From engadget: “London school children to get free loaner iPhones in experimental, educational trial”
The Gumley House Convent School — a small, Christian School for girls ages 11 to 18 — in London has laid out its plan to use give Apple’s smartphone to a select group of 30 students as a test educational measure. … The girls will have free access to all of the phone’s features with the exception of actual calls, and the trial will last until the end of the school year.
So assuming that the school has wifi, the students are basically getting an iPod Touch that can browse and use apps. Since I am a BlackBerry user its hard for me to evaluate the role the iPhone could play in education. Of course, a mobile internet device with some doc support can certainly play a role in terms of access and before domain aptitudes using new tools. Also, I’m sure the school is looking to buy some love from the students by giving them all a hip device. That said, it is always a question of balancing the benefit of using a tool and facilitating work and discovery, versus spending time building domain knowledge and expertise with that tool so that is a facilitator rather than a hurdle. Which is faster: great mental math skills, or digging out an actual calculator or booting up the calculator on your computer?
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Ambient Insight Research have released their report on the US Market for Self-Paced eLearning Products.
They estimate the market at $16.7 billion for 2009 with demand growing by a 5-year compound annual growth rate of 7.4%. This would take the market to over $23 billion by in 5 years.
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The games that people choose to play are not just an indication of how they personally prefer to face challenges: acting through characters and enjoying seeing those characters achieve and excel which is aligned to performing and linked to receiving praise for your skill – your performance; improving as a player and besting higher levels that require greater effort to master the challenges and domain knowledge and ability required to complete these challenges – your effort.
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In his own words: “Classtell was created because the options available to teachers for making websites weren’t good enough.” - Kasra Kyanzadeh, 15-year old founder of Classtell.com Not bad when a 15-year old kid from Toronto can create a Learning Management System – virtual classroom – for his teachers to use. Its a busy space with Google…
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We then got into….once you start with a blog, (Hello WordPress/Blogger) your learning starts to take off. You start to get motivated to want to find a tool that helps make your space more conversational and co-creative/crowsourced in terms of production/interpretation of content/ideas (Hello Wiki). You then want to throw in some pictures (Hello Flickr/OFoto)…
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Google has been buying and developing web-based applications for the last few years – looking to cement leadership in the world of software-as-a-service (soas). Google’s suite of applications includes email, chat, shared calenders, basic office applications, personal homepages and microsites. These applications are all interconnected and collaborative allowing connected communities of users to collaborate and…
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Some schools in the U.K. are developing Learning Platforms (LP) that will create online environments that facilitate collaboration, parental monitoring of classroom activities, grading and reporting, and access to assignments/homework. I would intrested to know who is developing this LP. Ideally, it would contain an amalgamation of leading technologies…but that is easier said than done….
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The One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) program aims to develop low-cost laptops (the cost will turn out to be $175 each) that they will sell in the Third World. The intention here – in my own words – is to distribute the infrastructure for meaningful learning opportunities to students who otherwise would not have the chance…
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Oh the tangled web…one site led to another and to another until I came across an open source webcasting/conferencing tool that seems to be a great step forward to facilitating educational dissemination of information, lessons by distance, rich online presentations and provide the visual element to support cross-cultural/linguistic interaction. ePresence is excellent because it allows…
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Tags: Collaboration, conference, e-learning, Education, elearning, media, Networking, OpenSource, software, streaming, tools, Video, web2.0, webcasting
The University of Toronto‘s Knowledge Media Design Institute (KMDI) is a remarkable example of a distributed group of educators and participants that cross disciplines – all in the aim of exploring the interaction between media, media technologies and human activity. In short, KMDI serves as a developmental and research environment for collaboration and innovation. Truly, this institute…
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