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New York City lifts its blanket ban on cellphones in schools
New York City kids may be reluctantly heading back to school this week, but they just got some (mostly) good news. As promised during Mayor Bill de Blasio's election campaign, the city's Department of Education is lifting its outright ban on cellphones in schools. The New York Times understands that principals (with help from parents and teachers) will decide just when and where students can break out their phones. By default, kids will be allowed to keep their phones around so long as they're hidden. If schools want, though, they can require that young learners drop cellphones off in a designated place. They can also give permission to use phones at certain places and times, such as outside during lunch breaks.
Google launches a teaching tool to help schools ditch paper
Google's itching to get Chromebooks into classrooms (and it's doing a pretty good job too), but the search giant just went full steam ahead with another product meant to help it shape the school experience. It's called (unsurprisingly) Classroom, and the free service is finally ready for enterprising Stand And Deliver types to take it for a spin before school starts again in earnest. Haven't heard of it before? Who could blame you -- chances are it won't be as downright crucial to your day-to-day the way Gmail is... unless you're a teacher plagued by too much paper. You see, Classroom lets teachers craft assignments that can be distributed, collected and graded from a sleek web interface, as well as start discussions and issue announcements to students (in 42 languages, no less). The upsides for teachers seem pretty straightforward, but Google's gains are substantial too: between Classroom and all those cheap Chromebooks, schools itching to smarten up could easily pledge their allegiance to Mountain View rather than Redmond or Cupertino.
Silent Light helps teachers control the noise in their classrooms
Silent Light - Classroom Timer and Decibel Meter is a new app from the folks at Top Storey Apps. It was written by a pair of teachers for teachers to use in the classroom or homeschool environment. The premise behind the app is simple -- it uses the microphone on the iOS device to detect background noise and rewards children when they are quiet for a set amount of time. The Silent Light app lets you select a target noise level that is compatible with a range of activities. When it is test-taking time, you can set the app to the lowest "hear a pin-drop" level of quietness. If you are holding small group discussions, you can raise the noise level to allow quiet talking, but not loud outbursts. The app rewards children with points for being quiet and you can configure the time, from 1 to 15 minutes, it takes for a child to earn a point. The app can be used on an iPad, iPhone or iPod touch that is placed on a student's desk. If you are using one device per classroom, you can also output the display to an HDTV using an Apple TV or a compatible digital AV adapter. Silent Light uses a very familiar traffic light graphic to visually represent the noise level in the clasroom. Red is too loud, orange is getting loud and green is within the level of quiet needed for an activity. A timing meter counts off the minutes and changes color to give kids real-time, feedback about their level of noise. A rewards counter keeps track of the points that awarded for times of quiet activity. When you are done with your quiet time, you can start over by changing the activity title and resetting both the timer and the rewards counter. I tested Silent Light in my own home and found that the app works exactly as described. It picked up ambient noise and reported it as loud based on the noise level that I selected. When I selected the ultra-quiet pindrop level, even quiet whispering between two or three children triggered an orange warning light. When I turned the level up to group discussion, my children were allowed to talk, but not laugh or yell without the app warning them they needed to quiet down. Warnings are visual only -- the timing meter turns red and the traffic light turns orange or red. There is no alert or other audible cue that the noise level is too loud. (According to the developer, there is a xylophone ding that should chime when the noise gets too loud). The only audible in the app is a cash register noise that chimes when a new point is added to the coffer. This noise can be turned off by lowering the volume on the phone. Silent Light - Classroom Timer and Decibel Meter is an effective visual tool for classroom or homeschool teachers who want to reward children for their quietness during activities. The Silent Light app is available from the iOS App Store for US$3.99.
Illinois school to distribute 7,000 iPads to students
One school district in Illinois is adopting the iPad in a new one-on-one program that'll put the fourth-generation version of the tablet into the hands of 7,000 students. According to the Daily Herald, the program will cost Palatine-Schaumburg High School District 211 up to US$1.43 million for a three-year lease and will be funded by the district's technology budget. Building on a successful pilot program, the district will expand its iPad usage next year and cover 50 percent of the school's students. School officials intend to get iPads in the hands of all students by the 2014-2015 school year. This full district rollout will happen once teachers have been trained and are ready to use the tablet devices.
GoNote 10-inch hybrid netbook / tablet bringing Ice Cream Sandwich to UK classrooms next month
Ergo Electronics, the company behind the GoTab, is looking to help bring Android to UK classrooms in the form of the GoNote, a combo tablet / netbook running Ice Cream Sandwich. The device has a 10-inch 1024 x 600 display, a 1.2GHz ARM Rockchip RK2918, 1GB of RAM and 8GB of storage, expandable via a MicroSD slot. Aimed at students, the GoNote also has four USB 2.0 ports and a VGA camera on-board. It'll be hitting in the UK in September for £150 ($236) in black and white options. More info in the press release after the break.
iPads seem to raise classroom math scores in charter school study
Earlier this year the folks who created the YourTeacher math tutoring and test prep system teamed up with KIPP Academy to gauge how well the iPad performs in the classroom. As noted by Jim Dalrymple of The Loop, the results are overwhelmingly in favor of the iPad. Between February 2012 and May 2012, a group of 8th grade math students in Houston used the YourTeacher Algebra 1 iBooks instead of their hardcover counterparts. The teachers used the iPads to create a flipped classroom in which students spent most of their learning time on the iPad (80 percent) while they were at home. This let teachers use the classroom time for advanced, one-on-one instruction. When compared to the control group that received traditional classroom instruction, the iPad group showed significant improvement in their math scores. The summary report on the pilot program says, Overall, the percentage of students who rated either proficient or advanced (the 'passing' rate) was 49% percent higher in the 'flipped classrooms' using the iPads than in the traditional classrooms with no iPads. The difference was most pronounced in the percentage of students rated as 'advanced,' which was 150% higher in the 'flipped classrooms.' This may be a small-scale study, but it is one of many recent results that suggest the iPad could benefit school-aged children as young as kindergarten. [Via The Loop]
Lenovo unveils toughened ThinkPad X131e for education, hikes price to $499
Lenovo must have struck a chord with schools looking for some rough-and-tumble ThinkPads, as it's bringing out the ThinkPad X131e even while teachers are still drafting their course plans for the fall semester. The new model keeps that better-than-military ruggedness in an 11.6-inch laptop while freshening the choices of AMD E-series chips or their Intel-made Celeron and Core i3 challengers. Dolby Advanced Audio even gives the speakers boost when it's not a matter of all work and no play. Educators, in turn, get the usual options for extended support or customizing the laptops with a little school pride. There's a premium to pay for putting classrooms on the cutting edge, however: at $499, the new systems are $70 more costly than the launch price of the X130e portables they replace, which leaves quite a bit less money for notebooks of the paper variety.
San Diego school district purchases 26,000 iPads
San Diego Unified School District is improving its classroom technology by purchasing 26,000 iPads for use in its schools, according to San Diego's 10News. The iPads will cost the district US$15 million and is funded through Proposition S, a money reserve available to help schools purchase up-to-date technology. The iPads will be used by 5th grade, 8th-grade and high school students in 340 classrooms. This program is thought to be one of the largest deployments of iPads within a K-12 school district. A smaller scale iPad pilot program just finished its first year in the Ashburnham-Westminster Regional School District in Massachusetts. In this pilot, 83 iPads were provided to all Kindergarten classrooms. A similar Kindergarten program was implemented in Auburn, Maine. Results from both programs are early, but encouraging.
Google: Chromebooks now serve web-happy students in over 500 European, US school districts
Whatever you think of the latest round of Chromebooks, school districts have clearly latched on to existing models. Over 500 school districts across Europe and the US are currently deploying the Google-powered laptops for learning the web way. Specialized web app packs and that rare leasing model are already keeping the material relevant and the hardware evergreen, but new certification for US ready-for-college criteria will go a long way towards making sure principals everywhere take a shine to Chrome OS in the future. That still leaves a lot of schools going the more traditional Mac or Windows PC route, with the occasional tablet strategy thrown in; regardless, we're sure Google doesn't mind taking any noticeable chunk of the market in a relatively brief period of time. We'll see if there's more reasons for Mountain View to get excited in a few days.
Intel adds rugged Studybook tablet to its student-friendly Classmate lineup
File this under: "Wait, that didn't happen already?" Intel just announced the Studybook, that tablet you see up there, and believe it or not it's only the first slate to join the company's lineup of Classmate products for schools. That's sort of wild, given the popularity of tablets and also the fact that there are so many kid-proof models floating around. And yet, the closest Intel had come until now was with the Convertible Classmate PC, a device that was more of a netbook with a touchscreen. Like the rest of Intel's Classmate series, the Studybook is meant to find a home in schools here in the US and around the globe, including developing markets. And by most measures, this reference design is exactly the kind of product you would have expected Intel to cook up for such an audience. Starting with raw specs, you're looking at a 7-inch (1024 x 600), Atom-powered tablet that can be configured to run either Android or Windows 7, depending on the school district's needs. As you'd expect, it's been designed to take a beating from careless kids: the plastic, 525-gram (1.2-pound tablet) can withstand 70-centimeter (2.3-foot) drops and has a rubber band reinforcing the bezel to keep sand and other elements out. You'll also find rubber gasketing around the ports, which include USB 2.0, HDMI, a headphone jack and microSD / SIM slots. Though it comes standard with 1GB of RAM, the amount of built-in storage will vary from school to school: four to 32 gigs, or a 128GB SSD. Just as important as the specs is the software package, which includes Kno's e-reader app, as well as the LabCam suite, which lets you do things like attach a special lens (sold separately) to use that rear-facing 2-megapixel camera as a microscope. As for price, Intel is quick to emphasize it doesn't set the cost (that would be OEMs), but it believes manufacturers who use this design can sell the finished product for $200 or less. No word, then, on when this might show up in a classroom near you, but for now we've got hands-on photos below and a pair of walk-through videos just past the break.
DDR Classroom Edition gets kids moving on sweet wireless mats
Though we imagined the DDR Classroom Edition setup as a bunch of kids fighting their way out of a tangled mess of cable in some smelly gymnasium, the end product looks a lot more interesting -- and a lot more wireless. These kids are dancing on some sweet mats!
Apple refreshes its education bundles, replaces white MacBook with MacBook Air
It was back in July that Apple quit selling the white MacBook to the general public, and recently the remaining stock -- only available through its education webstore -- met a similar fate. Although the folks at Cupertino quietly removed the polycarbonate machine from the store, it's now offering up 5-pack bundles of both the 11- and 13-inch MacBook Air in its place. Notably, an education-only variant of the 13-inch model is available, priced at $4,995 for the bundle ($999 a piece), which rocks the baseline configuration of the 11-incher (Core i5, 2GB of RAM and a 64GB SSD). As MacRumors points out, the cheapest 13-inch Air available to the public starts at $1,200, although it does have beefier specs, so it's nothing to be terribly upset over. You'll find more details at the links below.
48-player DDR coming to classrooms
Konami is making it easier for schools to use Dance Dance Revolution for fitness programs, with a new version designed specifically for schools. Dance Dance Revolution Classroom Edition, being unveiled Feb. 24 at the CAHPERD Conference, is a PC game that allows up to 48 mats to be connected to a single game.We can only hope that the following presentation at that conference will be about reinforcing classroom floors.
Nintendo testing classroom text-to-speech tech with DSis
Nintendo and Japanese telecom company NTT are working together on a voice recognition project, aimed at making it easier for students with hearing or other disabilities to keep up in classrooms.The project, which NHK reports is undergoing trials in Okinawa and Tottori Prefecture, captures instructor speech, converts it to text, and saves it to the cloud while also sending it to devices -- like the DSi. That way, students can read along, and have an automatic record of lessons. See it in action in the video on NHK's site.The downside to this plan, of course, is that it creates a situation in which a student is expected to be paying very close attention to his or her DS in the back of the classroom -- a situation ripe for abuse of the Retro Game Challenge variety.
School tech directors expect iPads to increase
A small survey of 25 education technology directors conducted by Piper Jaffray analyst Gene Munster suggests the iPad may become a staple of the classroom in the next three years. Apple will be pleased as it's the iPad and not Android tablets that are attracting the most attention. All the technology directors surveyed are testing or deploying iPads in their schools, but none of them are doing the same with Android. Those that are using computers in the classroom have one computer for every ten students, but that ratio is expected to improve now that tablets are mainstream. According to those surveyed, 36% of these directors expect to have one tablet for every student and 44% expect to achieve this goal within three to five years. Overall, the ratio of students to tablets is expected to be 6:1 which is better than the 10:1 student to computer ratio school systems have today. Tablets may be useful for schools, but there are significant administrative hurdles that must be overcome before they see widespread usage. The survey reveals that almost half (48%) of the directors believe a tablet is important as an information gathering tool, but 64% see device management as a significant hurdle to deploying these tablets in a school setting. Also a factor is cost, which is a smaller (20%), but still a significant hurdle schools need to overcome. Despite these challenges, some schools are embracing the iPad as a valuable teaching tool. In a controversial program, kindergartners in Auburn, Maine are using the iPad in the classroom for learning their basic phonic and math skills. Similarly, the Webb School in Knoxville, Tennessee is requiring all incoming fourth to 12th grade students to have an iPad.
School district eyes iPads to improve students' math scores
We've heard of secondary schools and universities swapping out books for iPads before, but now thanks to a pilot program in four middle schools in Las Vegas, we're beginning to see just how helpful iPads can be in an educational setting. According to the Las Vegas Review-Journal, 1,150 children at the four schools were given iPads preloaded with Fuse Algebra textbooks and software instead of regular math books, pencils, and paper. Now while working on their math assignments, the children can use the iPads to watch tutorials and get instant feedback on an equation they completed. If they got the math problem wrong, they can put on headphones and watch a tutorial on the spot teaching them how to solve it correctly. While official results of the pilot program won't be available for some time, anecdotal evidence on its effectiveness is very good. One student said that she was traditionally a C or D student in math, but since using the iPad in the classroom, her average math scores have increased to Bs or As. The teachers are jut as enthusiastic about using the iPads in the classroom. Principal Robert Mars said, "Any tech we use – a laptop, smart board, iPod Touch, handheld transponder – anything that's tech-related, kids gravitate toward that. Every child is engaged constantly by having them in their hands."
Kiro robot teaches Korean kindergarten by day, discusses Kandinsky by night
This little girl loves Kiro. Why? Because he's probably the raddest robot teacher she's ever seen. Developed by Korea's Robot Research Institute, the bot recently wrapped up a three week trial period in a kindergarten classroom, where he apparently spent most of his time screening educational videos on his abdomen, playing interactive games, and keeping his students in rapt attention. When he wasn't busy dishing out Ritalin to his underlings, Kiro also served as a guide at the Dong-A University Museum, in Busan. After programming the droid with enough knowledge to make him sound smart, engineers set him loose within the art gallery, where he would provide visitors with background information in hushed, docent-dulcet tones. He loves kids. He loves art. He's always smiling. He's the kinda bot you could bring home to Dad. Scope him out for yourself in the video, after the break.
Skype in the Classroom tears down geographic walls, connects pupils the world over
Cisco's doing it in the boardroom, and soon, your children may be taking notes from kiddos situated in a different continent. Skype in the Classroom is a new online platform that aims to make it easier for teachers to find other teachers who are utilizing Skype within their classes, and already there are 3,900+ taking advantage. The goal here is to enable professors to easily reach out and find like-minded individuals who are covering complementary topics, and with a quick email, the two could be cooking up joint lesson plans a dozen time zones apart. As of now, 99 countries have teachers that are signed on, and we're guessing it's only a matter of time before a couple more join and push that into triple digits. Next step? Logging into first period from home. Or Fiji.
Teachers-in-training to get pointers, CIA updates via wireless headsets
Okay, so maybe there's no actual guarantee that headset-wearing teachers will be able to tune into top secret broadcasts from the nation's capitol, but once the infrastructure is in place, it's just a matter of time before everyone's moonlighting as an operative. As the story goes, a gaggle of teachers are volunteering to take part in a Teach for America campaign that puts a bug into their ear and a mentor on the other end. The idea would be to rapidly bring a teacher up to speed by correcting and shaping their technique as it happens, and the potential implications and applications are both vast and numerous. For example, PhDs in foreign nations could one day remotely tutor rural math teachers if Obama's national broadband plan takes hold, and if they're feeling a bit comical, they could throw question marks onto the end of each pointer à la Anchorman. The trial is being funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
Tennessee school requires iPads of all 4th-12th grade students
Starting next year, fourth to 12th grade students attending the Webb School in Knoxville, Tennessee will be required to have an iPad for classes. Jim Manikais, technology director at the private school, said this new policy was designed to let students "use that technology whenever they need it." Currently, students have to "check out a cart, a laptop cart, or schedule lab time to take a class to a lab" which made it difficult for both teachers and students to use technology regularly in the classroom. The school has a three-year rental plan for parents who are unable to purchase an iPad. This payment plan will cost about $200 per academic year or $20 per month for the ten-month school year. School officials will block Facebook and Twitter on the school campus and English teacher, Elli Shellist, already has a plan to monitor web browser usage in class. The savvy teacher will randomly perform a flip check that requires students to flip their iPad towards the teacher so he can check what application they have opened. Of course, it won't take very long for even more savvy students to write an app that switches back to the appropriate application when the iPad is flipped forward rapidly. We won't even mention the antics that may ensue when the dual-camera iPad 2 makes its inevitable debut in the classroom. Despite the potential for abuse, this is an excellent use of technology that will continue to expand in the future. Other academic institutions like Seton Hill and the University of Notre Dame encourage the usage of iPads in the classroom, while textbook publishers like Houghton Mifflin Harcourt are developing applications for use in academic settings. [Via KSLA]
