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Weekly News Roundup: ISTE 2011 Edition

July 1, 2011 | 10:19 AM | By
 

Audrey Watters

Another ISTE attendee.

 

The International Society for Technology in Education held its annual conference and exhibition this week in Philadelphia. While the official headcount has yet to be released, early estimates pegged the number of attendees at over 20,000.

In lieu of our typical weekly review of ed-tech news, we’ve opted to focus instead on some of the announcements that came out of ISTE 2011.

  • Educational animation site BrainPOP launched GameUp, a free resource that integrates educational games into the BrainPOP platform. The game titles include “Battleship Numberline” and “Microbes” and come from organizations like iCivics, Filament Games, and Nobelprize.org. The games focus on topics like science, math, and social studies, and like the rest of the BrainPOP materials include supplemental information for teachers such as how to use the game in a lesson, which curriculum standards the game is aligned to, as well as a link to one related BrainPOP topic.
  • PBS launched PBS Learning Media, an online resource with over 14,000 pieces of digital content, including video, audio, photos, and more. The content comes from various local public broadcasting stations, as well as other public agencies, such as the National Archives, the Library of Congress, and NASA. The site is available to teachers and parents, and the material is all tagged and searchable, so that information can be found by content type, age type or topic. See our full story here.
  • ISTE itself released a white paper this week that offers a first look at ISTE’s new standards for technology coaching. The proposed NETS*C won’t be finalized until this fall, but the white paper discusses ISTE’s latest set of standards and the organization’s recommendations for helping integrate technology more fully into professional development. Continue reading →
FILED UNDER: blackboard, BrainPop, ISTE, ISTE11, McGraw-Hill, PBS, PBS LearningMedia, project tomorrow, Promethean

Watch Out, Print Textbooks: Here Comes Inkling

June 8, 2011 | 4:39 PM | By

Inkling

Whether it’s the iPad that will shake up the print book industry, or some other tablet, it’s evident that education textbook publishers are going to have to adapt to the digital world.

Since the iPad is still the front-runner in the education realm, publishers have to learn to think of it not just as another medium for reading. They have to completely rethink the way content is consumed. And they’re looking to the pros – the engineers — to show them the way.

At the moment, it’s Inkling that’s trailblazing the path to re-conceptualizing the college textbook.

“The iPad is not a book. Too many publishers pretend it’s a book,” said founder and CEO Matt MacInnis to ReadWriteWeb. “We have gently disassembled the textbook.”

What makes Inkling’s apps unique is the fact that “content isn’t bound by pages or sections or chapters in the same linear fashion. Rather, it’s hierarchical, richly illustrated and augmented. It’s interactive. It’s social,” Watters writes. The digital versions include quizzes, interactive infographics, and a scrolling and searchable interface.

The San Francisco-based startup has grabbed the attention of the media as well as of leading publishers in the industry. In March, the company received a round of funding from Pearson and McGraw-Hill. By fall, Inkling plans to have about 100 of the most used textbooks available. The apps will cost about 20 percent less than print books, and students can purchase individual chapters for $2.99. The company’s also planning to offer the product in an Android version, the Google operating system, according to the New York Times. Continue reading →

FILED UNDER: Teaching With Tech, digital textbooks, inkling, iPad, McGraw-Hill, Pearson

Content Providers Old and New Partner to Make Searching Easier

June 7, 2011 | 2:37 PM | By

Flickr:A Trying Youth

Google “photosynthesis” and you’ll see a long list of links to everything from Wikipedia to PBS to the University of Illinois, with plenty of YouTube videos thrown into the mix.

To streamline this somewhat random page of results for both educators and learners, a group of education content providers is teaming up to create a better defined framework for education-related searches online.

In a move that brings together for the first time traditional content companies and free, open content sites, the Association of Educational Publishers (AEP) and Creative Commons (CC) are partnering to improve search results online the through the creation of a metadata framework specifically for learning resources. That means teachers looking for content — much of it aligned to Common Core standards — will be able to more easily find information they need. At least that’s the hope.

“This can do for students what John Dewey did for readers 150 years ago when he created standardized card cataloging.”

“Easy access to high-quality learning resources is the end goal of this project,” said Charlene Gaynor, CEO of Association of Education Publishers at the Context in Content conference today.

Many of the big-hitters on both sides of the spectrum are involved, including Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, the Institute for the Study of Knowledge Management in Education (ISKME), Curriki, McGraw-Hill Education, Monterey Institute for Technology in Education (MITE), Pearson, Promethean, Scholastic Inc., and SMART Technologies, BetterLesson.

“Educators and students miss out on education resources available online because it is takes too long or is too hard to find appropriate content,” said Catherine Casserly, CEO of Creative Commons in a press release. “A common metadata schema will make this search more efficient and effective so educators can quickly discover the educational resources they want, including those they can reuse under Creative Commons licenses.” Continue reading →

FILED UNDER: Teaching With Tech, Association of Educational Publishers, creative commons, Curriki, HippoCampus, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, ISKME, McGraw-Hill, OER, Pearson