2015SpeakUp

 

Click here to download the PDF of the report.
Click here to view the report in HTML.

 

Also see:

Key findings from [the April 30th, 2015 Project Tomorrow] briefing include — from projecttomorrowblog.blogspot.com

Excerpt (emphasis DSC):

  • When students have access to technology as part of their learning, especially school-provided or enabled technology, their use of the digital tools and resources is deeper and more sophisticated.
  • The availability of online learning continues to increase with only 27 percent of high school principals reporting that they are not yet offering any online courses for students. Interest among students continues to grow, with 24% of high school students saying they wish they could take all their classes online – a large increase from 8% in 2013.
  • Almost three-quarters of students with school-provided devices as well as students with limited or non-existent technology access at school agreed that every student should be able to use a mobile device during the school day for learning.
  • Students connect the use of technology tools within learning to the development of college, career, and citizenship skills that will empower their future capabilities.
  • Digital experiences for students in a 100 percent virtual environment are much different than those in traditional schools. For instance, 72 percent of high school students in virtual schools take online tests, compared with 58 percent of traditional students.
  • Students see the smartphone as the ideal device for communicating with teachers (46%) and classmates (72%) and for social media (64%).
  • A gender bias exists in STEM interest –middle school girls are 38% less likely and high school girls are 32% less likely than their male peers to say they are very interested in a STEM career.

 

Excerpt from Press Release (emphasis DSC):

Students Report Digital Learning Supports Goals of Self-Directed and Collaborative Education, National Survey Finds
Nearly 60 Percent of High School Students Report Using Their Own Mobile Devices in School for Learning
Report Explores Differences Among Students in Blended Learning, Online Learning, STEM Learning and School-Sponsored Mobile Device Environments

Washington, D.C. – The ultimate learning experience for students is both highly collaborative and extremely personalized, supported by mobile devices and digital content, reports Project Tomorrow in their latest Speak Up report.

Over the last few years of the Speak Up survey, more students and administrators have signaled the importance of being able to access mobile devices in the classroom, whether through Bring Your Own Device policy consideration and implementation or through school-provided technology. This year, nearly half of teachers (47 percent) said their students have regular access to mobile devices in their classrooms. Among high school students, 58 percent said they now use their own mobile device at school to support learning activities.

 

From DSC:
This is a great pulse check on students’ use of ed tech — and on some things that they might be coming to expect.

 

Here’s how you build an augmented reality game for HoloLens — from theverge.com by Adi Robertson

Excerpt:

Programming a hologram sounds like something that should be done with some kind of special cybergloves on a computer the size of a ‘60s IBM mainframe. But at Build 2015, Microsoft has been quietly taking developers through the “Holographic Academy,” a 90-minute training session that teaches them the basics of building projects for its HoloLens augmented reality headset. I’m not a developer, but Microsoft let me and some other journalists go through it as well — and it turns out that basic hologram creation is, if not exactly straightforward, at least pretty understandable.

 

From DSC:
Will designing learning-related games for augmented reality and virtual reality become an area of specialty within Instructional Design? Within Programming/Computer Studies-related programs? Within Human Computer Interface design programs or User Experience Design programs?  Will we need a team-based approach to deliver such products and services?

I wonder how one would go about getting trained in this area in the future if you wanted to create games for education or for the corporate training/L&D world? Will institutions of higher education respond to this sort of emerging opportunity or will we leave it up to the bootcamps/etc. to offer?

 

 

Also see:

 

P90178908_highRes

 

 

Also see:

  • New Demo of Microsoft HoloLens Unveils the Future of Holographic Computing — from seriouswonder.com by B.J. Murphy
    Excerpt:
    What happens when you combine holographic technology with augmented reality and the Internet of Things (IoT)? Well, it would appear that you’ll soon be getting a hands-on experience of just that, all thanks to the Microsoft HoloLens. At the Build Developers Conference, Microsoft had unveiled the HoloLens and shocked the world on just how far we’ve come in developing legitimate, functional augmented reality and holographic computing.

 

future-hololens

 
 

Preparing for the Digital University: A review of the history & current state of distance, blended, & online learning - Siemens, Gasevic, Dawson

 

 Excerpt:

It is our intent that these reports will serve to introduce academics, administrators, and students to the rich history of technology in education with a particular emphasis of the importance of the human factors: social interaction, well-designed learning experiences, participatory pedagogy, supportive teaching presence, and effective techniques for using technology to support learning.

The world is digitizing and higher education is not immune to this transition. The trend is well underway and seems to be accelerating as top universities create departments and senior leadership positions to explore processes of innovation within the academy. It is our somewhat axiomatic assessment that in order to understand how we should design and develop learning for the future, we need to first take a look at what we already know. Any scientific enterprise that runs forward on only new technology, ignoring the landscape of existing knowledge, will be sub-optimal and likely fail. To build a strong future of digital learning in the academy, we must first take stock of what we know and what has been well researched.

During the process of completing this report, it became clear to us that a society or academic organization is required to facilitate the advancement and adoption of digital learning research. Important areas in need of exploration include faculty development, organizational change, innovative practices and new institutional models, effectiveness of teaching and learning activities, the student experience, increasing success for all students, and state and provincial policies, strategies, and funding models. To address this need, we invite interested academics, administrators, government and industry to contact us to discuss the formation of an organization to advocate for a collaborative and research informed approach to digital learning.

February 2015
George Siemens
Dragan Gasevic
Shane Dawson

 

From DSC:
First of all, I saw the following article:

Globe Theatre launch new augmented reality app — from standard.co.uk by Anna Davis
Take a look at Shakespeare’s theatre wherever you are

Excerpt (emphasis DSC):

A new “augmented reality” app will allow children from across the world to stand inside Shakespeare’s Globe theatre in Southwark.

The free app, released to mark the Bard’s 451st birthday, lets users create a 3D version of the theatre in the palm of their hands and explore inside.

It is one of the first uses of the latest augmented reality technology for schools and the first app of its kind created by a theatre.

 

GlobeTheatre-AR-App-April2015

 

From DSC:
The article got me to thinking…it made me wonder about taking things a step further with the application of augmented reality (AR) as it pertains to the theatre. 

Pretend that you are at a play or an opera. You could turn your mobile device towards the stage and zoom in on various objects, people, places.  Image/object/facial recognition software could allow you to get more information about who is on stage at any given time (I’m not a fan of facial recognition, but this might be an exception for me). 

Perhaps such an app could even provide language translation for you. Listening to an aria in Italian but want to know what the words are?  Who is that villain over there in the corner of the stage and what’s his role in this story? What village or town is this act in? What’s the year?

Or perhaps one could find “Easter Eggs” within the app that might unlock further meaning for the story.

Hmm….very interesting indeed.

 

 

 

 

From DSC:
What applications and implications might this type of setup mean for libraries? For classrooms?


 

PressPad Lounge: new digital press corner that utilizes iBeacon technology — from talkingnewmedia.com by D.B. Hebbard

Excerpt:

The idea behind PressPad Lounge is that the service allows a business to turn a space into a reading zone, allowing those with mobile devices to access digital publications for free.

 

PPLounge-1

 

Also see:
PressPad-April2015

Excerpt:

With PressPad Lounge, people visiting your venue are able to install the magazine app of their choice, and read every issue for free while remaining PHYSICALLY within your venue.

Whether it’s a hotel lobby, a shopping mall, restaurant or a booth, PressPad Lounge enables a slick marriage of digital publishing with location marketing. People located within the range of the reading zone will be able to read magazines on their mobile devices, for free.

 

FutureDigitalLearningDede-Adobe-April2015

 

From DSC:
Chris uses ecoMOBILE and ecoMUVE to highlight the powerful partnerships that can exist between tools and teachers — to the benefits of the students, who can enjoy personalized learning that they can interact with.  Pedagogical approaches such as active learning are discussed and methods of implementing active learning are touched upon.

Chris pointed out the National Research Council’s book from 2012 entitled, “Education for Life and Work: Developing Transferable Knowledge & Skills in the 21st Century” as he spoke about the need for all of us to be engaged in lifelong learning (Chris uses the term “life-wide” learning).

Also, as Chris mentioned, we often teach as we were taught…so we need communities that are able to UNlearn as well as to learn.

 

 

ecomobile-april2015

 

Also see:

 

AdobeCreate-YouTubeChannel

 

 

New from Educause:
Higher Ed IT Buyers Guide

 

HEITBuyersGuideEducauseApril2015

 

Excerpt:

Quickly search 50+ product and service categories, access thousands of IT solutions specific to the higher ed community, and send multiple RFPs—all in one place. This new Buyers Guide provides a central, go-to online resource for supporting your key purchasing decisions as they relate to your campus’s strategic IT initiatives.

Find the Right Vendors for Higher Education’s Top Strategic Technologies

Three of the Top 10 Strategic Technologies identified by the higher education community this year are mobile computing, business intelligence, and business performance analytics.* The new Buyers Guide connects you to many of the IT vendors your campus can partner with in the following categories related to these leading technologies, as well as many more.

View all 50+ product and service categories.

 

DeptOfEdTech2-GuideApril2015

Excerpt from the tech.ed.gov/developers/ page:

For Developers
Excellent opportunities exist for software designers and developers who want to use their talents to create impactful tools for teachers, school leaders, students, and their families. Our goal is to connect you to the resources needed throughout the cycle of a project – from concept ideation, to generating seed funding, to research and development and evaluation, and ultimately to scalable impact in education.

 

I originally saw this at “Ed tech must do more to ‘advance equity,’ U.S. Secretary of Education says” — from hechingerreport.org by Nichole Dobo

Excerpt:

SCOTTSDALE, Arizona—The U.S. Department of Education unveiled a new education technology developer’s guide [on 4/7/15] during the annual ASU+GSV Summit conference here.

In remarks at the conference, U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan urged developers to consider the needs of disadvantaged students, so that they are not left behind as more schools adopt new tools that advance teaching and learning.

“If the technology revolution only happens for families that already have money and education, then it’s not really a revolution,” Duncan said.

Duncan announced the developer’s guide during a speech at the ASU+GSV Summit, , a gathering of about 2,500 people interested in innovation in education. The free guide, available for download at tech.ed.gov/developers, is the result of two years of research by Department of Education officials, who interviewed educators, entrepreneurs, parents and students. Its goal is to help technology developers better understand the key needs of the nation’s school system. It identifies 10 “persistent problems in education,” among them increasing family engagement, improving professional development for teachers, creating tests that accurately measure what students have learned, and closing achievement gaps.

 

 

TeachingInADigitalAge-TonyBates-April2015

Teaching in a Digital Age
A.W. (Tony) Bates
Guidelines for designing teaching and learning for a digital age

The book examines the underlying principles that guide effective teaching in an age when everyone, and in particular the students we are teaching, are using technology.  A framework for making decisions about your teaching is provided, while understanding that every subject is different, and every instructor has something unique and special to bring to their teaching. The book enables teachers and instructors to help students develop the knowledge and skills they will need in a digital age: not so much the IT skills, but the thinking and attitudes to learning that will bring them success.

 

As Tony mentions here, his intended audience is primarily:

  • college and university instructors anxious to improve their teaching or facing major challenges in the classroom,
  • school teachers, particularly in secondary or high schools anxious to ensure their students are ready for either post-secondary education or a rapidly changing and highly uncertain job market.

 

An example chapter:
Chapter 7: Pedagogical differences between media

 

 

 

Augmented Reality can be a reality in your art classroom — from theartofed.com

Excerpt:

Last fall, I attended a technology conference where I went to a session on augmented reality technology (AR) and how it can be used in the classroom. I was blown away by the possibilities of this tech concept and its ability to modify our students’ current reality into a compelling, virtual experience of interactive information.

AR in your Art Classroom
There are dozens of AR apps, programs and resources out there that can help encourage curiosity and inspire critical thinking and intense creativity in your students. Here are a few augmented reality options that you can start infusing into your art curriculum.

Aurasma

ARPhoto#2

 

 

Jaunt VR wants to (virtually) change the way we travel — from cntraveler.com
Gaming is just the beginning. The real future of virtual reality lies in hacking the global travel experience.

 

 

52 of the best apps for your classroom in 2015 — from list.ly by Terry Heick

 

 

Adobe’s Slate is  a [new] visual storytelling app for the iPad — from techcrunch.com; also an article at CampusTechnology.com on this app

 

 

The top 50 apps for creative minds — from theguardian.com
Our pick of the best tablet and smartphone tools to enable you to make video, music, art and more

 

[Microsoft’s] Sway is now collaborative—create and edit together with others!

Excerpt:

When we announced Sway, we knew that people would want to work on standout class projects, eye-catching business reports, engaging vacation recaps, or more, together—it’s the way things are done now, right? But Sway up until now has been a tool for individual authors to create polished content in a new and interactive way to share with their audiences. However, we know you’ve asked for shared editing in Sway in our feedback channels (such as UserVoice), and that Office has delivered real-time editing and collaboration features for years, allowing people to work together to share their collective ideas. On top of that, we can’t tell you how many times that we on the Sway team have said to each other, “I wish I could work on this Sway with you!” So now we’re rolling out co-authoring in Sway!

 

Microsoft debuts Office Lens, a document-scanning app for iOS and Android — from techcrunch.com by Sarah Perez

Excerpt:

Microsoft [on 4/2/15] launched Office Lens, a mobile document scanner app that works with OneNote, for iOS and Android smartphones. The app, which allows users to snap photos of paper documents, receipts, business cards, menus, whiteboards, sticky notes and more, was first launched a year ago as an application designed only for Windows Phone devices.

 

 

5 free (or low cost) tools for Flipped Learning— from Campus Technology’s April/May 2015 edition

  • Doceri
  • Explain Everything
  • Office Mix
  • Screencast-O-Matic
  • Verso

 

 

AppStudio for ArcGIS — with thanks to Dr. Jason Van Horn (Associate Professor Geology, Geography & Env Studies at Calvin College) for this resource
Your mobile mapping apps, built in a snap

Excerpt:

AppStudio for ArcGIS is a groundbreaking tool in the GIS app revolution. It lets you convert your maps into beautiful, consumer-friendly mobile apps ready for Android, iOS, Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux, and publish them using your own brand to all popular app stores – no developer skills required.

 

 

Moodle Mobile 2 is coming: updated look and feel of the application, transition to Ionic Framework — from moodlenews.com

Excerpt:

A few weeks ago Juan Leyva introduced a demo site for Moodlers to check out the 2nd version of Moodle Mobile the ever improving official mobile application for the learning management system. The major changes include a shift to Ionic framework which will greatly enhance the developers’ ability to focus on new features development.

 

 

Some of the best storytelling apps for elementary students — from educatorstechnology.com

Excerpt:

The apps below are particularly useful for elementary students but they can also be used with other age groups. Elementary teachers often complain about the paucity of apps that are kids appropriate compared with apps for other age groups. So we thought it would be useful to create a section in this blog devoted entirely to apps specifically curated for elementary teachers. After we have covered math and writing apps, today’s post features some very good iPad storytelling apps to use with young kids. You can use these apps to help kids develop a wide range of basic literacy skills that include: writing, reading and speaking.

 

 

5 great writing apps for elementary students — from educatorstechnology.com

Excerpt:

The selection we curated for you today contains some  useful iPad apps to use with elementary students to help them with their writing. Some the things your kids will get to learn from these apps include: learning how to write letters, learning phonics and spelling, composing syllables by combining vowels and consonants, and several other basic literacy skills. Some of these apps also include tracking features which allow teachers and parents to keep updated about the progress of their kids.

 

Addendum on 4/8/15:

Addendum on 4/9/15:

Addendums on 4/13:15:

  • Six ways to make movies on a smartphone — from quib.ly by Laura Celada
    Excerpt:

    Have you tried using mobile devices to make movies? Film-making is such a great way for your children to express themselves and nurture their creativity and imagination. We’ve selected the most powerful apps and programs that can even the least techy kids become creative moviemakers.
    None of these require any special equipment, just a tablet or a smartphone. Children can take videos, edit their work and make professional quality movies on the go. Check out the list below and bring out the Spielberg in them. Maybe next year you and your little thinker might be walking down the red carpet…
    .
  • Nice for Every Device: 15 Tech-Agnostic Tools — from edsurge.com
    Posting included tools for:
    Student Response Systems
    Student Collaboration Activities
    English Language Arts/Social Studies
    Math/Science
  • 80 Twitter Tools for Almost Everything — from hongkiat.com

 

 

From DSC:
A vision for some edupreneurs out there:

Please create a system whereby machine-to-machine (M2M) communications would be used to detect and display the names and majors of students within a given classroom — complete with the photos of those students that are actually there at that particular time in a face-to-face classroom setting. 

The data from that information gathering would be sent to a holographic image that the professor could make larger or smaller. The professor could use gesturing to point to a given student to ask them a question. Once that student has been asked a question, the color around that student is changed to reflect that the professor has already called upon them recently. (The setting that controls how long this “who’s-been-questioned-recently” information is maintained could be cleared every X minutes/hours/days.)

For more introverted students, they could choose to use their own device to broadcast their answer to a digital/online-based means vs. answering verbally in front of 50-200 other students.

 

 

 

 

MIT study shows how educational videos could be better — from bostinno.streetwise.co by Clinton Nguyen

Excerpt:

Subgoal labeling turned out to be a big success for users, and that mode of thinking transferred to newer tasks beyond the initial one.

“Immediately [after the first task], we asked people to attempt another problem, and we found that the people who got the subgoal labels attempted more steps and got them right more often, and they also took less time,” said Mark Guzdial, a professor at Georgia Tech who’s who’s had a hand in similar research for the past five years.

“When we asked them to try a new problem that they’d never seen before, 50 percent of the subgoal people did it correctly, and less than 10 percent of the people who didn’t get subgoals did that correctly,” he said.

 

 

Tips for choosing and using educational videos in your classroom — from edtechreview.in by Prasanna Bharti

Excerpt:

No matter if you are an expert of technology or novice, there are a lot of ways by which you can use technology easily in teaching to make lecture more interesting and engaging, one of the best way is to use educational videos. However, you need to be thoughtful before choosing and using them.

 

Items on Meerkat* and Periscope*

Hashtag automatically uploads users’ Meerkat* posts to YouTube — from springwise.com
Meerkat users can now add #Katch to their Twitter posts and the service will automatically record their livestreams and post them on YouTube.

Excerpt:

One of the major successes of this month’s SXSW festival was Meerkat — a live streaming app which enables users to create and broadcast video footage in the moment. Videos are shared with the world, live, via the user’s own Twitter account, before disappearing forever into the ether of internet-past. That was until hacker Tarikh Korula launched #Katch, a simple hashtag which enables Meerkat users to auto upload their livestreams to YouTube, immortalizing them forever.

 

Want to save Meerkat* videos to YouTube? Katch’s hashtag wants to help — from mashable.com by Adario Strange

 

Twitter launches its own live video streaming app, Periscope — from talkingnewmedia.com by D.B. Hebbard
Periscope, which streams live video to your Twitter feed, launches a couple weeks after competitor Meerkat entered the App Store

* Meerkat and Periscope are tools to Tweet live video

 

periscope-march2015

 

 

Sharing TV Clips Socially (and Legally) with Whipclip — from adweek.com by Adam Flomenbaum

Excerpt (emphasis DSC):

Whipclip – an app that lets viewers splice and share (legally) TV clips – has launched today, and has secured partnerships with major broadcast networks, including Comedy Central, ABC, CBS, FOX, VH1, A&E and Lifetime, Bloomberg, OWN and truTV. In December, we wrote about the company raising $20 million to launch the service.

“The days of awkwardly holding your phone up to the TV to record and share your favorite moments may be coming to an end. Whipclip enables users to find and create their favorite TV and music clips and share them intimately with their closest friends or broadly across their entire social network,” said Richard Rosenblatt, co-founder, Chairman and CEO of Whipclip. “Not only benefitting the users but also providing the content owners with a viral user driven method to find new audiences.”

* From DSC:
What if we were talking about lectures on the TV…
what new affordances might there be?

 

 

Wipster and Adobe Voice — from markdubois.info by Mark DuBois

Excerpt:

I have been experimenting with the Wipster application for a few weeks. Essentially, this is a site where you post a video for others to review and approve. They can add comments in the video (as it plays). Although the service is not free, I am finding this to be very helpful for work I am doing with our student chapter of Web Professionals as well as within various courses I teach. What I find most beneficial is the use of Adobe Voice to generate short videos on a topic and then seek feedback via Wipster.

 

 

Also, though this isn’t just about video, I’m going to include it here anyway:

Sharing our inspiration from the Learning Technologies conference with links to all our liveblogs — from joitskehulsebosch.blogspot.com

Excerpt:

Sibrenne and myself arrived last Friday at Rotterdam airport with a head full of inspiration from the Learning Technologies conference and fresh air from our walk along the Thames. In this blogpost we compile some reflections and provide links to all our liveblogs, so that you may choose which ones to read. Something which struck us when we reflected on all different sessions.

If you’d like to read our liveblogs, choose one or several of the 13 liveblogs below:

 

 

Addendum on 3/29/15:

 
 

NHL-VirtualReality-WatchFromAnySeat-3-14-15

Excerpt:

AUSTIN, TX – Virtual reality is featured prominently at South By Southwest Sports this year, from using it to better train athletes with Oculus Rift to how it could transform the fan experience watching basketball, football and hockey at home.

The NHL had its first successful test of a 360-degree virtual reality experience at its Stadium Series game between the San Jose Sharks and Los Angeles Kings last month, mounting cameras around the glass that filmed HD images in the round.

 

 

NBA-VirtualReality-WatchFromAnySeat-3-14-15

Excerpt:

When basketball lovers aren’t able to trek to stadiums near and far to follow their favorite teams, it’s possible that watching games on a bar’s widescreen TV from behind bowls of wings is the next best thing. This may no longer be true, however, as a wave of court-side, 3D virtual game experiences is becoming available to superfans with Oculus gear.

Earlier this month, NextVR showed off its new enhanced spectator experiences at the 2015 NBA All-Star Technology Summit with virtual reality (VR) footage of an October 2014 Miami Heat and Cleveland Cavaliers match-up in Rio de Janeiro. The NBA also already announced plans to record VR sessions of the NBA All-Star Game, the Foot Locker Three-Point Contest, and the Sprite Slam Dunk event and practice.

 

NEXTVR-March2015

 

 

OculusRift-InSportsSXSW-2015

 

 

 

From DSC:
In the future, will you be able to “pull up a seat” at any lecture — throughout the globe — that you want to?

 

 



 

Alternatively, another experiment might relate to second screening lectures — i.e., listening to the lecture on the main/large screen — in your home or office — and employing social-based learning/networking going on via a mobile device.

Consider this article:

TV-friendly social network Twitter is testing a new Social TV service on iPhones which provides users with content and interaction about only one TV show at a time.

The aim is to give users significantly better engagement with their favourite shows than they presently experience when they follow a live broadcast via a Twitter hashtag.

This radical innovation in Social TV design effectively curates just relevant content (screening out irrelevant tweets that use a show’s hashtag) and presents it in an easy-to-use interface.

If successful, the TV Timeline feature will better position Twitter as it competes with Facebook to partner with the television industry and tap advertising revenue related to TV programming.

 
© 2025 | Daniel Christian