5 Must-Read Articles for Latest Educational Technology Trends :Nov 1, 2012

Here are our picks to represent the latest educational technology trends. They will give you an updated picture of it. Now it’s the moment to think different and think big for education.

To empower students, let’s bring interactive learning tools into the classroom

— A over view of noteworthy start-ups and new tools by Troy Williams
The result has been the emergence of a new teaching model, one that shifts content delivery beyond the walls of the classroom. We’re seeing big advances in adaptive learning platforms from established players like Knewton and upstarts like Brainscape and Cerego; YouTube and Sal Kahn are looking for ways to produce more instructional videos; and online course builders like Udacity, Coursera, and Peer2Peer University are democratizing instruction by way of Massive Online Open Courses (MOOCs)….

5 School Technologies To Watch: Personalized Learning Is Here

— Jeremy Friedman picked the top trends and market innovators leading the charge this coming year – attracting developers and investors along the way
From technologies that live inside the classroom to technologies that inspire learning outside the classroom; from physical devices to mobile applications. School technology decisions are becoming more democratic, and the pervasiveness of Internet-connected devices is helping to lead a revolution. We are reaching a point in time where technology is empowering people toward a path of  personalization, and almost every new technology in the education technology space today fills a cog in that wheel.
  • Moving to the Cloud and Collaborative Environments
  • Cross-Platform Integration, Vendor Collaboration and the Rise of the Marketplace
  • The Explosion of All Things Mobile
  • An Emphasis on Adaptive Learning
  • Gamification

Ed Tech Makes Consumer Electronics Association’s Top 5 Trends

— A briefing about educational technology prospect from CEA’s report
Technology in education is one of the “prominent technology trends expected to influence the consumer electronics (CE) industry in the years ahead,” according to the 2013 edition of “Five Technology Trends to Watch,” a report released this week by the Consumer Electronics Association (CEA). The other four tech trends identified were the future of 3D printing, next-generation TVs and displays, the evolution of the audio market, and the mobile revolution in Africa.

Educating Players: Are Games the Future of Education?

— A write-up about game-based learning from ‘Scientific Americans’
Smart phones, tablets and video game systems are often seen as distractions to school children in developed countries, which tend to adhere to a strict teacher-student educational model. At Technology Review‘s Emerging Technologies (EmTech) conference here on October 25, a panel of technologists and educators posited that it’s time to embrace students’ use of such technologies and rethink learning in both developed and developing countries.
OLPC in April delivered boxes containing more than a dozen tablet computers loaded with books, games and other apps—in English—to an isolated village in the Ethiopian highlands. No instructions were given to the village children regarding what was in the boxes or what to do with them. The villagers have no reading or writing skills, nor have many of them ever seen so much as a written word, not even on a sign or bottle, Negroponte said. “I thought they’d [just] play with the boxes,” he added.
Instead, within four minutes the village children had opened the boxes and learned how to turn on the tablets, he said. Within a few months they had learned the A, B, Cs and were singing the alphabet song in English.
The question now is whether those Ethiopian children learn to read and write in English, and how quickly they might do it, Negroponte said. This is critical because “if you can learn to read, you can read to learn. If they can do that it [could] not only impact the 100 million kids who can’t go to school but might also help us understand how to help the educational system here,” he added.

educational technologyForecast 3.0, Recombinant Education: Regenerating the Learning Ecosystem

— KnowledgeWorks highlights five disruptions that will reshape learning over the next decade
New education innovations, organizations, resources, and relationships will proliferate, giving us all the opportunity to put the pieces – some long-established and some new – together in new sequences to create a diverse and evolving learning ecosystem. The concepts that will shape the future of education are:
  • Democratized Startup
  • High-Fidelity Living
  • De-Institutionalized Production
  • Customizable Value Webs
  • sharable Cities
Just yesterday, George Lucas announced the $4.05 billion sale amount of Lucasfilm to Disney will be put  into a foundation that will primarily focus on educational issues. “For 41 years, the majority of my time and money has been put into the company,” Lucas said in a statement Wednesday. “As I start a new chapter in my life, it is gratifying that I have the opportunity to devote more time and resources to (educational) philanthropy.” (read the news here)

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