Abilene Christian U supports teachers through Digital Learning Institute — from convergemag.com by Tanya Roscorla
Excerpt:
This summer, Abilene Christian University in Texas hosted its first K-12 Digital Learning Institute for teachers. And this school year, the university will observe teachers’ lessons as they apply what they learned about mobile technology to their classes.
Translate between languages with SpeechTrans Ultimate for iPhone, iPad — from tipb.com by Leanna Lofte
SpeechTrans Ultimate is a translating app powered by Nuance. It knows 13 different languages and has speech recognition for many of them. One of the new features is Facebook chat with Speech Input and Voice Translation Output.
Near Field Communication (NFC): A Quick Guide to the Future of Mobile — from Mashable.by Sarah Kessler
Excerpt:
NFC allows a device, usually a mobile phone, to collect data from another device or NFC tag at close range. In many ways, it’s like a contactless payment card that is integrated into a phone. In other ways, it’s similar to Bluetooth, except that instead of programming two devices to work together, they can simply touch to establish a connection.
So why are some of the world’s most influential companies so excited about it? We’ve compiled notes on what NFC is, why its useful and how it’s starting to permeate the product world.
Also see:
MIT launches Center for Mobile Learning with support from Google — from readwriteweb.com by Jon Mitchell
Excerpt:
The Massachusetts Institute of Technology has announced the creation of a new Center for Mobile Learning. The center will be housed at the MIT Media Lab. Google supported the creation of the center with a grant from Google University Relations. The center’s first project will be the adoption and further development of App Inventor for Android, a do-it-yourself tool for building apps for Google’s Android mobile OS with no programming skills required.
From the announcement
The Center, housed at the Media Lab, will focus on the design and study of new mobile technologies and applications, enabling people to learn anywhere anytime with anyone. Research projects will explore location-aware learning applications, mobile sensing and data collection, augmented reality gaming, and other educational uses of mobile technologies.
Stanford researchers designed software that allows a viewer to zoom and pan while streaming online courses. They recently released the code to the public.
Anywhere, Anyplace, Anytime: Mobile Learning on the Rise — from Knewton
Your new campus guide: A small patterned square that talks to your smartphone — from The Chronicle by Jie Jenny Zou
Cross platform mobile app development — from Tribal Labs (UK) by Geoff Stead
A review and comparison of the top tools for true cross platform app development
Storytelling gets an upgrade: Beyond tactile stories — from digitalbookworld.com by J.C. Hutchins, novelist and transmedia storyteller
Excerpt:
Over the course of my two previous pieces on storytelling upgrades, I showed how tactile and kinetic features native to the iPad can be linked to traditional narrative devices, such as foreshadowing. However, where it gets really exciting is how the device can unlock a deeply interactive and immersive environment in which the “reader” is an integral part of a nonlinear story—all narrative features that cannot be rendered in print.
Up to now, I had been focusing on the tactile and kinetic, but there are dozens of ways exist to leverage the iPad’s other built-in features, including…
Also see:
StoryWorld Conference + Expo is a timely event for:
Per Nicola Santiago at Punflay:
Side reflection from DSC:
This type of work shows the power of using teams of specialists. One person can’t do it all anymore — we need to face up to this fact and stop thinking that simply providing more professional development is the answer. I realize that using textbooks brings in teams of specialists — but it seems to me that we still think that simply by providing more professional development, our teachers and professors will be able to meet the constantly (and quickly) rising bar. That type of approach has outlived its usefulness and it just won’t cut it anymore; we do our students a major disservice by clinging to that outdated, status-quo-based model.
How can we move to using more teams of specialists to create and deliver our educational materials?
Nice work to the teams at Punflay in India!
From DSC:
I originally saw this at The Educational Technology Guy blog
A mobile learning platform matrix — InsideHigherEd.com by Joshua Kim
From DSC:
Joshua give us the pros, cons, costs and considerations of several options.
