50 of the best teaching & learning apps for 2016 — from teachthought.com

Excerpt:

What are the best teaching and learning apps for 2016? That’s a good question this post looks to answer.

Every year, we put together a collection of what we believe are the best teaching and learning apps for that year. (Here, for example, is our 2015 version of the list below, where you will notice about half the apps are the same, and half have changed. That’s not bad for progress, is it?

This year, we were asked by the good folks at Easelly (the infographic and visual data platform) to create a collection of resources that while including their apps, would curate a lot of good stuff teachers would benefit from in 2016. Since we were preparing to release our TeachThought Editor’s Choice: 2016 Best Teaching and Learning Apps–and have used Easelly for years ourselves–we combined the two projects to give you something you can use to guide your #edtech integration this year.

 

 

6 ed tech tools to try in 2016 — from cultofpedagogy.com by Jennifer Gonzalez

Excerpt:

About a year ago, I published an e-book called the Teacher’s Guide to TechOver the last month, I have been updating it for 2016, adding over 30 new tools and refreshing the information I had about the original ones. I have to say, the 2015 version was excellent, but now it’s SO MUCH BETTER. (To take a peek at the guide, scroll to the bottom of this post.)

In the process, I discovered some tools that I absolutely fell in love with, and I wanted to share them with you here. Each of these tools can make your teaching more efficient and effective, and your students’ learning deeper and more engaging.

Let’s take a look.

 

6toolstotry-2016

 

 

Visit Shakespeare’s London at FIU’s new virtual reality facility — from cec.fiu.edu

Excerpt:

It’s 1598, and you’re on your way to the Globe Theater to watch one of Shakespeare’s plays. You walk along the dirt roads and the green fields of London and you realize you can see the London Bridge in the distance. A vagabond asks you for a coin, and you find the village houses and the town market bustling with customers. Once you arrive at the theater, you watch the first few minutes of the opening monologue of “Henry V.”

This is a virtual world created by a multidisciplinary team of FIU students – and you can immerse yourself in this time-travel journey starting Jan. 29 when the I-CAVE opens at Modesto A. Maidique Campus.

.

 

 

Google brings commenting to sheets and slides on mobile— from techcrunch.com by Frederic Lardinois

Excerpt:

Google announced [on 1/28/16] a couple of updates to the commenting features in its Google Apps productivity suite.

These include the launch of mobile commenting in the iOS and Android apps for Slides and Sheets. Thanks to this, the commenting experience in Google’s apps is now (almost) the same across all of its apps — whether on the web or on mobile. I’m not sure why Google didn’t already offer this before, but better late than never, right?

 

 

10 very good tools for student researchers — from educatorstechnology.com

Excerpt:

One of the onerous parts in essay and academic writing is the bibliography section. Managing, organizing and citing references can sometimes be a real challenge especially if you don’t keep track of what and who you cite. The last thing you  want after a strenuous writing task is a messy bibliography with one reference missing a page number, the other needs publication date or, worse of all, having to go back to your sources to check for the source of that quotation you included in your conclusion. If you find yourself constantly grappling with problems such as these, the web tools below are absolutely something you might need to consider. These are some of the best applications for organizing, managing, and publishing bibliographies, citations and references. Some of these softwares are integrated with Google Scholar.

 

 

Fresco News app brings crowdsourced journalism to Apple TV — from imore.com by Dan Thorp-Lancaster

Excerpt:

Fresco News, an app that crowdsources news footage by allowing citizen journalists to upload and share their photos videos of current events around the globe, has officially launched an Apple TV app. With the app, users can check out first-hand accounts of events around the world on the big screen through their Apple TV.

 

 

5 Apple TV fitness apps to get in shape on a budget — from macworld.com by Caitlin McGarry
There are tons of streaming TV apps, but I’m on the hunt for a streaming workout app that won’t cost a fortune.

Excerpt:

The fourth-generation Apple TV now has more than 3,600 tvOS apps, Apple revealed in its first-quarter earnings call Tuesday. Most of those are games or streaming video apps, and there are tons of great options in both categories. When it comes to fitness, which seems to me a natural fit for the TV, the selection is sparse. But still, I was sure at least one Apple TV app would have what I was looking for: a cheap way to stay in shape. But it wasn’t that easy.

 

 

Codespark.org

 

codespark-jan2016

 

 

Codemonkey

codemonkey-jan2016

 

 

Best iPhone 6 and 6s tripods for stablizing and mounting — from imore.com by Brent Zaniewski
A dependable tripod can enhance your iPhone photography skills and help you get an otherwise impossible shot.

 

 

 

Livestream unveils new device for affordable multi-camera productions — from bizbash.com by Mitra Sorrells
The tiny Movi camera links with an iOS app for real-time recording, editing, and streaming from events.

Excerpt:

Planners interested in creating multi-camera video productions at their events will soon have a new, inexpensive option. Livestream, the company behind live online events for brands such as Tesla, Salesforce.com, the N.B.A., and more, has created a 2.5-inch device that lets users record and edit in real time between nine virtual high-definition cameras. Movi is available for preorder for delivery in April, currently at a price of $299.

 

 

This lens can widen your view into a classroom for only $10 — from blog.edthena.com

 

 

How Five EdTech Start-Ups Are Using Big Data To Boost Business Education — from by Seb Murray
MOOC platforms explore analytics with b-school partners

Excerpt:

Education tech companies including Coursera, edX, Udacity and their b-school and university partners are delving deeper into big data analytics to improve teaching and student learning.

Simon Nelson, CEO of online learning company FutureLearn, says: “The potential is incredible — and we are just scratching the surface.”

A report to be published in January by the UK’s Higher Education Commission (HEC) envisages that big data will help identify risk of failure; give students instant feedback; and benchmark their performance against peers.

Addendum on 2/1/16:

Addendum on 2/2/16:

 

 

Augmented reality transforms biopharma — from genengnews.com by Gail Dutto
Shed the rose-colored glasses, says AFS, and put on smart glasses to achieve real-time oversight

Excerpt:

AFS’s technology combines smart glasses with biopharma-specific software to let people essentially see through others’ eyes. The software also overlays tags on equipment and lets wearers access data in their glasses, leaving their hands free for other tasks.

These capabilities improve outcomes from remote troubleshooting and training, enhance situational awareness among maintenance personnel and operators, and increase efficiency for researchers and other technical employees.

“The best technicians can only be in so many places. Now a novice with smart glasses can collaborate with engineers or seasoned technicians for better service.”

Enabling an engineer to see in real time — on a phone or tablet — what an operator is seeing brings immediate technical expertise to the problem without having to call an engineer onsite in the middle of the night or engage in the ambiguity of phone or text messages. And, if the engineer circles a panel or button on a tablet or smart phone, the operator sees that in the glasses, minimizing the chance of mistakes and reducing the need for emergency site visits, Pignata asserts.

 

We can do nothing to change the past, but we have enormous power to shape the future. Once we grasp that essential insight, we recognize our responsibility and capability for building our dreams of tomorrow and avoiding our nightmares.

–Edward Cornish

 


From DSC:
This posting represents Part III in a series of such postings that illustrate how quickly things are moving (Part I and Part II) and to ask:

  • How do we collectively start talking about the future that we want?
  • Then, how do we go about creating our dreams, not our nightmares?
  • Most certainly, governments will be involved….but who else should be involved?

As I mentioned in Part I, I want to again refer to Gerd Leonhard’s work as it is relevant here, Gerd asserts:

I believe we urgently need to start debating and crafting a global Digital Ethics Treaty. This would delineate what is and is not acceptable under different circumstances and conditions, and specify who would be in charge of monitoring digressions and aberrations.

Looking at several items below, ask yourself…is this the kind of future that we want?  There are some things mentioned below that could likely prove to be very positive and helpful. However, there are also some very troubling advancements and developments as well.

The point here is that we had better start talking and discussing the pros and cons of each one of these areas — and many more I’m not addressing here — or our dreams will turn into our nightmares and we will have missed what Edward Cornish and the World Future Society are often trying to get at.

 


 

Google’s Artificial Intelligence System Masters Game of ‘Go’ — from abcnews.go.com by Alyssa Newcomb

Excerpt:

Google just mastered one of the biggest feats in artificial intelligence since IBM’s Deep Blue beat Gary Kasparov at chess in 1997.

The search giant’s AlphaGo computer program swept the European champion of Go, a complex game with trillions of possible moves, in a five-game series, according Demis Hassabis, head of Google’s machine learning, who announced the feat in a blog post that coincided with an article in the journal Nature.

While computers can now compete at the grand master level in chess, teaching a machine to win at Go has presented a unique challenge since the game has trillions of possible moves.

Along these lines, also see:
Mastering the game of go with deep neural networks and tree search — from deepmind.com

 

 

 

Harvard is trying to build artificial intelligence that is as fast as the human brain — from futurism.com
Harvard University and IARPA are working together to study how AI can work as efficiently and effectively as the human brain.

Excerpt:

Harvard University has been given $28M by the Intelligence Advanced Projects Activity (IARPA) to study why the human brain is significantly better at learning and retaining information than artificial intelligence (AI). The investment into this study could potentially help researchers develop AI that’s faster, smarter, and more like human brains.

 

 

Digital Ethics: The role of the CIO in balancing the risks and rewards of digital innovation — from mis-asia.com by Kevin Wo; with thanks to Gerd Leonhard for this posting

What is digital ethics?
In our hyper-connected world, an explosion of data is combining with pattern recognition, machine learning, smart algorithms, and other intelligent software to underpin a new level of cognitive computing. More than ever, machines are capable of imitating human thinking and decision-making across a raft of workflows, which presents exciting opportunities for companies to drive highly personalized customer experiences, as well as unprecedented productivity, efficiency, and innovation. However, along with the benefits of this increased automation comes a greater risk for ethics to be compromised and human trust to be broken.

According to Gartner, digital ethics is the system of values and principles a company may embrace when conducting digital interactions between businesses, people and things. Digital ethics sits at the nexus of what is legally required; what can be made possible by digital technology; and what is morally desirable.  

As digital ethics is not mandated by law, it is largely up to each individual organisation to set its own innovation parameters and define how its customer and employee data will be used.

 

 

New algorithm points the way towards regrowing limbs and organs — from sciencealert.com by David Nield

Excerpt:

An international team of researchers has developed a new algorithm that could one day help scientists reprogram cells to plug any kind of gap in the human body. The computer code model, called Mogrify, is designed to make the process of creating pluripotent stem cells much quicker and more straightforward than ever before.

A pluripotent stem cell is one that has the potential to become any type of specialised cell in the body: eye tissue, or a neural cell, or cells to build a heart. In theory, that would open up the potential for doctors to regrow limbs, make organs to order, and patch up the human body in all kinds of ways that aren’t currently possible.

 

 

 

The world’s first robot-run farm will harvest 30,000 heads of lettuce daily — from techinsider.io by Leanna Garfield

Excerpt (from DSC):

The Japanese lettuce production company Spread believes the farmers of the future will be robots.

So much so that Spread is creating the world’s first farm manned entirely by robots. Instead of relying on human farmers, the indoor Vegetable Factory will employ robots that can harvest 30,000 heads of lettuce every day.

Don’t expect a bunch of humanoid robots to roam the halls, however; the robots look more like conveyor belts with arms. They’ll plant seeds, water plants, and trim lettuce heads after harvest in the Kyoto, Japan farm.

 

 

 

Drone ambulances may just be the future of emergency medical vehicles — from interestingengineering.com by Gabrielle Westfield

Excerpt:

Drones are advancing everyday. They are getting larger, faster and more efficient to control. Meanwhile the medical field keeps facing major losses from emergency response vehicles not being able to reach their destination fast enough. Understandable so, I mean especially in the larger cities where traffic is impossible to move swiftly through. Red flashing lights atop or not, sometimes the roads are just not capable of opening up. It makes total sense that the future of ambulances would be paved in the open sky rather than unpredictable roads.

.

 

 

 

Phone shop will be run entirely by Pepper robots — from telegraph.co.uk by

Excerpt (emphasis DSC):

Creator company SoftBank said it planned to open the pop-up mobile store employing only Pepper robots by the end of March, according to Engadget.

The four foot-tall robots will be on hand to answer questions, provide directions and guide customers in taking out phone contracts until early April. It’s currently unknown what brands of phone Pepper will be selling.

 

 

 

Wise.io introduces first intelligent auto reply functionality for customer support organizations — from consumerelectronicsnet.com
Powered by Machine Learning, Wise Auto Response Frees Up Agent Time, Boosting Productivity, Accelerating Response Time and Improving the Customer Experience

Excerpt:

BERKELEY, CA — (Marketwired) — 01/27/16 — Wise.io, which delivers machine learning applications to help enterprises provide a better customer experience, today announced the availability of Wise Auto Response, the first intelligent auto reply functionality for customer support organizations. Using machine learning to understand the intent of an incoming ticket and determine the best available response, Wise Auto Response automatically selects and applies the appropriate reply to address the customer issue without ever involving an agent. By helping customer service teams answer common questions faster, Wise Auto Response removes a high percentage of tickets from the queue, freeing up agents’ time to focus on more complex tickets and drive higher levels of customer satisfaction.

 

 

Video game for treating ADHD looks to 2017 debut — from educationnews.org

Excerpt:

Akili Interactive Labs out of Boston has created a video game that they hope will help treat children diagnosed with attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder by teaching them to focus in a distracting environment.

The game, Project: EVO, is meant to be prescribed to children with ADHD as a medical treatment.  And after gaining $30.5 million in funding, investors appear to believe in it.  The company plans to use the funding to run clinical trials with plans to gain approval from the US Food and Drug Administration in order to be able to launch the game in late 2017.

Players will enter a virtual world filled with colorful distractions and be required to focus on specific tasks such as choosing certain objects while avoiding others.  The game looks to train the portion of the brain designed to manage and prioritize all the information taken in at one time.

 

Addendum on 1/29/16:

 

 

 

 

e-180-creative-peer-learning-jan2016

 

 

e-180-creative-peer-learning2-jan2016

 

From their website:

For Events & Conferences
Much more than a conference app, E-180 works with your team to transform your event into a peer-learning community, using both our matchmaking technology and the onsite presence of our professional matchmakers. Nothing is left to chance, ensuring that your attendees meet and share knowledge with the right people.

 

 

CollabClassrmsMarkFutureHigherEd-EdDive-1-22-16

 

Collaborative classrooms mark wave of the future in higher ed — from educationdive.com by Tara García Mathewson
Student-centered models turn instructors into guides as students investigate for themselves

Excerpts:

The designs put students at the center of instruction, shifting the faculty role to one of tutor or guide.

“This changes the whole way we teach,” Benavides said.

Some colleges and universities are designing these spaces in new, modern buildings, while others are remodeling existing classrooms and making them work for this next generation of teaching and learning.

 

From DSC:
This sort of change may be uncomfortable to students and to faculty members alike. However, to shift the ownership of the learning to the student is a positive move. Why? Because we all need to be lifelong learners now.  The learning rests with each one of us now, or we could be broadsided and have a very difficult time getting back up. So to come out of college knowing how to learn…that’s a huge plus in my mind.

 

 

DanielChristian-No-longer-running-sprints--but-marathons

 

 

Also see:

 

Learning-Spaces-Guide-pkallscDotOrg

 

  • What do we want our learners to become?
  • What kind of learning experiences enable that becoming? 
  • What kind of learning spaces enable such experiences? 
  • How do we know? 

 

 

Meta-Analysis-Active-LearningSTEMApr2014

 

 

 

From DSC:
A close family member struggles with maintaining focus. She is easily distracted by noises and motions inside the classroom. When she’s distracted, there’s a loss of focus…which then results in errors and missed learning cues. Although she hasn’t been diagnosed as having Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD), she still struggles in this area.

That got me to wondering…

  • Could virtual reality be used to help students w/ Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD), and/or with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD), and/or with folks like my family member who are easily distracted?
    .
  • That is, could students who are struggling within their current learning environments create their own, individualized VR-based learning environment that would better suit their learning preferences?  i.e., immerse oneself into a setting that’s quieter with less visual distractions. Or into a setting where there’s soft, mellow music playing in the background while studying by a gently rolling river (or from a choice of library-based settings, or choose from a variety of rooms that offer a great deal of “natural light,” or on the beach, or on a mountaintop, etc.)

Hmmm…

 

vr-students-alchemylearning

Image from:
http://alchemylearning.com/adopting-virtual-reality-for-education/

 

 

river-stream

Image from:
http://www.snipview.com/q/Wykoff_Run

 

 

 
 

Virtual reality shines light on illiteracy at World Economic Forum — from fortune.com by John Gaudiosi

Excerpt:

A trio of virtual reality experiences, Project Literacy: A Life Unseen, debuted at the World Economic Forum in Davos-Klosters, Switzerland, today.

Each virtual reality scenario is a frozen moment in the life of an illiterate person. They explore the global nature of illiteracy and its correlation with gender inequality and malnutrition. According to UNESCO, these two global challenges incur economic costs estimated at $3.5 trillion and $12 trillion, respectively.

“As others have aptly called it, virtual reality is the ultimate empathy machine,” Shamlin says. “Nothing else gives you the same sense of immersion and presence. The international struggle to fight illiteracy has raged on for a long time and we were asked to bring fresh perspective. Now, with the advent of this technology, we can bring a renewed and more intimate awareness of how people struggle with illiteracy.”

 

Equipped for EQUIP? Here’s a primer — from edsurge.com by Bart Epstein and Ben Wallerstein (on 11/9/15)

Excerpt:

On October 15th, the Department of Education launched a new Experimental Site called Educational Quality through Innovative Partnerships (EQUIP), which creates a pathway to federal aid for unaccredited education providers–including the fast-growing bootcamp sector. Here’s what you need to know.

The US Department of Education’s Experimental Sites Initiative (ESI) is a policymaker’s dream. The authority granted though the ESI allows the Secretary of Education to waive certain rules governing federal financial aid to experiment with new models and test their impact. The goal: improve access for low-income students, and increase the return on our $130 billion annual investment in student aid.

As a policy “lab,” Experimental Sites have allowed the Department of Education to provide Title IV access for self-paced and competency-based programs, decouple aid from the credit hour, and fund students who demonstrate prior learning through assessments.

 

From DSC:
As higher ed (as an industry) doesn’t seem to be able to decrease the costs of obtaining a degree, alternatives continue to crop up.

If…

  • The prices don’t start coming down from institutions of traditional higher education
  • Alternatives continue to crop up and gather steam
  • The U.S. Federal Government gets behind such alternatives

…then higher ed (again, as an industry) can only blame itself for not responding more significantly than we did.

We need to respond. We need to address this growing wave of unrest regarding higher ed. We need more innovation. We need lower prices. Towards that end, that’s why I’ve been saying that we need more TrimTab Groups to find ways to maintain quality, but reduce the price.

 

TheTrimtabInHigherEducation-DanielChristian

 

 

BloggingInTheClassroom-MattBanner-Nov2015

Blogging in the classroom: How to get started — from onblastblog.com by Matt Banner

Excerpt:

Here’s what we’ll discuss today:

  • Ways to bring blogging into your classroom and daily lesson plans
  • The litany of benefits blogging brings to education
  • Deciding the purpose and goals of your blog
  • Setting up your classroom’s blog
  • Easy ways to promote and grow your classroom blog


Blogging about a subject turns novices into experts.
There’s no other choice. When you write thousands upon thousands of words about something, doing research all the while, you become an expert in that subject. It’s unavoidable, and possibly the best way to learn in my opinion. Instead of having the information fed to them, students are taking it and putting it down on paper in their own words.

They live the information instead of simply seeing it. This is huge in terms of learning something for the long-term. Hands-on experience will always leave more of a lasting impression than something that is simply boiled down to a few questions on a test.

Michelle Lampinen, a high school English teacher in New Jersey wrote a great article on this here.

 



 

Also see:
How blogging is being used in the classroom today: Research results — from emergingtech.com by Mike Wallagher

Excerpt:

The 2015 survey has yet to be reported on, but 2014 research findings have something to say about the state of blogging in the classroom today.

Benefits of Blogging in the Classroom
Blogging in the classroom can have numerous benefits depending on how you use your blog. Just some include that:

  • Instructors can create a blog about class happenings so parents can stay up-to-date and students can access announcements from anywhere
  • Teachers can use their blogs to store lessons online or provide supplemental learning materials to students
  • Instructors can use blogs to organize assignments, such as posting them online for absent students or listing due dates so all students have access to the course materials from anywhere
  • Teachers can post previous students’ work as examples or publish current students’ work so they can show parents and family who live far away
  • Educators can open the comment sections on blog posts to get feedback from parents and the community as well as to create discussion between students
  • Student blogs teach children about writing techniques, online publishing, and proper Internet etiquette, which most students will use in future careers

How Blogs Are Being Used
“Blogging in the classroom” may bring up this idea that there’s one way to present blogging to your students, but there are a myriad of ways educators can use blogs. Just some options include:

  • Personal blogs for teachers
  • Student blogs
  • ePortfolios
  • Platforms for assignments, homework, and announcements
  • Classroom blogs for collaboration and discussion

 



 

From DSC:
Whether your school, university, or college has a web hosting service or whether you need to go out and find a web hosting service yourself — or use a free service/solution — blogging is a great way to create streams of content and to “think out loud.” It offers benefits for students, teachers, professors, staff, and administrators.

 

 

 

 

From DSC:
Currently, you can add interactivity to your digital videos. For example, several tools allow you to do this, such as:

So I wonder…what might interactivity look like in the near future when we’re talking about viewing things in immersive virtual reality (VR)-based situations?  When we’re talking about videos made using cameras that can provide 360 degrees worth of coverage, how are we going to interact with/drive/maneuver around such videos? What types of gestures and/or input devices, hardware, and software are we going to be using to do so? 

What new forms of elearning/training/education will we have at our disposal? How will such developments impact instructional design/designers? Interaction designers? User experience designers? User interface designers? Digital storytellers?

Hmmm…

The forecast?  High engagement, interesting times ahead.

Also see:

  • Interactive video is about to get disruptive — from kineo.com by James Cory-Wright
    Excerpt:
    Seamless and immersive because it all happens within the video
    We can now have embedded hotspots (motion tags) that move within the video; we can use branching within the video to change the storyline depending on the decisions you make; we can show consequences of making that decision; we can add video within video to share expert views, link directly to other rich media or gather real-time data via social media tools – all without leaving the actual video. A seamless experience.
    .
  • Endless learning: Virtual reality in the classroom — from pixelkin.org by David Jagneaux
    Excerpt:
    What if you could be part of the audience for Martin Luther King Jr.’s riveting “I Have a Dream” speech? What if you could stand in a chemistry lab and experiment without any risk of harm or danger? What if you could walk the earth millions of years ago and watch dinosaurs? With virtual reality technology, these situations could become real. Virtual reality (VR) is a hot topic in today’s game industry, but games are only one aspect of the technology. I’ve had fun putting  on a headset and shooting  down ships in outer space. But VR also has the potential to enhance education in classrooms.
    .
  • Matter VR

 

MatterVR-Jan2016

 

Report from Davos: 5 million jobs to be lost by 2020 because of tech advances — from siliconbeat.com by Levi Sumagaysay

Excerpt (emphasis DSC):

A new report predicts a loss of 5 million jobs in the next five years because of technological advances, but don’t blame it all on the robots.

The other culprits: artificial intelligence, 3-D printers and advances in genetics, biotech and more.

The World Economic Forum, which is holding its annual meeting in Davos this week, in its report details the effects of modern technology on the labor market, for better or for worse.  It says “the fourth industrial revolution” will be “more comprehensive and all-encompassing than anything we have ever seen.”

The report actually estimates a loss of 7 million jobs in 15 economies that today have 1.86 billion workers, or about 65 percent of the world’s workforce, but it also expects 2 million new jobs to be created.

 

From DSC:
If this turns out to be true, how should this affect our curricula?  What should we be emphasizing and seeking to build within our students?

 

 

From DSC:
If you can clear up just short of an hour of your time, this piece from PBS entitled, “School Sleuth: The Case of the Wired Classroom” is very well done and worth your time.  It’s creative and objective; it offers us some solid research, some stories, and some examples of the positives and negatives of technology in the classroom. It weaves different modes of learning into the discussion — including blended learning, online learning, personalized learning and more. Though it aired back in October of 2015, I just found out about it.

Check it out if you can!

 

SchoolSleuth-WiredClassroom-Oct2015

 

 

 

Also see:

  • Schools push personalized learning to new heights — from edweek.org
    Excerpt:
    For most schools, reaching the next level of digitally driven, personalized learning is far from reality. Still, some schools are extending their digital reach in significant and sometimes groundbreaking ways, as the stories in this special report illustrate. They are making moves to integrate a variety of technologies to track how students learn and to use the resulting data to expand the use of hands-on, project-based learning. The goal is to build never-ending feedback loops that ultimately inform the development of curriculum and assessment. Plus, big data and analytics are gradually making their marks in K-12 education. This special report outlines the progress schools are making to use digital tools to personalize learning, but also raises the question: Are they reaching far enough?
    .
  • A Pedagogical Model for the use of iPads for Learning — from higheru.org

 

pedagogicalmodeliPads-dec2015

 

 

 

 

TopIllustrators2015

 

 

New York Public Library shares digital archive of 180,000 restriction-free images — from itsnicethat.com by Alexander Hawkins

Excerpt:

180,000 restriction-free images are now available in the New York Public Library digital collections. Including high res photographs, illustrations and maps, images can be downloaded easily and are free to share and use without permission. The collection can be viewed by genre or colour.

 

 

Hypnotic New Kinetic Sculptures by Anthony Howe — from thisiscolossal.com

 

 

 

Artists evolve: The dangers of creatively typecasting yourself — from 99u.com by Elizabeth Saunders

Excerpt:

It’s a deeply emotional struggle whenever we shift our fundamental “brand” or style of creative output. Picasso, Monet, and all creatives before and since have had to wrestle with the reality that to stay fresh, enthusiastic, and authentic, you have to disrupt yourself.

That takes courage.

In short: You are more than your “brand.” As a living, breathing, developing human being, you don’t need to be ashamed to change. It’s vulnerable to let go of some of the roles you’ve held for a very long time and the persona you’re known for. But it’s also incredibly freeing and an opportunity to truly come alive. Now is the time to be who you are now instead of carrying around the shell of who you once were.

 

 

Editorial Type

 

 

 

 

Illustrator Spotlight: Simón Prades

 

 

 

 

Illustrussia: January 15, 2016 — from designcollector.net

 

 

 

Microlearning: The e-Learning method taking off around the world — from educators.co.nz by Catherine Knowles

Excerpt:

Technology is disrupting traditional learning bringing new methods and tools into educational institutions and businesses.

Microlearning, for instance, has displayed great potential for growth, according to Association Learning + Technology 2016 – a report published by Tagoras and sponsored by YM Learning.

The report looks at the use of technology to enable and enhance learning in the continuing education and professional development market and provides insight into how the role technology plays in learning has and will evolve.

 

In fact, among five emerging types of learning (microlearning, massive open online courses (MOOCs), flipped classes, gamified learning, and microcredentials), microlearning shows the highest rate of adoption – and arguably the greatest potential for growth.

 

 

 

Podcasting is perfect for people with big ideas. Here’s how to do it — from by Todd Landman
Surprisingly few academics have learned how to podcast – but it’s a great way to reach a wider audience

Excerpt:

In the face of conflict in the Middle East, the flow of refugees to Europe and the violence associated with Islamic State and other militants, there has never been a more important time to talk about human rights. And talk about them is what I do – not in a lecture hall or at conferences with academics, but in a podcast series. Let me explain why.

I have worked as a political scientist for 25 years, focusing on human rights problems such as the struggle for citizenship rights in Latin America and the relationship between inequality and human rights violations.

I am part of a wide network of people dedicated to producing sound evidence on human rights, and my work has been communicated through articles, books and reports. But I am limited in my ability to reach the people I would most like to engage and influence – those who do not have an academic understanding of human rights but might benefit from finding out about it.

There is a new breed of academic who understands this and is committed to bridging the gap between academia and the real world. Many blog, actively seek media coverage of their research and appear on radio and television to shed light on the issues of the day.

 

 

From DSC:
Some of the tools that Landman mentioned were:

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  • A MacBook Pro and its free audio editing software GarageBand (for Mac OS X and for iOS)
  • A lapel mic used with his iPhone

 

garageband-jan2016

 

Some other tools to consider:

 

 

From DSC:
The above articles point to the idea — and the need — of creating “streams of content” — something that I wish more professors, teachers, staff, administrators, trainers, and instructional designers would create. Blogs, podcasts, and the use of Twitter come to my mind. Such channels could really help build others’ learning ecosystems.

Many professors and academics — folks who have so much information to share with the world — often produce works just for other academics in their discipline to review/check out. Such bubbles don’t have the impact that would occur if professors created streams of content for members of society to check out and learn from. Such mechanisms would also hopefully strip away some of the more academic sounding language and would get to the point.

 

 

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Also see:

podcastscratch-june2015

 
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