Making Education Hip (and Hop)

An augmented reality game being developed by a group at the University of Wisconsin (Local Games Lab) invites students to conduct research centered around the task of creating a hip hop store at a local mall. Using a theme to organize the research and data analysis tasks, especially one that so many student are familiar with and enthralled by, seems to be just the spoonful of sugar needed to help the medicine go down.

From the Milwaukee Journal Sentinal: Rapped attention
Hip-hop game puts students' math, business skills to the test

Anytime and literally anywhere

There's a push to provide internet connectivity to students on school buses. I'd seen a presentation at a tablet pc conference last year about groups of educators creating mobile hot spots for students to use in their vans on long field trips and many cities have recently looked at this type of service as a way to entice commuters so it only makes sense that educators consider this a viable way to enhance students' ability to learn beyond the walls of the school. Like this article suggests - there are particular advantages to students in rural areas who often have extremely long bus rides:

From eSchoool News: Emerging Trend - Bus-based Connectivity

The world as hightech gameboard?

From CNet: HP has gaming Handheld in the works
Hmm...a new technology to bridge gameplay between the virtual and physical world. Catchy name: mscape, short for mediascapes (even though it seems to be in use by some other groups as well), but will it catch on? Is gaming a guilty pleasure best enjoyed on an oversized sofa in the comfort of one's home or are new generations of gamers willing to hit the pavement in search of the next great gaming adventure?

Related articles on Mscape: from Joystique: Hands-on HP's mscape and an HP blurb about a demo at the 3GSM conference in Barcelona.

Smart Stuff

I'd be the first to admit that I'm biased in terms of believing the educational benefit of SMART Boards as an educational tool. I had my first experience using a SMARTBoard more than a decade ago and I immediately appreciated the fact that a simple teaching tool had been transformed into a powerful resource - capable of making the learning experience more interactive, more transportable/transferable and more transparent for learners.

From eSchool News: Study Links Interactive Whiteboards to Improved Student Performance
The link to the report in the article above is broken. Here is the correct link: http://insight.eun.org/shared/data/pdf/impact_study.pdf.

More on what was said above - esp. since the article seems to focus more on engagement and motivational benefits associated with usage (at least from the brief bit that I've had time to read). Clearly the two aforementioned items (i.e. engagement and motivation) are byproducts of most interactive learning experiences. Another obvious advantage of interactive whiteboards is the ability to simplify content retention, sharing and future modification through content-storage features (thus saving time and effort which can in turn be focused on other more meaningful educational endeavors - and allowing further reflection and discussion that might otherwise be challenging or impossible for logistical reasons). Finally, in terms of transparency - by enabling students to see everything that is going on and potentially replay entire processes at a later point in time, specific procedures as well as more general lifelong learning processes can be more effectively modeled in instructional settings. Being able to see process in addition to outcome/output makes for a powerful learning experience. In sum - it comes as no surprise that they found evidence to support the benefit of using interactive whiteboard technology as an instructional tool - and I suspect that future studies will identify additional benefits.

Right on Target

The only thing that I'd remotely disagree with (and only as a technicality) is that we needed to be doing all these things 10 to 20 years ago rather than starting now, but later is better than never. Much of the United States has been way too inwardly focused for the past decade(s) - and it seems that the most inwardly focused/domestically-centric sections of our population/economy are the ones that are most ripe for feeling the pinches ultimately caused by growing globalization. History drills in the point that "once great"- doesn't ensure "always great" - the world keeps changing and citizens that want to stay competitive keep adapting. Survival in this era is guaranteed only to the fittest (globally speaking).

From the ASCD: Becoming Citizens of the World

laptops in class: learning tool or distracting toy?

From the Washington Post: Laptop vs. Learning.

The author points out the distracting potential of laptops used by students to take notes. There's interesting opportunity for more elaborate study here I suspect. ...are there different outcomes in students' level of engagement or academic success if they take traditional notes via pen and paper vs. the more transcript-like style of notes most common among their laptop-using peers? What about students using pen-enabled technology devices such as tablet pcs - perhaps they'd have the best of both worlds - the ability to jot with a pen, but have the option to type longer sections of text when necessary - and call up/manipulate notes more easily during follow-up study sessions.

fond memories...and flops

Thought this was a rather interesting article because it brought back some good and funny memories of technology fads gone by (who could forget the pets.com sock puppet, the Apple Newton...and from the comments section: Y2K bug), but also because it did a good job reflecting on and dissecting the reasons for why these technologies failed to live up to the hype around them. In many cases it came down to poor design, but for each ill-concieved or poorly developed product there was an equal number that suffered from poor timing or inadequate marketing.

Without further ado - here's to the 21 biggest technology flops! From Computerworld: Don't Believe the Hype: The 21 Biggest Technology Flops

Eggstraordinary Use of GPS

Teachers used GPS technology to stage a modern version of a more traditional Easter Egg Hunt for their elementary school students in a North Carolina school - putting a high-tech twist on an old tradition. From the News&Observer (North Carolina) : Egg hunt helps teach technology

Not just for kids...

I saw this article in this weekend's New York Times (reading the Times isn't something that I usually do - and I found it to be a surprisingly messy endeavor - esp. given that I was sitting in the middle seat of a totally packed airplane for most of my reading experience). I trust that the digital version will result in less black smudges on people's computers ;)

From the NYTimes: Video Games Conquer Retirees

I especially liked the part about the Wii Senior Bowling league. With more inclusion of different types of gamers I suspect that there are opportunities for new diversity and innovation in game-making. Gaming fun doesn't have to stop when people hit puberty - and its inspiring to see how games are able to help conquer technology phobias that folks who didn't grow up with computers often have.