Archive: 2012
Apple Joins the Digital Textbook Game
Today Apple announced a suite of products aimed at creating and publishing digital education textbooks during an Education Event in New York City at the Guggenheim Museum.
Parents Choosing Teachers? Try Blended Solutions
Andy Rotherham wrote a provocative Time blog suggesting that parents should take great care in choosing their child's teacher. He suggests that teacher choice is more important than school choice because differences within schools are often more pronounced than between schools. Online and blended learning expand the world of options for students, parents--and teachers.
SOPA and PIPA Polling Lower than the BP Oil Spill
How will SOPA and PIPA affect online education? It will be the collateral damage. On the surface, both bills seem reasonable. Both bills seek to give power to law enforcement to stop access to “rogue” websites that abuse copyright and exchange counterfeit goods. The bills focus on foreign websites; however, U.S. based Internet companies and technology leaders fear the bills are over-reaching and will have chilling effects on Internet freedoms in the U.S.
iNACOL Webinar to Guide Teachers to Optimize the Online Classroom
The International Association for K-12 Online Learning (iNACOL) will host a webinar on Thursday, January 19 for online teachers looking to create an enriching virtual classroom experience to encourage higher order thinking for their students.
Balancing Young Learners’ Media Consumption: Is There an App for That?
America's preschoolers spend about four hours a day consuming media, ranging from television (still No. 1) to Internet, digital video, and young gamer favorites such as Club Penguin, SesameStreet.org and Little Big Planet. Start with the recent explosion of touchscreen tablets and apps, add a healthy dose of new 'i-tot' products now marketed to parents with young kids, and presto -- we have a whole new media ball game that has parents and educators in a tizzy.
Getting Smart Opposes PIPA and SOPA
The Protect IP Act (PIPA) in the Senate and the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) in the House have the potential to censor the Web, pose harmful regulations on businesses, and hurt economic growth and innovation. Getting Smart stands with the millions of Internet users, entrepreneurs, businesses, human rights organizations, and professors who oppose PIPA and SOPA.
Is Online Education for K-12 Really Wrong-headed?
The real answer is that we don’t know – yet. Recent investigative journalism by papers as diverse as The New York Times and Arizona Republic have left the impression that online education is underperforming, costly, and misguided. A careful look at the way respective journalists made their cases leaves parents and the public asking for more incisive and scientifically-based investigations. Here is how some of the criticism was constructed and what we need to answer the question about the value of online education.
Analyzing Apple’s Education App Store
The Joan Ganz Cooney Center at Sesame Workshop released iLearn II: An Analysis of the Education Category of Apple's App Store, a review of the 200 top learning apps for iPad and iPhone.
Review: No Excuses Works But There Are Some Lousy Charters
The National Study of Charter Management Organization (CMO) Effectiveness released their final study, Diverse Strategies and Diverse Student Impacts. The factors that differentiate high performers from the dirt bags are behavior policies and teacher coaching--the high expectations, no excuses culture.
Khush CEO Asks, ‘Can Tech Transform Education?’
This week on TechCrunch, Khush CEO Prerna Gupta joined us in scratching our heads over the questions: Why has education fallen so behind other industries in technology adoption? Why is higher education overvalued?