Campus Technology 2015 Readers’ Choice Awards

CampusTechReadersChoiceAwardsSept2015

Excerpt:

In this first-ever higher education “gear of the year” guide, Campus Technology has turned to hundreds of education professionals to tell us which products in 29 categories are truly the best. We cover the gamut of technology from 3D printers to wireless access points. In almost every category you’ll find the Platinum, Gold and Silver picks to help you short-list your shopping, fuel your decision-making or perhaps start a friendly debate on campus.

  1. Learning Management and E-learning
  2. E-Portfolios
  3. Other Instructional Tools
  4. Student Information Systems and Data Management
  5. Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP)
  6. Constituent Relationship Management (CRM)
  7. Student Success/Retention
  8. Student Response Systems and Classroom Clickers
  9. Lecture Capture
  10. Document Cameras
  11. Projectors
  12. Interactive Whiteboards
  13. Videoconferencing and Web Conferencing
  14. Virtual Classroom and Meeting
  15. Classroom Audio Distribution/Sound Enhancement
  16. Captioning
  17. Office/Productivity Suites
  18. Classroom Presentation
  19. Multimedia Authoring Suites and Creative Software
  20. E-Learning Authoring
  21. Media Tablets
  22. Chromebook
  23. Windows Tablet
  24. Convertible and 2-in-1 Notebooks
  25. Notebooks
  26. Virtual Desktops and Thin Clients
  27. Wireless Access Points and Hotspots
  28. 3D Printers
  29. Emergency Notifications

 

 

 

Nine Ways to Improve Class Discussions — from facultyfocus.com by Maryellen Weimer

Excerpt:

So this post offers some simple suggestions for increasing the impact of the discussions that occur in our courses.

  1. Be more focused and for less time
  2. Use better hooks to launch the discussion
  3. Pause
  4. Have note takers
  5. Talk less or not at all
  6. End with something definitive
  7. Use the discussion – Keep referring to it!
  8. Invite students to suggest discussion topics
  9. Discuss discussions – Briefly is fine.

 

From DSC:
From my teaching time yesterday, I wished that I had done a better job with the transitions into and out of our class discussions. I wish that I had better prepped them for the discussion that we were about to have and to better summarize some of the key points from the class discussions.  I ended up emailing them the key points that I wanted to emphasize…so there are other ways to recover from those times that we aren’t on our best game in any particular class. Also, I would add to the above list, have different students be in charge of leading the discussions — and then see if the discussions/participation rates pick up.

 

Coursera Survey Pins Down MOOC Benefits — from campustechnology.com by Dian Schaffhauser

Excerpt:

More than seven in 10 learners report career benefits and more than six in 10 report educational benefits from completing massive open online courses (MOOCs). Participants from developing countries and particularly those with lower socioeconomic status and less education appear to be more likely to report benefits from pursuing MOOCs.

Those results and others come out of the first major research survey done among Coursera learners and reported in the Harvard Business Review.

 

Imagine what learning could look like w/ the same concepts found in Skreens!


From DSC:
Imagine what learning could look like w/ the same concepts found in the
Skreens kickstarter campaign?  Where you can use your mobile device to direct what you are seeing and interacting with on the larger screen?  Hmmm… very interesting indeed! With applications not only in the home (and on the road), but also in the active classroom, the boardroom, and the training room.


See
Skreens.com
&
Learning from the Living [Class] Room


 

DanielChristian-AVariationOnTheSkreensTheme-9-29-15

 

 

Skreens-Sept2015Kickstarter

 

Skreens2-Sept2015Kickstarter

 

 

The Living [Class] Room -- by Daniel Christian -- July 2012 -- a second device used in conjunction with a Smart/Connected TV

From DSC:
Some of the phrases and concepts that come to my mind:

  • tvOS-based apps
  • Virtual field trips while chatting or videoconferencing with fellow learners about that experience
  • Virtual tutoring
  • Global learning for K-12, higher ed, the corporate world
  • Web-based collaborations and communications
  • Ubiquitous learning
  • Transmedia
  • Analytics / data mining / web-based learner profiles
  • Communities of practice
  • Lifelong learning
  • 24×7 access
  • Reinvent
  • Staying relevant
  • More choice. More control.
  • Participation.
  • MOOCs — or what they will continue to morph into
  • Second screens
  • Mobile learning — and the ability to quickly tie into your learning networks
  • Ability to contact teachers, professors, trainers, specialists, librarians, tutors and more
  • Language translation
  • Informal and formal learning, blended learning, active learning, self-directed learning
  • The continued convergence of the telephone, the television, and the computer
  • Cloud-based apps for learning
  • Flipping the classroom
  • Homeschooling
  • Streams of content
  • …and more!

 

 

 

 

Addendum:

Check out this picture from Meet the winners of #RobotLaunch2015

Packed house at WilmerHale for the Robot Launch 2015 judging – although 2/3rds of the participants were attending and pitching remotely via video and web conferencing.

 

Empowering Students Through Multimedia Storytelling — from edutopia.org by Michael Hernandez

 

Excerpt:

Recent studies have proven that stories can change perceptions and even make people more tolerant. Rather than wait to be defined by others, it’s important that students learn to create understanding by sharing their story, their worldview, their concerns, and their triumphs with others.

Groups like Youth Radio and Cause Beautiful are empowering teens in poor and minority-majority neighborhoods to become multimedia journalists. Kids in these programs learn how to tell and share their own stories with a local or national audience.

No matter your class demographics or grade level, ELA and social studies teachers should integrate similar projects in their own classrooms, because every student will benefit from learning to craft a compelling visual story backed by persuasive facts and ideas.

What Is Multimedia Storytelling?
Students use video, audio, photography, web, and social media to craft documentaries and nonfiction stories about the world around them. These interdisciplinary projects allow students to focus on creating an authentic product that many people outside the classroom and their neighborhoods will see.

 

From DSC:
I am passionate about multimedia because the components of it — digital audio, digital video, text, graphics, animations, digital photography, and more — can create hugely powerful pieces of communication. Students need to be able to communicate — online. But it’s not just students. Each one of us needs to have an online-based footprint now in order to remain marketable.  Multimedia can help relay our stories, our work, our dreams.  It unleashes enormous amounts of energy and creativity inside of us.

I wish that more teachers and faculty members would seek to integrate multimedia-based assignments into their courses — or at least encourage the idea that this can be one of the acceptable ways that assignments can be turned in. At the same time, it can be one of the more interesting ways to assess learning and comprehension. Online-based resources like Lynda.com can help get students, teachers, and professors up the learning curves.

 

IBM Expands Watson Platform for Next Generation of Builders; Extends Industry’s Largest Portfolio of Cognitive APIs — from ibm.com

– New APIs Broaden Watson’s Language, Vision and Speech Capabilities
– Developer Tools Simplify Combining APIs and Data
– Upcoming Platform Innovations Previewed including Industry Data Sets & Robotics Integration
– New Watson Hub to Open in San Francisco

Excerpt:

SAN FRANCISCO – 24 Sep 2015: IBM (NYSE: IBM) today expanded the industry’s largest and most diverse set of cognitive APIs, technologies and tools for developers who are creating products, services and applications embedded with Watson.

The announcement was made by IBM during its forum on cognitive computing and Artificial Intelligence, where the company announced a new Watson location in San Francisco. IBM also previewed new platform innovations and research projects that will extend its industry-leading cognitive portfolio.

 

 

Excerpts from IBM Watson Ecosystem Partners in Market Building Businesses:

Student Career Counseling: Carney Labs is an education technology company that provides a platform embedded with Watson language capabilities to help schools learn about a student’s personality characteristics in order to build them a career roadmap. The Commonwealth of Virginia adopted a policy for all high schools in the state to leverage this app to use with students entering their freshman year.

Knowledge Management: Bloomfire  is a cloud-based knowledge network platform that helps employees within a company easily find the information they need to do their jobs. By scanning posts within the platform and automatically creating tags via the Watson data insights API, employees at companies including Whole Foods, Dun & Bradstreet and Etsy spend less time searching for information and more time doing meaningful work to improve company performance.

Research & Development: Inno360, an enterprise research and innovation management platform provider, is embedding a powerful combination of 7 Watson APIs for language and data insights into its SaaS platform to transform the way its clients, including Fortune 50 companies, conduct research and process big data. Inno360 is able to provide its clients advanced analysis of their R&D data to resolve product issues quickly and bring new products to market more rapidly.

Talent Sourcing and Matching: UnitesUs is a cloud based hiring & recruitment platform utilizing cognitive computing and big data analysis to match prospective employees to hiring organizations based on personality, company cultural fit, and core qualifications. By analyzing the personalities of job candidates leveraging Watson language capabilities and characterizing a company’s work environment, UnitesUs uses proprietary, automated matching algorithms to help companies, including imaging and electronics company Ricoh USA and fitness gym chain 24 Hour Fitness, make better hiring decisions.

 

 

ibmwatson-sept2015

 

The graphic below is from Home Remodeling for People with Disabilities: What You Need to Know — from expertise.com by Michael Sledd; with thanks to Grace Valladolid for the resource

Per Grace:

  • This a comprehensive guide for people living with disabilities. It aims to help make the federal grants available to seniors, veterans, and people with cognitive and physical disabilities much easier to understand and take advantage of, particularly for remodeling homes for accessibility.
  • Expertise.com exists to help people make truly better decisions by clearly laying out their options, with content written by industry experts.

 

 

For another version of this graphic, see:
http://www.ncsu.edu/ncsu/design/cud/pubs_p/docs/poster.pdf

 

From DSC:
The graphic provides a great visual summary of the principles of Universal Design.

Note how these concepts are applicable in the realm of learning — per Wikipedia:

The concept and language of Universal Design for Learning was inspired by the universal design movement in architecture and product development, originally formulated by Ronald L. Mace at North Carolina State University.[5]  Universal design calls for “the design of products and environments to be usable by all people, to the greatest extent possible, without the need for adaptation or specialized design”.[8]

These concepts benefit all learners. This is why I’m big on more choice, more control — and providing content in as many ways as possible, while offering as many pathways to successfully meeting the learning objectives as possible.

 

 

Discovr Labs brings Virtual Reality to the classroom, lets teachers see what students see  — from techcrunch.com by Greg Kumparak

Excerpt (emphasis DSC):

As consumers, we tend to focus on how virtual reality will work in our homes — the new types of games it allows, the insane 360-degree cinematic experiences, etc.  Some of VR’s greatest potential, though, lays not at home, but in the classroom.

Discovr Labs has built an interface and technology to help teachers use VR as a teaching tool. After the student straps on their headset, Discovr allows the teacher to select which module the student is interacting with, and to see exactly what the student sees; everything from the headset is beamed, wirelessly, to an all-seeing interface.

 

For now, Discovr is focusing on a local experience, with all of the students being in the same room as the teacher. Moving forward, they envision remote experiences where students and their teachers can come together in VR experiences regardless of their physical location.

 

Also see:

 

discovrlabs-sept2015

 

discovrlabs2-sept2015

 

 

 

 

A somewhat related addendum on 9/24/15:

Virtual Zeno Robot – The Future of Augmented Reality in Education — from virtual-strategy.com

Excerpt:

Digital Elite developed a new line of low-cost head mounted augmented reality paper viewers specifically for the education market. A number of novel applications in the field of robotics, virtual physics and a unique book for autism is already readily supported by the viewer. More Apps in the pipeline are being developed to support other immersive and virtual experiences.

In a scientific study the new viewers have compared favorably against expensive VR headsets, such as the Samsung/Oculus Gear VR and Zeiss VR One. The viewers were also tested in a number of real-life education scenarios and Apps. One example is a virtual robot teaching physics and geography deployed in an Augmented Reality (AR) application to break down the final frontier between physical robots and their virtual counterparts. Results are being published in conferences in Hong Kong today and Korea later this month.

 

 

Addendum on 9/25/15:

  • Five emerging trends for innovative tech in education — from jisc.ac.uk by Matt Ramirez
    No longer simply future-gazing, technologies like augmented and virtual reality (AR/VR) are becoming firmly accepted by the education sector for adding value to learning experiences.
 

Microsoft Office 2016 launches Tuesday — from fortune.com by  Barb Darrow
No surprises here: New Office adds real-time co-authoring for Word documents, Skype for Business, and other perks to mix.

Excerpt:

As expected, Microsoft is pushing out the latest version of its cash-cow Office application suite on Tuesday.

Office 2016, the base components of which are Word, Excel, and PowerPoint, now lets team members work together on Word documents in real time. It will add that capability to the other Office apps over time according to a blog post by Kirk Konigsburger, the corporate vice president for Office Client Applications and Services.

Microsoft also added Skype for Business to the mix so users can, from within their Word documents, talk or video chat with colleagues, partners or customers.

And Microsoft also made available a private preview of GigJam, a tool that promises to let workgroups collaborate across devices and applications, which Microsoft will add that to the Office 365 mix next year.

 

 

 

Here are the Top 100 Tools for Learning 2015 — from c4lpt.co.uk by Jane Hart

 

TopTools-2015-Hart

 

Excerpt:

Over 2,000 learning professionals from around the world from both education and enterprises contributed to the 9th Annual Survey of Learning Tools. Very many thanks to all those who took the time to complete the online form, write a blog post, send me an email or tweet me their selection.

I have now compiled the Top 100 Tools for Learning 2015, updated the Top 100 Tools for Learning website and prepared a slideset, which I have hosted on Slideshare and embedded below.

For the 7th year running Twitter is the  No 1 tool on the list, although this year it is very closely followed by YouTube, and once again, the list is dominated by free online tools and services. I can also see some interesting new trends in the tools that are being used for both personal learning and for creating learning content and experiences for others, and I will provide my analysis shortly. In the meantime, beneath the presentation, you will find a summary of the new tools on the list and the big movers up the list.

 

Ikea’s incredibly futuristic table replaces your stove, your cookbook, and your brain — from techinsider.io by Drake Baer

Excerpt:

Ikea’s plans for the table are, to say the least, ambitious. For EXPO Milano 2015, the company previewed a concept table called the Table For Living, which tells you what you can make with various ingredients and heats your food, no stove required.

Ikea created the prototype with the help of the global design consultancy Ideo, which recently gave us a behind-the-scenes look at how the table was brought into the world.

Here’s how it happened.

 

 

This would require two main technologies: induction heating to cook with wood …

This would require two main technologies: induction heating to cook with wood ...

… and computer vision to recognize ingredients.

... and computer vision to recognize ingredients.

 

The prototype only had three ingredients, each readily distinguishable by color — a red tomato, a green head of broccoli, and rice in a blue bowl.

The design team — along with members from Ikea, Ideo, Lund University, and Eindhoven University of Technology — wanted to create a table that would help people become more confident cooks and lead more sustainable lives.

The induction technology could keep your coffee hot — and even charge your phone, which Ikea products like the Riggad Lamp already do.

 

From DSC:
I don’t care for the title here, but there are some valuable items that can be found by digging around in this article entitled, “Silicon Valley billionaires are appalled by normal schools — so they’ve created this new one” — from businessinsider.com by Melia Robinson

Excerpts:

A typical day at Altschool, the Bay Area-based school system that raised $100 million in venture capital in May, is anything but typical.

Kids take attendance on an iPad, complete a “playlist” of activities, and learn 3D modeling software to design a playhouse for the class pet.

Founder and CEO Max Ventilla previously helmed the personalization team at Google, where he helped build Google+ and other products that make the internet feel more personal.

His latest venture aims to transform the outdated, early-1900s model of elementary education for the digital age.

In May, we spent the day at AltSchool‘s Fort Mason location in San Francisco to see its revolutionary teaching style in action.

 

From DSC:
Is there anything here that public schools would find attractive and/or could implement?

  • AltSchool divides students between the ages of 4 and 14 into three groups: lower elementary, upper elementary, and middle school. There are no traditional grade levels.
  • A typical day at AltSchool begins with attendance. As kids arrive, they sign in to the school’s attendance app on a dedicated iPad.
  • The attendance app is one of a dozen or so tech tools developed by the school’s 50-person product team, which includes former employees of Apple, Uber, Zynga, and Ventilla’s alma mater, Google.
  • The PLP is the foundation of the AltSchool experience. Teachers collaborate with families and students to design a set of goals for the learner based on the student’s interests, passions, strengths, and weaknesses.
  • Each child receives a weekly “playlist” of individual and group activities that are aimed at achieving those goals. This student is writing an entry for his blog on coin collecting.
  • Teachers pick activities for their students by creating items in their playlists or searching the My.AltSchool library to find items that other teachers have made.
  • This 8-year-old demonstrates a game of Pac-Man using MaKey MaKey — a simple circuit board that transforms everyday objects into touchable user interfaces …he attaches alligator clips to four mounds of clay and tapes one clip to himself. When he taps the clay and completes the circuit, the computer interprets the input as arrow key actions.
  • This streamlined instruction time frees up the teacher to walk around the classroom and interact face-to-face with students.
  • The lower elementary students spend the morning knocking a shared item off their playlists: “writing the news.” These guys are chronicling a recent trip to the park.

 

trip-to-the-park

 

  • Many of the younger kids wear headphones during playlist time to drown out distractions.
  • Technology isn’t necessary to complete all activities, but it is used to document students’ work. This student takes a picture of her news clipping using an iPad and uploads the image to her playlist.
  • The classroom, like the tech, fosters AltSchool’s individualized learning approach. Students sprawl across the room on carpets, beanbags, and even lofts of their own construction.

 

own-construction

 

  • Classrooms are treated like stations, rather than designated areas for particular grade levels, and students move from room to room throughout the day. It’s especially important for micro-schools to maximize space so that a four-room schoolhouse doesn’t feel cramped
  • Craft and cleaning supplies are stored where the smaller kids can reach them, giving them a sense of agency.
  • After lunch and PE in the nearby park, students put aside their playlists and work on more integrated group projects.
  • The middle-school students were tasked with a classroom redesign. This 11-year-old, who was wearing an Iron Man T-shirt, built a parkour course. He’s writing a parent permission slip on his Google Chromebook now.
  • His classmate learned from online tutorials how to use the 3D-modeling software SketchUp, and she designed an urban-garden-inspired seating area for the unused deck on the second floor. There’s an obstacle course inside the benches for a class rabbit to tunnel through.
  • Another student, who wants to be a veterinarian, lawyer, writer, and manga comic-book writer, grew an indoor tea garden. She says she loves how the assignments “bend to your ability.”
  • If Silicon Valley’s favorite elementary school has its way, personalization will remain king.

 

 

ArtPrize2015

 

ArtPrize is a radically open international art competition decided by public vote and expert jury that takes place each fall in Grand Rapids, Michigan (USA).  For 19 days, art entries from all over the world cover three square miles of downtown Grand Rapids, Michigan—and it’s all free and open to the public.

 

Also see ArtPrize’s 2014 Annual Report:

 

ArtPrize2014AnnualReport

 

 

The Messy Human Core of Reinventing Higher Education Institutions — from educause.edu by Paul LeBlanc

Excerpts:

Discussions of business model reengineering and innovation in higher education tend to focus on program design, technology, data, and marketing challenges and on delivery, organizational, revenue, and outsourcing models—along with the myriad other moving parts of the modern organization. Even though traditionalists and romantics would rather not think about these questions, which they view as a neoliberal “corporatization” of the academy, getting the organizational questions wrong can imperil the academic mission for which all colleges and universities exist—especially in these turbulent times for higher education. Still, for those of us who are thinking hard about innovation and new business models, two critical components are too often missing from our discussions: people and culture.

But here’s the thing: the very best organizational models are doomed to failure if staff talent is not good and if the culture is poor, whereas high performers and the right culture can produce amazing results even with a poor organizational model.

 
© 2024 | Daniel Christian