Archive for the ‘Education’ Category
OpenEMIS – Open Source Education Management Information System
UNESCO launched a new version of OpenEMIS, a generic and open source Education Management Information System software package issued without conditions or restrictions for use by countries. Able to run offline on desktop computers or on the web and on mobile devises, OpenEMIS facilitates the collection, processing, analysis and supports the dissemination of data on education systems. It is a tool conceived to be easily and quickly adapted to the needs of information producers and users at national and sub-national levels. It manages a broad range of information: data on student enrolment, teachers, non-teaching staff, classes, textbooks, infrastructure, finances and learning outcomes. In order to meet country requirements, OpenEMIS can handle both individual and aggregated (census) datasets for pupils, teachers and non-teaching staff.
Now You See It: How the Brain Science of Attention Will Transform the Way We Live, Work, and Learn
A brilliant combination of science and its real-world application, Now You See It sheds light on one of the greatest problems of our historical moment: our schools and businesses are designed for the last century, not for a world in which technology has reshaped the way we think and learn. In this informed and optimistic work, Cathy N. Davidson takes us on a tour of the future of work and education, introducing us to visionaries whose groundbreaking ideas will soon affect every arena of our lives, from schools with curriculums built around video games to workplaces that use virtual environments to train employees.
Education Needs a Digital-Age Upgrade
The contemporary classroom, with its grades and deference to the clock, is an inheritance from the late 19th century. During that period of titanic change, machines suddenly needed to run on time. Individual workers needed to willingly perform discrete operations as opposed to whole jobs. The industrial-era classroom, as a training ground for future factory workers, was retooled to teach tasks, obedience, hierarchy and schedules.
That curriculum represented a dramatic departure from earlier approaches to education. In “Now You See It,” Ms. Davidson cites the elite Socratic system of questions and answers, the agrarian method of problem-solving and the apprenticeship program of imitating a master. It’s possible that any of these educational approaches would be more appropriate to the digital era than the one we have now.
Read also: Now You See It: How the Brain Science of Attention Will Transform the Way We Live, Work, and Learn
Google+ Communities in Education
Educators are flocking to Google+ for news and interaction, and many of them are joining communities in education. Whether you’re interested in educational technology, free online courses, or the future of learning, there’s something out there for you. Check out our list to find some of our favorite up and coming Google+ communities in education.
The World Is Open: How Web Technology Is Revolutionizing Education
Technological development and the Internet have opened up learning to the point where anyone can learn anything from anyone else at any time. To help explain this highly complex situation and its implications for education, both formal and informal, Curtis J. Bonk outlines ten key technology and learning trends. Using a model called “WE-ALL-LEARN,” Dr. Bonk shows how technology has transformed educational opportunities for learners as well as of innovators from the worlds of technology and education that reveal the power of opening up the world of learning.
The 10 openers of the WE-ALL-LEARN model are outlined below. They are discussed in detail in Chapters 2-11. The Introduction plus Chapter 1 kick off the journey into the Web of Learning and unveils the WE-ALL-LEARN model. Chapter 12 recaps the book and push toward future visions as well as reflect on the past century of distance learning.
Read also: The World Is Open Blog
A radical manifesto for teaching computing
The biggest justification for change is not economic but moral. It is that if we don’t act now we will be short-changing our children. They live in a world that is shaped by physics, chemistry, biology and history, and so we – rightly – want them to understand these things. But their world will be also shaped and configured by networked computing and if they don’t have a deeper understanding of this stuff then they will effectively be intellectually crippled. They will grow up as passive consumers of closed devices and services, leading lives that are increasingly circumscribed by technologies created by elites working for huge corporations such as Google, Facebook and the like. We will, in effect, be breeding generations of hamsters for the glittering wheels of cages built by Mark Zuckerberg and his kind.
Education for a Digital World – Advice, Guidelines, and Effective Practice from Around the Globe
Education for a Digital World contains a comprehensive collection of proven strategies and tools for effective online teaching, based on the principles of learning as a social process. It offers practical, contemporary guidance to support e-learning decision-making, instructional choices, as well as program and course planning, and development.
Practical advice, real-life examples, case studies, and useful resources supply in-depth perspectives about structuring and fostering socially engaging learning in an online environment. A plethora of e-learning topics provide insights, ideas, and usable tools. Tips and evidence-based theory guide administrators, program and course developers, project teams, and teachers through the development of online learning opportunities.
A Selection of Education Apps
There are plenty of apps you can use in education. There are even apps created specifically for use in education. Apple has a whole category dedicated to education in the App store. But how do you really know which ones are worth downloading, or possibly even paying for? TCEA (Texas Computer Education Association) to the rescue! TCEA regularly tests available apps and recommends apps that teachers should be using. TCEA maintains a list of recommended apps in a shared document via Google Docs. The list is organized by subject area and free apps are color coded in white.
Toward Peeragogy
Here, in a continuing series, Howard Rheingold reflects on his ongoing experiment in high-end, peer-to-peer, global learning via the internet and social networks.
The more I give my teacher-power to students and encourage them to take more responsibility for their own learning, the more they show me how to redesign my ways of teaching.
At the end of the first course I taught solo, I asked students for their frank opinions of what was working and what could work better. I didn’t want to wait for anonymous evaluations, which don’t afford dialogue or collaboration. The first pushback was a strong request for more project-based collaboration, shared earlier in the semester. The first year I tried this, we discovered that four students work better than six for a semester-long project — division of labor, intra-group communication, assessment, and the nature of the final presentation rapidly grow more complex with more than four collaborators. When teams presented their projects at the end of the term, we were all so astounded that one student astutely asked (to general acclamation): “Why can’t we show each other this kind of collaboration earlier than the last class meeting?” We had learned that learning to collaborate ought to be collaborative — the teams should interact with the other students in the class as co-responsible learners during the collaboration process, not just as an audience for the final product.
Technology for Education and Learning
Latest research on Technology for Learning and Education. Results of the 2012 International Conference on Technology for Education and Learning (ICTEL 2012). Written by leading experts in the field.
This volume contains 108 papers presented at the international conference on Technology for Education and Learning (ICTET 2012), Macau, China , March 1-2, 2012, which is to bring together researchers working in many different areas of education and learning to foster international collaborations and exchange of new ideas.
This volume can be divided into two sections on the basis of the classification of manuscripts considered. The first section deals with technology for education. The second section of this volume consists of technology for learning.
