Hack Education

ISTE held its conference this past week in Denver. While I've seen lots of great blog posts from attendees and exhibitors, I found it very interesting that the event was not mentioned by a single tech blog this week. More thoughts on this later. Google Scholar now allows you to...

If technology is to live up to the promise of transforming the way in which we learn, then we need to make sure that our innovations are inclusive, not exclusive. And so I was pleased to see a number of announcements this week regarding the accessibility of technology tools: Google...

On LearnBoost's blog today, co-founder Raphael Corrales wrote what I've been thinking for a long time: "Techies care about education, but not enough." He observes a pretty common phenomenon: education related articles make it to the Hacker News front page. And then, a few months later, the same content appears...

I tuned into the Twitter stream from Sunday's opening keynote at ISTE 2010 with interest. The speaker was former World Bank Fran�ois Rischard, whose talk addressed the myriad of global challenges that education must face and must address. That's a heavy weight for teachers to shoulder, and not necessarily an...

The Google Code blog dedicated today's post to Antoine de Saint-Exup�ry's story The Little Prince, in honor of the book's 110th birthday. "The Little Prince starts with a picture titled Drawing Number One, which grown-ups typically interpret as a hat, but only the acute eye of a child can reveal...

Jeff Utecht writes of "networked literacy" as a new way of thinking about the demands for literacy. Print literacy remains the emphasis of most instruction, but more and more teachers are teaching digital literacy as well. Utrecht defines networked literacy as "...what the web is about. It's about understanding how...

Some of the education technology stories that caught my eye this week: Online language learning site Babbel announced the release of a browser-based voice-recognition tool as part of their language learning packages. The tool helps correct the pronunciation of students, analyzing their voice and scoring it based on how it...

I've seen this reprinted in a number of places, but it's an important story and I'm going to retell it here. (I first saw it on Restructure.) A group of seventh graders visited Fermilab. They drew "before" and "after" pictures, and in these drawings we can see the kids' changing...

With some of the recent reshuffling at Linden Labs, I've been thinking a lot lately about the implications for educators who've heavily invested (time, expertise, budget, curriculum development) in virtual worlds. Are virtual worlds viable (in the classroom and/or as a business)? Do they require too much tech investment/knowledge from...

The headline from the Chronicle caught my attention today: Online Learning May Slightly Hurt Student Performance. The story reports the findings of a a recent study Northwestern University education professor David N. Figlio that posits that students perform better with face-to-face instruction, particularly Hispanic students, male students, and lower-achieving students....