Nassau BOCESDepartment of Curriculum, Instruction and Technology

In this poignant, funny follow-up to his fabled 2006 talk, Sir Ken Robinson makes the case for a radical shift from standardized schools to personalized learning — creating conditions where kids’ natural talents can flourish.

ZooBurst is a digital storytelling tool that is designed to let anyone easily create their own customized 3D pop-up books. Using ZooBurst, storytellers of any age can create their own rich worlds in which their stories can come to life.

ZooBurst books are completely web-based and can be experienced using nothing more than your browser outfitted with the Adobe Flash plug-in. Books can be inspected from any angle from with a 3D space, and rotating around a book is as easy as dragging and dropping your mouse. In addition, the author of a book can choose to make items “clickable,” allowing you to learn more about individual characters within a story. You can choose to experience a ZooBurst book in a number of ways, including in Augmented Reality. If you have a webcam installed on your computer simply click on the ‘Augmented Reality’ button at the top of the screen and watch as the book appears in the palm of your hand!

Sign up for an account and check out this exciting resource here: http://alpha.zooburst.com/index.php

The Horizon Report series is an ongoing research effort established in 2002 that identifies and describes emerging technologies likely to have a large impact on teaching, learning, research, or creative expression within education around the globe. This volume, the 2010 Horizon Report: K-12 Edition, examines emerging technologies for their potential impact on and use in teaching, learning, and creative expression within the environment of pre-college education.

Each edition of the Horizon Report introduces six emerging technologies or practices that are likely to enter mainstream use in the educational community within three adoption horizons over the next one to five years. Each report also presents critical trends and challenges that will affect teaching and learning over the same time frame.

View the web version of the report here: http://wp.nmc.org/horizon-k12-2010/

Download it here: Download the 2010 Horizon Report: K12 Edition (430k PDF)

Those of you previously familiar with the “computational knowledge engine” have most likely seen immediate uses and implications for the classroom.  I think we can agree that it serves as an example of the power that can exist with technology and leads us to what perhaps is yet to come.

I was pleased to learn recently that WolframAlpha has started to embrace education and has devoted a section of the site to that effort.  Visit the link below to see video, lesson plans, examples, the WolframAlpha Education Portal and much more.  You can even join the WolframAlpha Education Group.

All of that and much more here: http://www.wolframalpha.com/educators/

Although the time for submission has passed, I was surprised to find out that not too many people actually know about the Google Planned Fiber Implementation.

From Google:

We’re planning to build and test ultra high-speed broadband networks in a small number of trial locations across the United States. We’ll deliver Internet speeds more than 100 times faster than what most Americans have access to today with 1 gigabit per second, fiber-to-the-home connections. We plan to offer service at a competitive price to at least 50,000 and potentially up to 500,000 people.

Our goal is to experiment with new ways to help make Internet access better and faster for everyone. Here are some specific things that we have in mind:

-  Next generation apps: We want to see what developers and users can do with ultra high-speeds, whether it’s creating new bandwidth-intensive “killer apps” and services, or other uses we can’t yet imagine.
-  New deployment techniques: We’ll test new ways to build fiber networks, and to help inform and support deployments elsewhere, we’ll share key lessons learned with the world.
-  Openness and choice: We’ll operate an “open access” network, giving users the choice of multiple service providers. And consistent with our past advocacy, we’ll manage our network in an open, non-discriminatory and transparent way.

Some communities are going all out to get a piece of this Google initiative.  Check out one here: http://www.googletwinports.com/index.php

Interesting or creepy, you be the judge!  While technology advances, we often get somewhat expected innovations, and this may be one of them.  We have all seen and thought about robots and how they would interact in a “real” environment.  We have seen them everywhere from movies to toy stores, but a company called Kokoro has created a telepresence robot that can be controlled from a remote location which may place them in the office or our schools!  Sure, that may not be for some time, but it is interesting to watch the progression of technology.  Please enjoy the video below.

This thought-provoking film offers unique insight across generations and nations, and reveals a very inconvenient truth about education. The world is changing rapidly – but our education system is not keeping pace.

The film, titled ‘We Are The People We’ve Been Waiting For’, was inspired and guided by Lord Puttnam and Sir Michael Barber and explores the education system in the UK and asks whether the current system provides young people with the opportunity to develop their talents. High-profile figures sharing their personal experiences and views include Sir Richard Branson, Germaine Greer, Henry Winkler, Bill Bryson, Sir Ken Robinson and a wide range of education experts from around the world.

‘We Are The People We’ve Been Waiting For’ follows the lives of five teenagers and the challenges they face during their education in the UK.  It reveals the dislocation between the education system and the rapidly changing, globalised world which is increasingly dominated by digital technology, and focuses on the need for fundamental change in teaching and learning.  The movie parallels much of what exists in the US education system as well.

View the trailer below or watch the entire film here: http://www.wearethepeoplemovie.com/

Conversation with Bernard Trilling, Charles Fadel, Tony Wagner, Sir Ken Robinson, Tim Magner and Daniel Pink are just a few of the folks that have and will participate in this ongoing interview series.  Free to participate in and occurring every week, these conversations are fun and enlightening.

The Future of Education Ning network is a site that hosts an interview series and community devoted to providing an opportunity for those who care about education to share their voices and ideas with others.  It is a place for thoughtful discussion and dialog on an incredibly important topic.  The highlight of the site are the interviews conducted with leaders of thought, innovation and education.

All the sessions are recorded in multiple formats, including Elluminate playback and MP3 for portability.  This site is a must visit.  One page tells it all.  The main page (linked below) has a list of both upcoming “conversations” as well as the recordings of ones past.  Of course all of this is open and free to participate.

Find the network here: http://www.futureofeducation.com/

You can also subscribe to the Google Calendar here.

Ok, so they may not be WALL-E, but the Korean Institute of Science and Technology and the Nippon Institute of Technology have introduced robotic teachers in Korea and Japan.  According to ETNews, robot teachers have passed the first round of testing and will expand into 500 preschools by 2011 and 8000 classrooms by 2013.

NIT’s e-Nuvo humanoid robot comes with a built in projector, and is meant to build interest in science, technology, engineering, and math by discussing robotics.

“By around 2015, robots should be able to help teachers in English classes. By 2018, they should be able to teach on their own while communicating with students,” said Kim Shin-hwan, an economist at the Hyundai Research Institute.

There is a lot of work being done in the area of robotics across just about all industry sectors.  It will be interesting to follow these developments and see what the future may hold for our classrooms!  Enjoy the video below of the first lecture.

Some of you may recall the post on Augmented Reality just before the holiday break.  For a recap, you can view it here.  It seems that we are getting closer to seeing AR in the US aligned with instructional materials.  It was exciting to see SMART at the Celebration of Teaching and Learning demonstrating some of the work they are doing in this area.  Although the representative was quick to point out that they are looking to see what the interest is and not ready for market, you will notice in the video I quickly shot (below) that many of the materials are already branded.  Also note that the SMART document camera he is using is not a current model, but one they are soon to release.  Existing SMART document cameras cannot currently be used with AR.

So, it looks like we are closer to seeing this exciting technology in our classrooms.  The video I shot is below.  Enjoy!

The Department of Education has developed this Portal as an online forum where key stakeholders in education can share their innovative ideas and collaborate to turn those ideas into a new reality.  By connecting an idea from a teacher in Maine to a principal in Oklahoma, or a teacher-entrepreneur in North Dakota with a foundation in New York, the Portal will be a national marketplace of ideas of how we can ensure that every American child will graduate ready to succeed in college and the workplace.

The Web Portal is designed to engage all stakeholders in education: teachers, school administrators, parents, foundations, nonprofit organizations, and the American public.

You can find it here: https://innovation.ed.gov/index/

“Within a single generation, digital media and the World Wide Web have transformed virtually every aspect of modern culture, from the way we learn and work to the ways in which we socialize and even conduct war. But is the technology moving faster than we can adapt to it? And is our 24/7 wired world causing us to lose as much as we’ve gained? In Digital Nation: Life on the Virtual Frontier, FRONTLINE presents an in-depth exploration of what it means to be human in a 21st-century digital world. Continuing a line of investigation she began with the 2008 FRONTLINE report Growing Up Online, award-winning producer Rachel Dretzin embarks on a journey to understand the implications of living in a world consumed by technology and the impact that this constant connectivity may have on future generations.

Watch it all online here or see the trailer below:

Education Futures celebrates its first five years of exploring new futures in human capital development with a timeline of the history of modern education. This timeline provides not only a glimpse into the past and present, but plots out a plausible future history for human capital development. The future history presented is intended to be edgy, but also as a conversation starter on futures for education and future thinking in human capital development.

Although this timeline is largely U.S.-centric, the trends impacting it are global. Scroll through below…