Blog Juice for Educational Technology

MIT’s Nicholas Negroponte and associates continue to stay on course to provide a $100 laptop to the world’s children. Here’s the latest: The first prototype will be shown on November 17 at the World Summit on the Information Society in Tunis. By 2007, the target is to be shipping 150…

The May/June 2005 issue of Foreign Affairs includes an article by Thomas Bleha titled "Down to the Wire". In it he illustrates how the US has fallen so far so fast in the broadband race and the impact on the nation’s economy, including education. Bleha’s summary: "Once a leader in…

Mainichi Daily News reports that Tokyo’s Shinagawa-ku ward (a large neighborhood in the city of Tokyo) is preparing to equip all 12,000 elementary school students with special cellphones that allow them to call two different numbers in addition to providing access to emergency services by pulling a pin on the…

The Boston Globe reported on May 28 that the Boston Public Schools no longer allow students to use Yahoo, Hotmail, or other personal Web-based accounts from school. The action was taken after four incidents of students using school computers to e-mail threats, hit lists, and pornography to other students and…

CmapTools has been updated to v3.8. The release was accompanied by a story from the Associated Press that appeared in The Boston Globe. CmapTools is a freely available, open source mind-mapping tool developed at the Florida-based Institute for Human and Machine Cognition (IHMC) with funding provided by NASA and the…

MIT’s $100 laptop initiative launched a website on March 5, 2005. The site brings together all the current news on the project in a Q & A format. A sample: What can a $1000 laptop do that the $100 version can’t?Not much. The plan is for the $100 Laptop to…

Wired News has a piece profiling the use of interactive whiteboards at Columbia University’s privately-run elementary school. Presenting a utopian view of this technology, the article quotes Nancy Knowlton, president of Smart Technologies, the leading manufacturer of interactive whiteboards: "My speculation is over the next three to five years you’ll…