TechTalk

Hemet Unified School District (CA) is piloting a new app aimed at getting parents more involved in their child's education through instant mobile alerts sent right to their iPhone.

SoLoMo = Social, Local, Mobile

While movements to incorporate ebooks and develop better Learning Management Systems (or LMS) are finally taking hold in higher education, more interesting (and potentially disruptive) are the emergent tech trends of Social, Local and Mobile – or what I like to call SoLoMo. We will begin to see innovations in these areas affecting the classroom and education in both dramatic and subtle ways.

Social

The days of mutual exclusivity between traditional learning tools and social networks are numbered. The winning cross-platform apps and cloud-based systems will transcend easy categorization and integrate all the social sharing widgets we’ve come to expect, from Facebook and Twitter to real-time conversation and chat layers.

Students are already sharing all kinds of content with their friends. The problem is that neither Facebook nor Blackboard go far enough to provide the right contextually-aware, fun sharing environment.

Location

Physical location matters less and less as we’re connected with peers, teachers and advisors 24/7 through our phones. However, when we are on campus, there are plenty of ways that we can do a better job of maximizing our time.

Mobile

Last but not least, mobile is the third pillar that will drive education tech innovation forward and is already a key component in the social and location-based services imagined above. With the general public obsessed with asking Siri to help them learn, plan and do, we’re now primed to expect even more from our VPAs.

Bottom Line

While students are increasingly connected on the go, educators have only scratched the surface of intertwining learning into their students’ mobile lives outside the classroom. Transporting academics to the entire campus and beyond will better integrate curricula with other school activities.

Gates Intermediate School (MA) "might not be Stanford or Berkeley, but it certainly represents a rather large fraction of schools in our education system still currently wavering over the official integration of sites like Facebook into school policies. I’m sure this isn’t the last we’ll be seeing of this same situation."

"Now that literally everyone and their mom appears to be on Facebook, the natural question becomes: Why waste time and resources on menial tasks like envelope-sealing when one can instead more effectively send a single email blast or Facebook post that informs the majority?

Administrators at Gates Intermediate School (GIS) in Scituate, Massachusetts say it’s not that easy. GIS is one of many educational facilities currently working towards adopting social media more heavily into its current routine. In particular, the school hopes to secure its own official Facebook page, one that School Principal Sarah Shannon says will be “limited to informational postings approved by Gates’ top officials.”

Findings from the Norton Online Family Report, which examined the effects of growing up in the digital age on youth, include the following:

Cyberbaiting - Twenty percent of teachers have personally experienced or know another teacher who has experienced cyberbaiting, a new study reveals. Cyberbaiting occurs when students taunt their teachers, capture their reactions on a mobile recorder and threaten to upload the footage to the Internet.

Teacher use social media. 67% of teachers say being friends with students on social networks exposes them to risks. Despite the apparent risks, 34% of teachers continue to friend students.

Schools need social media policies. Only half of the respondents (51%) report that their schools have social media codes of conduct dictating how teachers and students can interact online.

Teachers want more education in online safety. 80% of teachers think there should be more education about online safety in schools. Seventy percent of parents agree.

A good annotation tool can make the iPad a powerful companion for any teacher and scholar, especially if combined with a stylus for writing on the screen. But a bewildering variety of apps now exist to satisfy this need. The hard part is figuring out which is best suited to higher education.

Click on the headline above to view a great chart comparing different apps.

Sullivan Park High School, Kingsport, TN

As part of the Bring Your Own Technology (BYOT) program at South this school year, the Colonial Heights school has embraced all Wi-Fi devices with a schoolwide Wi-Fi system and integration of the technology into many classes. The pilot program started in September, said Evelyn Rafalowski, supervisor of technology, athletics, transportation and safety.

“Educators aren’t just handed a textbook to teach a subject. They teach a whole lot of other things,” South Principal Greg Harvey said.

An iPad, iPod or smart phone is no more banned at South than a piece of paper and pencil or pen would be, although the school has filters on the Wi-Fi access and rules about phone ringers being off.

“We need to teach students how to use tools. You just don’t say ‘Here’s the tools. Have at them,’” Yennie said.

He said that includes what to do to stay out of trouble and online etiquette.

Read more by clicking on the title above.

Tablets like the iPad can set your workforce free, but with benefits come risks and tradeoffs, from securing and supporting tablets to budgeting for them.

Twitter is perennial professional development at your finger tips.

It has been more than a year since I entered the Twitterverse. After attending the 21st Century Learning Conference in Chicago in October of 2010, I threw myself into the social media mix, and I could not be happier for it. I tell anyone who will listen that developing a Personal Learning Network on Twitter is perennial professional development at your finger tips, 365 days per year.

Last week, I participated in #edchat like I usually try to do for at least a few minutes on Tuesday mornings (depending on what is coming through my door). I really enjoy connecting with fellow learners in education, and I have a great deal of respect for each of the individuals who is willing to make public their thoughts and opinions on educational matters. Last Tuesday's chat was a philosophical one on 'the skills that we want to our children to have' when they leave the K-12 system. But as the chat progressed, I found myself beginning to get a bit frustrated with the ethereal comments that we (and I include myself in this--I made a few nebulous comments as well) were making as a group.

We say it all...

Amidst grim reports this week that California schools are “failing to invest enough time, money and training to teach science well,” and that only one out of 10 elementary school students gets to play with hands-on science experiments, a shining counter-example is happening at the Nueva School in the wealthy San Francisco suburb of Hillsborough.

Sixth-grade students are using Wii remote controls to collect scientific data on things like positive and negative acceleration and thinking about conceptual issues like the difference between engineering and science.

Led by Stanford researchers, the class is using Wii remote controls (available online for anywhere from $15 to $40) to create things like a rat-trap car, a marble roller-coaster, and balloon-powered vehicle to test different theories.

With the rat-trap car, students have created a Wii-strapped vehicle with CDs as wheels, like a skateboard. They’ve already experimented with smaller mousetraps and lighter batteries to see if the cars would go faster, but landed on the rat trap as the best way to measure the information they needed...

A majority of American parents say they are concerned that digital media is interfering with childhood development. Yet most do not think their own children spend too much time with electronic devices.

That’s according to a recent report [PDF] by the Joan Ganz Cooney Center at Sesame Workshop. The nonprofit research lab analyzed surveys of 810 parents with children ages 3 through 10 and reported some seemingly paradoxical findings:

About 59 percent of parents say their children’s digital media use prevents them from getting physical exercise.

More than half (53 percent) say the media use can pose a threat for online safety and privacy.

About 40 percent of parents say digital media infringes on time their children would otherwise spend in face-to-face interactions.

Only 18 percent of parents believe their own children spend too much time with digital media.