Blog Juice for Educational Technology

Minnesota school districts are receiving $55 million in vouchers that can be used for technology equipment and software resulting from Minnesota’s settlement with Microsoft. The vouchers were mailed to school districts and charter schools on January 27, 2006. Details can be found at the Minnesota Department of Education at http://www.education.state.mn.us….

Black history teaching resources are featured this month at FREE. See first person accounts of slavery and photos of former slaves. Learn about abolitionists, the Civil War, western migration, Jim Crow, the church in Southern black communities, and Brown v. Board of Education. Read about Martin Luther King, Jr., Frederick Douglass, Jackie Robinson, Booker T. Washington, George Washington Carver, the Tuskegee Airmen, Ralph Bunche, Madam C.J. Walker, J.C. Penney, and the 369th Infantry.

I’m at the ELI conference in San Diego and have been learning both from my peers and from the various presentations about how the world has changed within the world of learning technology. There are three different areas that I’d like to comment …

President Bush said he will speak about his education plans in tonight’s State of the Union address. One education topic that is a strong contender to be included tonight is the country’s math and science quandary. The lack of certified science and math teachers is a growing problem for schools around the nation, particularly those in poor neighborhoods. Lawmakers in Washington are proposing to spend billions over the next several years to encourage more teachers to enter those subject fields, USA Today reports.

The lack of quality math teachers has become a crisis in Los Angeles public schools, especially after the school district approved new graduation requirements included algebra and geometry. The state of California followed in 2004 by requiring algebra statewide. But too many kids are failing those classes, the L.A. Times reports.

Maybe in a few decades, we will be hearing a State of the Union address from this guy.

A new survey of teachers and instructors at the high school and post-secondary levels has found that students who excel in the use of information and communications technology (ICT) are driving change in classroom instru…

I will be speaking at a state conference in April that will be held on the campus of a major university. The entire conference facility will have robust wireless access to the Internet, and the conference planners want to utilize the heck out of it.
A number of edublogerati have talked about how […]

There has been a long exchange on the TechLearning Blog page, that began with my Letter from the Principal post, apologizing for failing to prepare children for the 21st century. I posted a second blog on TechLearning yesterday, posing several essential questions behind education reform.
T&L Blogerati, Terry Freedman commented on that post asking

…so what […]

WOODRIDGE, Illinois Nurturing diverse learners is the goal at Goodrich School, where more than 400 elementary students speak some 41 languages. Fourth-grade teacher Denise Trabilsy sees herself as a “guide on the side,”…

As Moore’s Law works its seemingly inexhaustible magic, more and more (no pun intended) computing power can be crammed into smaller and smaller spaces. One result? The pen as computer. We’re not talking about handheld computers or tablet PCs, in which the

Study: Wikipedia as accurate as Britannica–at least on science. Nature conducted a side-by-side comparison of articles in covering a broad swath of the scientific spectrum . Wikipedia and other reference sites that allow users to submit and edit content

Perhaps you, gentle user, are looking for an insightful and contemplative 45-minute talk on Beethoven? Maybe you would like to learn more about the nature of Cold War realpolitik? Fortunately, the Library of Congress’s Webcasts website has these topics we

That’s what I heard today, from a chorus of twenty 6th graders, all eager to show me the Internal Error 500 message that was on their screens.
I was trying to get them all setup with their own accounts on the Flash Card Machine. After registering, the user has to activate their account by clicking a […]

Pupils in an East London school have been banned from raising their hands to answer questions in class because their teachers fear it leads to feelings of victimization, reports the London Telegraph.

While they hogged the limelight, the most able pupils often did not volunteer answers for fear of being labelled as “swots,” which is British slang for students who study excessively.

“There are others who never put up their hands because they have decided that they do not do that bit of the lesson, so they stop listening,” Mr. Buck said. “If you don’t use hands up, the pupils don’t know who you are going to choose, and they all have to think about the question.”

Mick Brookes, the general secretary of the National Association of Head Teachers, said it was the first time he had heard of such a policy.

“The habit will be hard to break, but when you listen to what the head [teacher] says, there may be method in what at first appears to be madness.”

We can only hope.