Upcoming Cool Resource

http://www.eschoolnews.com/news/showstoryts.cfm?Articleid=5673

Educause Article

http://www.educause.edu/er/erm05/erm0532.asp

Link to research

The Madison Gamers provide lots of great resources, this one is for mobile tech...

http://www.elearnopedia.com/category.asp?catid=19


From elearnopedia, I found a cool site in the UK for mobile (cell and handheld) tech learning...

http://www.m-learning.org/index.shtml

HOUSSE, Standards, PD, Leadership

I know I will need this resource for this, so I will add it now before I forget:

The Regional Alliance: Publications

~julz

Blogging Cons

Students are using blogs to vent and threaten. Additionally, the aspect where students info is being put out on the web at all violates COPA/COPPA...

Schools Block Blog Sites

~julz

Mobile tech article

Using handheld remotes for quiz feedback is showing up here at NMSU. Here's an article about it in the K-12 environment:

Teachers and students click on feedback method
~julz

iPod Fever

It's catching! Drexel gives iPods to its education majors...

Students entering the School of Education at Drexel University this
fall will receive iPods as part of a program to explore and evaluate
the educational potential of the devices. Duke University launched a
similar program last fall, distributing iPods to all 1,650 of its
incoming freshmen. The program at Drexel, however, is much smaller in
scope, with about 30 students expected to enter the School of Education
in the fall. Some have criticized such programs as gimmicks that are
unlikely to produce valuable educational results, and officials
involved in the programs acknowledge the risk that students will simply
use the devices to listen to music. Drexel officials said part of the
university's program is to solicit feedback from students about how
the devices could be put to good use educationally. Students will
receive microphones to record interviews and other meetings, and the
university will request that the students use the iPods to create
"audio Web logs" during a required semester of off-campus work. Drexel
will also experiment with podcasting, a process in which iPod owners
can download audio files, such as news announcements or lectures from
professors, and listen to them at their convenience.
Chronicle of Higher Education, 2 March 2005
http://chronicle.com/free/2005/03/2005030203n.htm

Les Chappell Article

I liked Les Chappell's article today called "Technology puts pressuree on education methods". The trends indicating that 5-7 year-olds are the fastest-growing technology market and that 70% of teens say they would rather give up TV than the Internet is a clear indication, to me anyways, that at the very least, concerned parents are going to have to figure out how to supplement their children's learning. The generation and educational gaps are simply starting to widen along the lines of Moore's Law and that is scary. Teachers and parents have to take on the challenge of jumping over that gap before it becomes a chasm.
~julz

How do we get back our kids' attention?

You know, it's not that hard getting kids attention. Keeping it is harder and keeping it when you have 30 of them to contend with harder still. I contend, however, that we (educators) just don't try hard enough to get their attention in the first place. Imagine a classroom where the teacher comes in every now and then with a cool lesson to share with kids. A lesson done with some digital gadget, like a lesson based on the cell phone, or on digital cameras, or palm blogging, or podcasting, etc. I bet that teachers would be more likely to get and more importantly keep student attention. I think we gotta go where no teacher (or very few anyways) has gone before, we gotta go mobile!
~julz