Why can’t teachers buy lessons like people buy songs off of iTunes? Are publishers at risk of irrelevance if they don’t proactively solve this problem for their customers? I have noticed that my music habits have changed dramatically over the past 5-6 years. With the advent of iTunes I was…
Education technology bloggers have been a busy lot with NECC 08, end of school year, and lots of new products to play with. Here are just a smattering of some of my favorite posts from the past few weeks. Enjoy. John Rice flagged an article showing that putting games in…
ISTE’s National Education Computing Conference (NECC) 2008 is in full swing in San Antonio. The Education Technology maven’s tribal gathering is bigger than ever. A sign over the entrance reads “The Worlds Largest Education Technology Exhibit.” That’s a Texas sized ambition. Here are a few impressions from day one. I’ll…
The Obama and McCain campaigns squared off at the Great American Education Forum sponsored by the Association of Education Publishers (AEP)* in Washington DC today. Educational policy experts from the campaigns addressed a wide range of positions the candidates are staking out from vouchers to the federal role in education.…
How will the economic downturn affect education budgets? How are executives at publishing houses and education technology firms planning for the recession? Education Week noted a couple of weeks ago: “…states across the country are confronting deteriorating budget conditions that have tied the hands of legislators and governors hoping to…
What do large school districts need from ed-tech providers? Michael Casserly Executive Director of the Council of the Great City Schools spoke at the Software Information Industry Association (SIIA) conference this week in San Francisco. The speech was direct, honest, and well balanced in tackling some difficult issues like NCLB.…
By Randy Wilhelm, CEO Thinkronize – Guest Blogger Did George Washington’s dog play multiplication math games with Abraham Lincoln’s animals during the Civil War? I would guess the answer is a resounding no. However, a new Index reveals the most popular keywords that K-12 students are searching for on the…
The reaction of many parents and educators to the idea of playing games in school is horror. School is supposed to be serious hard work. What these people don’t know is that in modern video games doing tasks repetitively to slowly build skills and status is the norm not the…
It has been a while since I did a round up of blog articles, time to clean a few items out. Rather than dump a long list I’ve picked four articles I’ve found particularly interesting in the past few weeks. Matt Mihaly over at The Forge notes that MMO’s/Virtual Worlds…
Virtual Reality and Education have a long and checkered history. On-line worlds give students opportunities to experience things that would be too expensive, too dangerous, or too time consuming in the “real” world. It allows us to distill an experience into it’s essence while allowing learners to be active agents…