Digital Promise announced a partnership with the United Nations SDG Action Campaign and Oculus to launch the MY World 360° project. The new goal: to support youth worldwide in creating immersive media that shares their perspectives on how to advance the UN's 17 Sustainable Development Goals.
- By Dian Schaffhauser
- 04/17/18
When Tampa Preparatory School launched decided to turn a closet into a virtual reality lab, they had no idea how far their students would run with the tools....
While "mobile learning" may be overshadowed these days by other tech trends, make no mistake: in the hands of today’s youth, mobile learning is huge! Data to back that claim up — and more like it — are in this week’s blog post, where we interview Dr. Julie Evans, CEO — and Diva Extraordinaire — of Project Tomorrow. Using their "phones" teens are absolutely exploring "socially-based, un-tethered and digitally rich learning."
- By Cathie Norris, Elliot Soloway
- 04/10/18
A joint research project at several universities found that the "persistent presence" of smartphones comes at a "cognitive cost." Researchers in the schools of management at the University of Texas at Austin and the University of California, San Diego as well as the Department of Social and Decision Sciences at Carnegie Mellon ran two experiments to attempt to measure how well people finish tasks when their smartphones are nearby — even if the phones aren't in use.
- By Dian Schaffhauser
- 04/09/18
Wearable devices will see 15.9 percent growth this year on their way to selling 132.9 million units, according to a new forecast from International Data Corp. Throughout the forecast, the market will see a compound annual growth rate of 13.4 percent, reaching 219.4 million shipments in 2022.
Augmented and virtual reality headsets will see a compound annual growth rate of 52.5 percent through 2022 despite a lackluster year in 2017, according to a new forecast from International Data Corp. In 2017 the market saw a decline, largely because of reduced shipments of screenless V.R. viewers, which in turn was a result of vendors ceasing to bundle the viewers with smartphones. Following last year's poor showing, however, I.D.C. predicts strong growth this year, with shipments surging to 12.4 million units on a 48.5 percent C.A.G.R.
A new whitepaper from personalized learning nonprofit KnowledgeWorks explores how wearables, augmented reality and virtual reality could play out in education. Vignettes drill into how educators could use these technologies in and out of the classroom to add "digital depth" to physical reality to increase student engagement, enhance the personalization of learning, help people understand others' experiences and perspectives, generate greater levels of self-awareness and foster critical thinking.
- By Dian Schaffhauser
- 03/14/18
NGSS – The Next Generation Science Standards – is the hot new way to teach science in K-12. NGSS is a revolution in science education. In our blog, we briefly try to do that revolution justice by explaining its five key terms.
- By Cathie Norris, Joe Krajcik, Elliot Soloway
- 03/14/18
Whether they're filling in the "30-million-word gap" or increasing the number of "conversational turns" they have with adults, a group of kids at a Virginia childcare center were exposed to an average of 1,100 more words and 59 conversational turns by the time they'd participated in a four-month pilot study. The pilot used a "talking pedometer" that records the conversation a child has.
- By Dian Schaffhauser
- 02/28/18
Deeply digital, highly interactive curricula are fast becoming the new normal; such materials are needed in order to take advantage of those newly minted 1-to-1 classrooms. The Collabrify Roadmap Platform at http://roadmap.center is a free resource designed to take the burden out of creating and using this new generation of curricula.
- By Cathie Norris, Elliot Soloway
- 02/26/18