Archive for March, 2009
Students: School a Technology Downgrade
Teenagers are speaking up once again—stating that, in technology, school is a big downgrade from what they experience, and expect, in the rest of their lives.
That message comes through in new data from Project Tomorrow, the nonprofit group, once called NetDay, that has surveyed school communities across the United States since 1993.
The Speak Up 2008 [...]
Online Learning in the Spotlight
Online education gets a thorough workout in the new “Technology Counts” report, released today by Education Week. (Subscription required for full access.) Full disclosure: I covered technology for this newspaper and wrote articles in the previous 12 editions of this report. This year’s report gives examples of established and nascent forms of online education, some [...]
Coming Soon: Review of U.S. Software Study
I will soon post my review of the new federal study of educational software, which found no significant benefit.
And next week: Mobile phones in the classroom.
Study: One million U.S. students in online learning
About 1,030,000 students were enrolled in online or “blended learning” courses in K-12 in the 2007-08 academic year, out of 49 million students in U.S. public schools, according to a new study by the Sloan Consortium, a nonprofit research collaborative based in Needham, Mass. That figure was up from 700,000 students in courses that were [...]
Island-Hopping and Mushing via Web 2.0
A few schools are beginning to tap Web 2.0 tools for multimedia communication to give their students vivid educational experiences.
Educators in Ventura County, in Southern California, and the Bering Straits district, in Alaska, are both working in this vein, though with different twists.
Ventura County has partnered with the National Park Service to connect students to [...]
Gluttons for Web 2.0
The Consortium for School Networking conference, in Austin, has been the scene of two interesting days of near-constant discussion about Twitter, Facebook, blogging, podcasting, Wikipedia, open content, curriculum wikis, online video games, and smartphones–and how those Web 2.0 tools fit together with the traditional school staples of assessment, curriculum, student privacy and safety, budgets, and [...]
Ed-Tech Leaders Convene in Austin
This week I am in Austin, Texas, at the annual conference of the Consortium for School Networking, a key group based in Washington, with a national membership of school administrators who make decisions about technology, teacher-leaders, university professors and researchers, vendors, and various consultants and government officials.
CoSN has a quality program each year, and the [...]
Best Technology Plug-in: Better Teachers?
Without good teaching, technology in the classroom simply does not yield educational benefits for students.
An obvious assertion? Perhaps so, but the notion that technology can succeed where teachers failed is a persistent idea, which many vendors of ed-tech “solutions” do not try to discourage.
What’s more, educational software developers have sometimes told me, a reporter, that [...]
Silver Bullets Beware!
Technology in education should be about increasing, and sometimes releasing, people’s capacities to pass along knowledge and to enable learning.
This blog, launching today, is about how those processes interrelate, and how they are tied to other key issues in K-12 education.
Digital Education Today will explore its subject by flagging and commenting on current news and [...]
