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.
• Project Tomorrow and Blackboard released a new report examining the rapid acceleration in online learning at the middle and high school level in the U.S. The survey found that the number of high school students who have been involved with online learning has tripled and the number of middle school students who’ve done so has doubled over the last three years. Furthermore, 36% of classroom teachers say that they too have taken some sort of online class. More than 40% of the students surveyed said they see online classes as an essential part of their learning experience, and more parents and administrators are starting to agree. The demand for online learning opportunities is growing, with a third of 3rd through 5th graders saying they’d like to have the opportunity.
• StudySync announced that it was expanding its supplemental curriculum from the high school to the middle school level. The company provides a library of more than 300 videos that help teach literature and writing. The video lessons serve to help students learn how to analyze and appreciate literature, and the StudySync system also includes peer-to-peer interaction, so that students learn to engage in written discussions around literature. In expanding to the middle school level, StudySync has added new level-appropriate titles, including Alice in Wonderland and Anne Frank, Diary of a Young Girl.
• Sokikom announced the launch of what it’s calling the first massively multiplayer online math game. Geared to students grades 1 through 6, Sokikom’s game lets up to 30 students in a classroom play a game together. Currently Sokikom has 3 games: Frachine, which focuses on fractions, decimals and percentages; Opirate, which focuses on algebra; and Treeching, which deals with measurement, time, and money.
• McGraw-Hill introduced CINCH, an all-digital, cloud-based curriculum for K-12 math and grade 7 through 12 science. The content is available through the browser, meaning that students will be able to access it on any Internet-enabled device. CINCH includes not just digital text but also education games, an assessment component, and social networking elements (such as commenting within the curriculum). McGraw-Hill says that the content in CINCH is customizable by districts and teachers and is aligned to Common Core State Standards.
• Interactive whiteboard maker Promethean announced a partnership with the Channel One Network. Promethean Activboards will get access to the daily Channel One news, supplemented with various interactive tools.

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.

Here’s what’s on the agenda for Inkling next fall:

The top 100 undergraduate titles from McGraw-Hill Higher Education

A comprehensive MBA curriculum, featuring 24 of the most popular business titles, from Pearson Education

A full line of medical textbooks, featuring Lippincott Williams & Wilkins, an imprint of Wolters Kluwer Health

Top undergraduate arts and sciences titles from Pearson Education

Top medical education and reference content from McGraw-Hill Professional

As far as how many students have crossed over to the digital side, at this point, it’s a chicken-or-egg question. E-textbooks made up only 2.8 percent of total U.S. textbook sales in 2010, according to the Times. Some students say they’d be willing to invest in a gadget like an iPad if half of their textbooks were available in digital editions, but exactly when that time will come, perhaps only Inkling has an inkling.

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.

“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.”

Today’s announcement follows on the heels of Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft’s Schema.org, a collaboration between the three major search engines that’s billed as a “major step forward in the evolution of search.”

Likewise, this collaboration is meant to “create a learning explosion,” said Shep Ranbom of ISKME. “This can do for students what Dewey did for readers 150 years ago when he created standardized card cataloging.”

The partners are hoping to have the function up and running in between six months to a year.