specs (we don't review hardware often here at ReadWriteWeb), I want to address some of the larger questions at stake schools will weigh when considering which, if any, of these devices they'll adopt for one-to-one programs.
There seem to be three forces at play when it comes to education and social media. The first is a lack of force, quite frankly - the inertia that makes many educators unwilling and uninterested in integrating the technology into their classrooms. The second is the force of fear - the pressures on the part of administrators, district officials, and politicians to curtail and ban teacher and students' interactions online. (See Rhode Island's recently passed legislation that outlaws all social media on school grounds as a case in point.) And finally, the third force is that of more and more educators who are embracing social media and advocating its use on- and off-campus - for student learning and for teacher professional development alike.
I spent this past week with many of those teachers at the International Society for Technology in Education conference in Philadelphia, and when Google unveiled Google+ on Tuesday, most of us were otherwise preoccupied. But now that many of the early tech adopter teachers are getting their Google+ invites, the question on their minds is "How will this work for education?"
I'm at the ISTE 2011 conference this week, which purports to be the premier ed-tech conference in the world. I'll be reporting on the latest-and-greatest in education technology - in new technology innovations as well as how these tools are being incorporated by teachers and students into the classroom.
The big names in the ed-tech industry will be on the exhibit floor - Pearson, Scholastic, SMART Technologies, Microsoft, Google, for example. But despite this strong and sizable presence of major tech companies, I can't help but wonder how the explosion in consumer technology over the last few years is reshaping ed-tech and how it is changing what teachers and students alike are demanding: technology that is more personalized, more user-friendly, and, well, just plain better.
An elephant never forgets. And as Evernote's elephant logo suggests, the note-taking platform already sees itself as a tool for storage, yes, but also for enhancing memory.
That couldn't be clearer with a newly release app today: Evernote Peek (iTunes link). The app makes rather ingenious use of the new iPad Smart Cover, creating a new way to make and study flash cards.
Having long wooed the educational market with its Apps for Education suite of productivity tools, Google is now poised to bring to students and teachers the hardware necessary to take full advantage of these Web-based apps and of the Web itself. Google's Chromebooks for Education announcement at Google IO this morning could provide schools with a huge opportunity to equip their students with computers, at a $20 per student per month rate.
No doubt, many schools still operate with pretty woeful IT, in terms of hardware, software, and Internet access. Plenty of schools still have just one computer in a classroom - if they have computers at all. Some have computer labs, of course, where rows of desktops line the room and where students can come for one class or so a week to learn keyboarding, do research, or play games. As computers have become more affordable and more common, and as computing has become more mobile, many schools have experimented with one-to-one laptop initiatives, all in the service of putting a computer in the hand of every student.
Rocketship Education, a network of K-5 charter schools, announces today that it has received over $3 million so far this year in philanthropic investments from Silicon Valley entrepreneurs and venture capitalists. The funds will be used to help further develop the technology that supports the Rocketship Hybrid School Model.
That model relies on a blend of traditional classroom learning and individualized online instruction. The latter involves the schools' Learning Lab, in which students spend time each day working on computers to their master reading and math skills. The Learning Lab helps the schools assess students' weaknesses and, through adaptive learning technology, helps provide remediation for those areas.
Evernote doesn't necessarily tout itself as an educational tool. Nonetheless the app has become incredibly popular among students, teachers, and researchers, and the company often highlights some of the innovative uses that these groups have devised in its blog posts.
As it's nearing Finals Week for many schools, and the necessity of the good notes and storage seems paramount. And Evernote is announcing a new integration today with StudyBlue that is targeted at the educational market and that showcases the ways in which Evernote's popular storage and note-taking capabilities can be utilized for educational purposes
A lot of foreign language instruction is geared toward the travelling experience. But what that typically means is a few vocabulary lessons on shopping and a few key phrases on how to order from a menu. If you aren't really interested in local dining or boutiques, then you'll probably find that even mastering all the vocabulary or phrases in a language guide will do little to help you on your particular journey.
A set of new apps hits the iTunes App Store today that offers a much better way to help you customize what you want and need to know about a particular language - whether you're travelling for business or for pleasure. TripLingo launches its first 4 apps with Mexican Spanish, French, German, and Brazilian Portugese versions.
This week the OCW Consortium is holding its annual meeting, celebrating 10 years of opencourseware. The movement to make university-level content freely and openly available online began a decade ago, when the faculty at MIT agreed to put the course materials from all 2000 of the university's courses on the Web.
With that gesture, MIT OpenCourseWare helped launch an important educational movement, one that MIT President Susan Hockfield described today as both the child of technology and of a far more ancient academic tradition: "the traditional of the global intellectual commons."
The opening keynote at today's OCW Consortium meeting was Tim O'Reilly, founder and CEO of O'Reilly Media, who spoke on "Perspectives on Open" and on what opencourseware and open education can learn from the open source movement.
In 2006, I created a project with a friend who had taught in Botswana. Called "Blogswana," the project was designed to teach students at the University of Botswana how to employ social media to tell their own stories. It was very popular - with Africans. All the funding sources, public and private, however, seemed to believe the same thing: Why fund tech when everyone knows Africans need industrial baby formula and fly whisks? Why teach social media when no one in the "Dark Continent" knows how to use a computer?
Well, the entire continent of Africa begs to differ with that cartoonish picture. Having covered African technology extensively here, and having been invited to speak at the continent's largest digital technology conference, I wanted to find out what Africans themselves were doing in terms of utilizing the social web to short circuit the abiding desire of the West to draft Brad Pitt and Bono as the voices of Africa. I found the Kuyu Project.
