Tech Tools

The newest devices, software, sites, and apps that are changing the way we learn.

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May 16, 2012 | 10:23 AM | By

Teachers Transform Commercial Video Game for Class Use

MinecraftEDU

By Katrina Schwartz

Educators have been tapping into the wildly popular online game Minecraft for its potential as a learning tool for a while now — to teach physics, math, and computer science. But until recently, the game was mostly the territory of computer science teachers, and even they were forced to use the commercial version of the online game.

So a few months ago, two teachers, Santeri Koivisto and Joel Levin, decided to make the software more accessible and relevant to teachers. They joined forces to found MinecraftEdu and started offering discounted educator licenses to Minecraft. MinecraftEdu now offers a plug-in, which enables teachers to tailor the software to individual curriculum. And a fresh new wiki is dedicated to sharing ideas with topic suggestions such as “How To Use Redstone, (a fictional mineral) To Teach Electricity.” Teachers can also work with others to co-develop lesson plans within the game software.

Teachers like to use Minecraft because it’s a “sandbox” game — it provides players nearly limitless freedom to build within it. As a player’s skill develops, the game’s complexity increases ad infinitum. In multi-player levels, players collaborate on building complex structures, use programming features to build contraptions, games, or compose music. Meanwhile, beginning players use their problem solving skills to scavenge for materials. They learn to mine stone for building, and coal for making fire.

“Many educational games start with the question, ‘What should we teach with the game?’ and they forget the most important part, that it should be a great game too.”

Koivisto and Levin decided to pursue a classroom application after observing students solve complicated problems with their collaboration in the game. When Koivisto tested Minecraft at a Finnish school, one-third of the 20 teachers in the study later chose to incorporate the game into their teaching.

Koivisto and Levin, who uses the game with his second-grade students, are part of the growing movement of teachers who see video games as more than entertainment and educational games Continue reading →

FILED UNDER: Learning Methods, Tech Tools, Games, Minecraft, video games
May 15, 2012 | 11:11 AM | By

Websites in Different Languages Offer More Global Perspective

The wired world has made it possible for people from all across the globe to connect and learn from each other. In a few days, New York Times reporter Nicholas Kristof will host a Hangout and interview United Nations Ambassador Susan Rice during school hours. In classes across the country, students are hearing about the Greek debt crisis; presidential elections in France, Serbia, Armenia, Greece, and Egypt, as well as Secretary Clinton’s recent travels to China.

International news coverage gives us one set of perspectives on these events. But students can also have more immediate access to global conversations — in the languages that are being spoken. Here’s how.

TRANSLATED FOREIGN PAGES

Google’s translated foreign pages offer a direct view into websites created in other languages. Enter a simple query, such as [presidential election], and you’ll get a typical page of results. If you’re searching in the U.S., you’ll tend to see information on the latest Republican primaries, the date of the national election in November, and both general web search and Google News results about the upcoming election. To the left-hand side of the screen is a column showing a number of links, including one promising “More search tools.” Continue reading →

FILED UNDER: Tech Tools
May 14, 2012 | 1:41 PM | By

Guide to Free, Quality Higher Education

By Katrina Schwartz

As the current generation of college graduates wrangles with an unprecedented amount of debt, a sea change is underway in higher education. More and more elite universities are offering free online courses that might characterize the next iteration of the college experience for the forthcoming generation of students.

Will students be able to receive the equivalent of a bachelors degree for free? How will brick-and-mortar institutions be used in the future? Will academic rigor suffer? How will credentials or tuition apply to those who come to campus and those who complete courses online?

At the moment, students of these online courses receive certificates of completion, but no university credit. But the movement is still in major flux as we speak, as day by day, yet another development in free online education is announced. What started 11 years ago with MIT’s OpenCourseWare — the syllabi, lecture notes, problem sets and solutions, exams, reading lists, and event video lectures from more than 2,000 MIT courses — has amassed into an explosive movement that’s compelling venerable institutions to reconfigure their education platform to an online audience.

Last fall, a group of Stanford professors decided to offer a few courses online free of charge and were overwhelmed when hundreds of thousands of students signed up for their courses. That experiment has spawned the growth of similar endeavors. Here’s a guide to some of the newest free education sites and what they offer, with the big caveat that this will soon change, as more institutions come aboard.

  • COURSERA. Coursera is an interactive online learning system that offers free courses from Princeton, Stanford, University of California, Berkeley, University of Michigan—Ann Arbor and University of Pennsylvania. Their courses span the range from humanities, to social science, computer science, business, biology, medicine and mathematics. Andrew Ng, one of the Stanford professors whose class drew an astounding 100,000 students, and his new business partner, Daphne Koller, announced that they received $16 million in investment capitol from two prominent Silicon Valley firms to launch the project. Students will have access to lectures, interactive elements like quiz questions interspersed throughout lectures to help students recall and retain information, and peer-grading for homework, essays and tests. They plan to Continue reading →
FILED UNDER: Culture, Learning Methods, Tech Tools, Coursera, Harvard, Minerva, MIT, MITx, Open Source, Stanford, Udacity
May 10, 2012 | 1:23 PM | By

How Teachers Make Cell Phones Work in the Classroom

Erin Scott

A.P. Chemistry students use their cell phones to answer their teacher's question.

When we talk about using cell phones in class, we’re not just talking about using cell phones in class.

The idea of mobile learning touches on just about every subject that any technology addresses: social media, digital citizenship, content-knowledge versus skill-building, Internet filtering and safety laws, teaching techniques, bring-your-own-device policies, school budgets.

At its core, the issues associated with mobile learning get to the very fundamentals of what happens in class everyday. At their best, cell phones and mobile devices seamlessly facilitate what students and teachers already do in thriving, inspiring classrooms. Students communicate and collaborate with each other and the teacher. They apply facts and information they’ve found to formulate or back up their ideas. They create projects to deepen their understanding, association with, and presentation of ideas.

Guide to Mobile Learning

This is part four of a series exploring mobile learning co-produced by MindShift and Spotlight on Digital Media & Learning.

Other posts in this series include:

In the most ideal class settings, mobile devices disappear into the background, like markers and whiteboards, pencil and paper – not because they’re not being used, but because they’re simply tools, a means to an end. The “end” can be any number of things: to gauge student understanding of a concept, to capture notes and ideas to be used and studied later, to calculate, to communicate, to express ideas.

WHEN IT WORKS

In Ramsey Musallam’s A.P. Chemistry class at Sacred Heart Cathedral Preparatory in San Francisco, cell phones are a natural extension of the way he communicates with his students.

As soon as kids walk in, Musallam sends out a text blast through Remind101, asking them a challenge question that’s related to the day’s lesson. “First person to tell me the units on K for a second order reaction gets chocolate,” he types and sends off. His students know he does this regularly, so they’re constantly anticipating the question during the day, in and out of class.

“Sure, that’s kind of cute,” he says, admitting that it can be seen as gimmicky. “But more importantly, in my mind that’s saying, ‘You’re carrying around something that I can contact you with.’ It’s a fun ways to stay motivated in our day, which can be pretty dry sometimes. It’s a chance to think about what we’re learning outside the context of state testing.”

“I want it to be as rich and as visual as possible. I want them to see things, not just know it.”

Once the class settles in and things are rolling along, the steady hum gets louder when kids are excited or working together, then quieter again when they’re working out problems on their individual little whiteboards (to be clear, these are not digital).

Musallam constantly walks around, sending out directives – “Write the answer on your table!” ““I Continue reading →

FILED UNDER: Culture, Learning Methods, Tech Tools, cell phones, mobile, Mobile Learning, Remind101, texting in class
May 9, 2012 | 10:41 AM | By

For Exams, is Using the Internet Considered Cheating?

Erin Scott

By Ann Michaelsen

Students sit in the test-taking room, with full access to computers and wireless connections. As they work on national exams, they can be seen accessing the Internet from time to time. Are the results from this test going to be corrupted because these test-takers are not isolated from global information resources?

What is high-tech cheating exactly? Is it really a problem, or do our old-school definitions of cheating need rethinking?

Most educators agree that students must meet certain requirements if they’re going to succeed as citizens and workers. “The term ’21st-century skills’ is generally used to refer to certain core competencies such as collaboration, digital literacy, critical thinking, and problem-solving that advocates believe schools need to teach to help students thrive in today’s world, according to Education Week.

“Our exams have to reflect daily life in the classroom and daily life in the classroom has to reflect life in society.”

But when you look closely at these competencies and think about how students perform on exams, it starts getting complicated. What qualifies as cheating and what qualifies as a natural extension of learning, when students are increasingly expected to apply online research skills to find specific information in the vast ocean of facts and data?

WHAT DENMARK HAS LEARNED

In November 2009, 14 Danish upper secondary schools used the Internet during written exams, and a follow-up report  in 2010 by a group of auditors concluded that the experiment was a success. “The Internet is an integrated part of students’ everyday lives and education so this Continue reading →

FILED UNDER: Culture, Learning Methods, Tech Tools, cheating, search education
May 8, 2012 | 10:49 AM | By

Which Device Will Win the Tablet Battle?

XO-3

By Frank Catalano

The future of tablets in our schools may not be coming from Cupertino. Or even the U.S.

Despite the craze around Apple’s iPad, it’s only been two years since the device was introduced, and that may not be enough time to separate fad from trend over the long term in education. And while the iPad’s presence – and promotion by the Apple faithful since its launch in 2010 – is hard to ignore, a winning tablet trend hasn’t been clearly established on a global basis.

It’s certainly true that tablets are on the upswing in K-12 schools and higher education. There’s no shortage of U.S. numbers to cite. Going beyond statistics of tablet penetration (in one case, most recently, 25% of college students and 17% of college seniors), it’s in the composition of purchases where the data can get interesting. For example, a Harris Interactive/Pearson Foundation survey released in March gave iPads the largest share among college students (at 63%), followed by the Kindle Fire (26%) and the Samsung Galaxy Tab (15%).

As U.S. education appears to be moving toward tablets in pockets here and there, other countries’ education officials are embracing them in bulk.

Another way to read those figures: It’s roughly a 60/40 split between Apple’s iOS operating system and all flavors of Android devices (“flavors” might be the right word, as Android has named its more recent OS versions Ice Cream Sandwich and Gingerbread). These relative rankings among popular Android tablets in education mirror the broader U.S. consumer market.

But the scope of some big decisions made by international government agencies – and the price of non-U.S. devices – could upset the apple cart.

Consider India. Last fall saw the launch of the highly touted US$50 Aakash Android tablet for education (subsidized to US$35). That initiative subsequently stumbled following reports the first models built by the UK firm DataWind were sluggish and fragile. The government has since decided to press ahead with a new version with improved specifications.

Yet the overwhelming interest in what was supposed to be a first run of 100,000 tablets has spurred the growth of a handful of new education-focused competitors. They’ve developed tablets that are more expensive, but apparently more capable: the US$100 ATab, US$150 HCL MeTab, Continue reading →

FILED UNDER: Tech Tools, Apple, digital textbooks, e-readers, iPad, tablet