Hack Education

Stories of schools adopting tablets or iPads still make headlines, even though such implementations are becoming more and more commonplace. But I'm intrigued by news from Georgia that state legislators are considering ditching printed textbooks and moving to iPads. Perhaps it's just a matter of phrasing (and honestly, I do...

The U.S. Census Bureau has released new data on school enrollment. The information comes from the Current Population Survey, a statistical survey that the Census Bureau and Bureau of Labor Statistics administer. The data, which is available to download, is from 2009, but the historical tables available in some of...

Citing the move to more and more online instruction, Cisco has just announced its Virtual Classroom Instruction Specialist certification, a program that's designed to help build educators' skills so they can effectively teach in virtual classroom environments. It's not cheap. The training will cost you $1395, and the certification exam...

Blackboard co-founder Matthew Pittinsky has raised $4.5 million for a new educational startup, according to a regulatory filing from the company. Parchment is still in stealth mode (www.parchment.com simply redirects to a generic page), so no word yet on what exactly the startup will do. One clue, perhaps, comes from...

PBS, in conjunction with Grunwald Associates, has just released its 8th annual survey (PDF) on teachers' media and technology usage. Not surprisingly, the survey finds the increasing importance of digital media and Internet technologies in the classroom. Teachers say it helps them do their jobs better and helps students be...

MIT OpenCourseWare has released a new iPhone app that allows you to access OCW videos on the go. Of course, you can already load up your phone with MIT OCW lectures via iTunes U. But what this iPhone app offers, in addition to the video content, is a social learning...

The Pew Internet and American Life Project has released its latest report, this one detailing Generations and Gadgets (PDF). It's an interesting look at the adoption of various computer devices, which are increasingly popular but whose adoption is still vastly different based on age. Not surprisingly, Millennials lead the way...

Most folks talk about email bankruptcy. But I'm about to declare RSS bankruptcy. I'm swimming under a mountain of ed-tech news having been out-of-town. And if I don't address is here and now, well, there's no telling if I'll ever dig myself out. So in lieu of a bunch of...

1. A Rant About Ed-Tech Stories in Tech Blogs The news hit Techcrunch first last night. I'm not sure it was an exclusive, per se, as Arrington's story on Instructure was followed this morning by stories in The Chronicle, Inside Higher Ed, and Campus Technology. But the news hit Techcrunch...

Google Labs has just launched Julia Map, an app that renders fractals in your browser using HTML5. Julia sets are fractals that were studied by the French mathematician Gaston Julia in the 1920s. Some fifty years later, Beno�t Mandelbrot studied one of these sets (z2 - c) and popularized it...