Learning & Technology News

So what will the coming decades hold for us? In tracking our progress in the technological-evolutionary journey, Kurzweil has identifies six epochs, each of which is characterized by a major paradigm shift.

For the most part, language just works – by some mysterious process, people all over the world absorb the complex, underlying rules of their native grammars and store a vast lexicon of words and idioms in long-term memory. Effortlessly, we share stories, make demands, manipulate and delight one another with language.

The outcomes indicate the majority of students rate themselves (n = 617) as a novice (66.3%), compared to a happy amateur (17.3%), a power user (11.5%), or rather anxious (4.9%). Many observations can be drawn from this, including we tend to have a new intake who have a really good grounding in software (desktop and web based). It also indicates the need to devote resources to a well designed student support package, as 22% are not engaging with web based material would rate themselves as anxious and stressed with respect to technologies in learning.

It's all about Think Aloud, that age-old trick of simply narrating everything you are doing as the wiser, more experienced brain in the room. Narrate your decisions and your rationale and you will be teaching your students how to make good decisions online and off. Good behavior online is trickle down, after all. Model it, live it, talk about it. It's all "using" technology.

The I-slate looks similar to an iPad, with a seven-inch liquid-crystal touch screen display. But it's not a full tablet computer—in fact, unlike other hardware supplied to disadvantaged children through efforts such as One Laptop Per Child, it's not a computer at all, and does not have an operating system. "It's an elaborate, single-function device," says Palem. Kids can read from a preloaded textbook or take notes and work out math problems using a stylus on a "scratch pad" to one side of the screen. The device can store a few pages of notes.

This review focuses specifically on the potential of neuroscience to inform the design and use of educational technology. It will be of interest not just to researchers but also to those concerned with the future role of technology in education.

When I first read an iPad book to my son, back in April of 2010, I had a sick feeling in the pit of my stomach. What did these new picture books, with their instant appeal, mean for print books and more importantly, for reading as a pastime? Would my son ‘read’ or would he instead be distracted by books he could passively watch, or even worse, books that were more like toys and less like educational tools for literacy?

The online characters – dubbed "chatbots" – employ high-speed speech recognition technology enabling them to conduct real time spoken conversations directly with students.

Pine Glen was very fortunate to receive 60 iPads this school year on two Bretford Power Sync Carts! The Carts will make management of the iPads easier, because they provide a central place to store, recharge, and sync the iPads to the iTunes library on my laptop. It was quite a bit of work to get the iPads ready to go for the students. I made a few mistakes a long the way, but here’s the most efficient method that I’ve found for getting all the iPads up and running in a uniform manner, particularly if you already have a bunch of free apps and apps purchased from the Volume Purchase Program:

Alas, one year on the website (The TED Teachers’ Network) is unused and hasn’t been added to or accessed for a long time. To be honest, I had forgotten about it until I saw a post on Martin Warter’s blog about a similar problem he had had with his school’s wiki for teachers. That got me thinking about why my attempt had failed - I think reflection of this kind is just as valuable as reflecting on what worked well, if not more so - and here’s what I came up with: