Today’s students were born digital but those responsible for their education were not. Youngsters arrive at school in tune with the social context and experience the Web offers. Children thrive when teachers find ways to educate them in a more flexible, hypertext manner. This space focuses on development of and support for teachers in their use of technology as they cultivate 21st century content knowledge and skills in their students.
Overall Educational Value: B
The application is most suited to provide a skill and drill approach to memorizing vocabulary, math facts and other learning content. It also provides learners with the opportunity to:
learn “bite sized” pieces of relevant information at a time
receive immediate feedback on results
test knowledge in any subject using custom card set integration with Google Docs
My youngest son, Aiden, is two and a half years old and seems to be devloping a real interest in the iPod Touch. While this is most likely because he watches his mom and dad use mobile devices on a daily basis, his interest really made me consider if and how the iPod Touch and the apps available for it could be used to support early learning.
There are approximately 6000 educational apps available in the iTunes store, so I have been trying to spend some time each day investigating, experimenting and analyzing an educational app. To further explore my research questions, I also decided to follow the example of Piaget and use my own children as a research subjects, so I downloaded a few apps, synced them to my iPod Touch and set Aiden loose.
In the coming months, I plan to continue working with Aiden and various iPhone apps. I'll be collecting data, video documenting his learning experiences and trying to determine what place, if any, these apps have in the early childhood classroom. In some cases, I'll review the apps and contribute them to I Education App Review. To kick this little project off, I thought I'd share a few of the early videos I've collected.
I reviewed the Wheels on the Bus and Word Magic iPhone apps for the I Education Apps Review community back in April. Each review consisted of a written component and a supplemental video review to show the app in action. One thing that I was never quite satisfied with was the technique I had to use to capture video of the iPhone app in use. To complete the first two app reviews, I resorted to mounting my video camera to a modified tripod that allowed me to capture video from directly above my iPod Touch. This method was less than ideal as it was very difficult to attain the proper lighting so that the screen was always clearly visible.
This weekend, I sat down to write, record and edit a long overdue IEAR review, but I just couldn't seem to produce video of the iPod screen that was high-quality enough to use. After nearly an hour of frustration, I decided there had to be a better way to create video of an iPhone app in use. That's when I turned to Google and YouTube. I started with a Google search of the terms "iPhone screen capture." Jackpot. The search results provided a plethora of website and video tutorials.
"Sexting" (sex + texting) is the act of sending sexually provocative or explicit photos electronically, most often between mobile devices such as cell phones. While college age young students are most likely the largest demographic to engage in “sexting”, teens between the ages of 13 -18 may be the fastest growing demographic. This rather recent emergence of sexting by adolescents has caught most school administrators off guard, and across the country, school boards and their legal counsel are scrambling to craft appropriate policy responses.
Mr. Single presently focuses his practice on general school law representation. Mr. Single is a member of the American Bar Association, Ohio State Bar Association, Cuyahoga County Bar Association, Cleveland Bar Association, and the Ohio Council of School Board Attorneys.
Pepple & Waggoner Ltd., is a Cleveland based law firm which handles a broad assortment of school law matters for Ohio's school boards.
In this podcast, Gregg and I discuss some general background information regarding sexting, talk about a few of the most well known sexting cases in Ohio and across the U.S. and also address the issue of sexting from a student and parent perspective.
Today an email landed in my Inbox from the good folks at eTech Ohio that I thought I should share. "Free PD to Go from eTech Ohio," was the advertisement in the Subject line of the communication. Formerly Ohio SchoolNet, eTech Ohio is the organization that serves as the main hub of all things educational technology in Ohio. From the eTech About Us page:
As a state agency, eTech Ohio is dedicated to enhancing learning by developing programs and using best practices to serve learning organizations while acquiring, integrating and sustaining educational technology.
It is our mission to provide the leadership and support that promotes access to and use of all forms of educational technology needed to advance the education and accelerate the learning of the citizens of Ohio.
This just in...how would you like to earn a FREE doctorate from Harvard University? Sound too good to be true? Well, it's not. News of a tuition-free doctoral program in educational leadership spread quickly over Twitter this morning around 11:00 A.M. EST following this tweet.
Here's some more information on the programs from the official Harvard news release:
Harvard University today announced the launch of a new, practice-based doctoral program to prepare graduates for senior leadership roles in school districts, government agencies, nonprofit organizations, and the private sector.
The new tuition-free Doctor of Education Leadership Program (Ed.L.D.) will be taught by faculty from the Harvard Graduate School of Education (HGSE), the Harvard Business School (HBS), and the Harvard Kennedy School (HKS). The program offers an unprecedented approach to preparing leaders equipped to transform the American education system in order to enable all students to succeed in a 21st-century world. The three-year program will begin in August 2010 and initially enroll 25 students per year.
One of the first YouTube videos that really caught my attention from an educational perspective was "Did You Know?" I remember the first time I viewed it, about 2 years ago, how moved I was by its message. It made such an impact that I began to show the video prior to any conference presentation I gave. All of the facts and figures presented in the original version were mind boggling to me and I felt it was my duty to share them with other educators around Ohio. I still have the first version of the video I saw bookmarked as part of a YouTube playlist.
Since that time, the video has gone under several revisions. Today, both Dr. Scott McLeod and Karl Fisch, the original creators of the Did You Know? series, sent out links to the most recent version over their Twitter feeds. While the graphics, music and facts have evolved into a more polished piece, the message is still fairly consistent with the original. I'd recommend that all educators take the time to view not only Did You Know? 4.0, but also the original version, in order to understand the real impact of the information age and globalization.
Last week as I was browsing my Twitter stream, a tweet from @InnovativeEdu caught my eye.
I have been using Adobe Connect for the past 3 years for web conferencing, sharing desktops, documents and whiteboarding. When it comes to managing virtual teams or conducting eLearning, a product like Adobe Connect, Elluminate, WebEx or DimDim is essential for fostering synchronous communication and collaboration. I have to admit I'm a big fan of the Connect, so of course I had to chime in with my two cents. Before I could get my @reply typed out, another tweet came across on TweetDeck.
For the last couple of months, members of my PLN have been tweeting intermittently about Tinychat.com. Tinychat is a free service that provides text chat rooms and video chat rooms. One of the benefits of Tinychat is that nobody involved needs special software to join in. From the Tinychat website:
Tinychat delivers dead simple video conferences without the extraneous add-ons and inconvenience, making video conferencing an accessible, uncomplicated experience. It works on Windows, Mac and Linux; with Firefox, IE, Safari, and Chrome; and there is a version available for iPhones. You can have up to twelve people in a room with HQ video, protected by passwords and moderators, share your desktop with them, and your conferences can be recorded and embedded on your website.
