Newest Library Items

Google's Loon Project Puts Balloon Technology in Spotlight

Michele Cummins — Wed, 19 Jun 2013 20:42:47 +0000

Google's Project Loon aims to bring remote parts of the globe online with a ring of floating balloons that drift through the stratosphere (about twice as high as commercial planes fly) to deliver 3G service to off-the-grid areas. Current challenges include keeping the balloons light enough, power production and the propellers or other equipment to help keep the unit where it's supposed to be.

Teacher training: 'Industry of mediocrity,' says controversial report

Michele Cummins — Wed, 19 Jun 2013 19:08:40 +0000

A recent survey of more than 1,000 teacher-training programs finds they have become an industry of mediocrity, churning out first-year teachers with classroom management skills and content knowledge inadequate to thrive in classrooms with an ever-increasing diversity of ethnic and socioeconomic student.

Can a video game encourage kids to read the classics?

Michele Cummins — Wed, 19 Jun 2013 17:52:11 +0000

Amplify Education has released a massive role-playing game called Lexica. In the game's environment, books are being withheld from the public, and for students to progress they must read novels on their own outside the game, getting to know the characters, storylines, themes, and more to get ahead and become more powerful players.

Forget MOOCs--Let's Use MOOA

Michele Cummins — Wed, 19 Jun 2013 17:10:57 +0000

A John Hopkins University professor has announced plans for MOOA (Massive Open Online Administrations) that could make decisions for hundreds of campuses simultaneously, expeditiously and economically. Since many colleges and universities face the same administrative issues every day, a central MOOA would generate cost savings, allowing colleges to dispense with a large part of their own administrators.

Location

John Hopkins University

3400 North Charles Street Baltimore, MD 21218

United States

See map: Google Maps

British Airways’ In-Flight Hackathon Spawns Solutions To The Engineering Crunch

Michele Cummins — Tue, 18 Jun 2013 02:57:47 +0000

British Airways hosted an "innovation Lab in The Sky" where Silicon Valley elite packed onto a flight where they couldn't access the internet or their devices and were given the task to brainstorm, productize, and pitch their solutions to the world’s shortage of great programmers. This article discusses the winning ideas that came from the event.

Digital divide widens in The Gambia

Michele Cummins — Fri, 14 Jun 2013 22:41:34 +0000

Typically, Jawara teaches class sizes of up to 39 pupils between the ages of 11 and 26. Huddling around a laptop, or using paper printouts of screenshots of applications like Microsoft Office, is not however, very conducive for learning.

3D Printing: Important for Art History, Not Just Weapons

Michele Cummins — Fri, 14 Jun 2013 22:35:54 +0000

A new Kickstarter project is making 3D-scan plaster casts of ancient Greek and Roman sculptures at The Skulpturhalle Basel museum in Basel, Switzerland [and] release the 3D scans and 3D printable models into the public domain, at no cost and copyright free, on Makerbot’s Thingiverse 3D printing website, allowing anyone with a 3D printer to print their own copies....

Tech Revamps in Prolific Places: Touch Screens in Museums, Libraries with APIs

Michele Cummins — Fri, 14 Jun 2013 22:29:13 +0000

Technology solutions can help to preserve some of the world’s most prolific institutions for generations to come while maintaining historical or artistic integrity. However, one wrong decision can garner the public backlash from countless fans, members or philanthropists. Collaborating with key personnel and decision makers to understand the institutions vision as well as the perspective of visitors, fans and members is crucial.

Is the Minerva Project the Real Future of Online Education

Michele Cummins — Fri, 14 Jun 2013 22:14:40 +0000

The Minerva Project is a non-profit Ivy League-style university created and designed especially for America’s most talented students. It isn’t even open yet; it’s planning a 2015 launch. Minerva Project will mix online learning with offline living in physical dorms; not just in the United States, but across the globe. Theoretically, students will get the best elements of America’s current higher education system — customized online learning at their own convenience, classes led by talented PhD teachers, and the opportunity to experience many of the social benefits of a physical university.

Districts Turning Summer School Into Learning Labs

Michele Cummins — Fri, 14 Jun 2013 22:09:38 +0000

This summer, students are learning the science involved in crime-scene investigations in Florida, the math involved in constructing infrastructure for a community center in Michigan, and how the themes of one novel can apply to various academic disciplines in California. Past summer projects have included designing a disaster-preparedness robot, creating AIDS- and homeless-awareness campaigns, building a community garden, and writing books for elementary students on bullying, said Zenae Scott, the district's youth-development coordinator.

Obama's Plan for High-Speed Connections in Schools and Libraries

Michele Cummins — Fri, 14 Jun 2013 20:59:03 +0000

Obama has announced the ConnectED initiative, which calls upon the Federal Communications Commission to "connect 99 percent of America's students to the digital age through next-generation broadband and high-speed wireless in their schools and libraries" within five years.

RoboRoach Lets You Control an Insect's Mind With an App

Michele Cummins — Fri, 14 Jun 2013 20:28:37 +0000

A neurological education and outreach company launched a Kickstarter Monday to make neuroscience portable and classroom-accessible via the RoboRoach. RoboRoach is a hands-on experiment that guides students/users in inserting wires into the roach's antennae and attaching a temporary "backpack" to the bug's thorax so that the backpack communicates directly with the neurons via small electrical pulses, and by using an iPhone app, users can temporarily control the critter.

What Developers And Teachers Can Learn From Each Other

Michele Cummins — Fri, 14 Jun 2013 20:15:11 +0000

In the three years since he co-founded the adaptive, online learning platform KnowRe, David Joo has visited a number of schools, but he still found a recent visit to the Brooklyn Institute of Liberal Arts (BILA) eye-opening. While observing the school’s ninth-grade English class, Joo was struck by students’ difficulty logging in to online blogging software. Software developers and teachers innately understand the importance of designing products around the people who will use them. Yet edtech tools often suffer from a lack of communication between the two groups.

EdX Goes Open Source To Woo MOOC Developers

Michele Cummins — Fri, 14 Jun 2013 20:05:56 +0000

EdX, the massive open online course (MOOC) consortium started by MIT and Harvard, has released its full source code, a decision the backers hope will accelerate advances to the platform. "We want contributors," said Rob Rubin, edX's VP of engineering. "We'd welcome any company's contributions and any peoples' use of the edX platform.

Maps That Live and Breathe With Data

Michele Cummins — Fri, 14 Jun 2013 19:45:06 +0000

As mobile phones become all-in-one tools for living, suggesting where to eat and the fastest way to the dentist’s office, the map of where we are becomes a vital piece of data. This explains why Google is deep in negotiations to buy Waze, a social mapping service used by millions of drivers around the world that has generated many of its maps by tracking the movements of its nearly 50 million users via GPS.

Laptop Computers and Their Impact on Sixth-Grade Learning (1999)

Michele Cummins — Thu, 06 Jun 2013 20:12:06 +0000

*In this special edition of HZ News, we are celebrating the New Media Consortium's 20th Anniversary by posting historical content which showcases the NMC's beginnings and evolution as well as the evolution of technology over the past 20 years.*
In 1999 the Beaufort County (South Carolina) School District initiated a new and exciting era for the use of computers in learning. Its cutting-edge initiative provided approximately 300 of the district's sixth graders with their own laptop computers. Unlike computers in traditional instructional settings, these new laptops were intended to be in the constant possession of each sixth grader—in effect, they were replacements for the students' customary three-ring school binders.

8 Steps To Great Digital Storytelling

Michele Cummins — Fri, 31 May 2013 20:53:11 +0000

Digital stories push students to become creators of content, rather than just consumers. Weaving together images, music, text, and voice, digital stories can be created in all content areas and at all grade levels while incorporating the 21st century skills of creating, communicating, and collaborating.

Wikimedia launches ‘Nearby’ to surface Wikipedia articles based on location, and it wants your photos too

Michele Cummins — Fri, 31 May 2013 20:43:58 +0000

Wikimedia Foundation, the charitable organization behind Wikipedia and other online collaborative projects, has introduced a new Nearby page as it looks to surface articles based on a user’s location. This Nearby page is accessible via the main menu in the mobile Web version of Wikipedia.

Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Badging in the Classroom: Our Definitive Guide

Michele Cummins — Fri, 31 May 2013 20:38:21 +0000

This guide discusses why digital badges are taking off, who is using them and how.

What do we actually learn from videos?

Michele Cummins — Fri, 31 May 2013 20:06:13 +0000

Many of us have enjoyed watching TED talks, the online videos of scientists, artists, inventors and others talking about their work. But do we actually learn anything from them?