Source: nytimes.com

By: Alex Williams

For the first half-hour of the meeting, it was hardly surprising to see a potential client fiddling with his iPhone, said Rowland Hobbs, the chief executive of a marketing firm in Manhattan.

At an hour, it seemed a bit much. And after an hour and a half, Mr. Hobbs and his colleagues wondered [...]

Source: nytimes.com

The recession has forced colleges to take dramatic steps to cut costs, from layoffs to halting major construction projects. But as our colleague, Tamar Lewin, reports today, colleges have found other ways to reduce expenses.

For example, the University of Washington’s communications department has eliminated most of its landlines (at a savings of about $1,100 [...]

Source: nytimes.com

By: CLAIRE CAIN MILLER and MATT RICHTEL

On a PC, having to fill out a form and type in a credit card number to buy something is only mildly annoying. On a cellphone, it could make you want to skip the purchase entirely.

This is why investors, start-ups and major corporations are pouring money into services [...]

Source: nytimes.com

By: Winnie Hu

WESTPORT, Conn. — Math students in this high-performing school district used to rush through their Algebra I textbooks only to spend the first few months of Algebra II relearning everything they forgot or failed to grasp the first time.

So the district’s frustrated math teachers decided to rewrite the algebra curriculum, limiting it [...]

Source: latimes.com

By: Mitchell Landsberg
Sometimes in the evening, long after her last class of the day, Patricia Medina has an uncommon urge. She wants to go back to school.

“I want to come at night and just, like, make something,” said Patricia, a sophomore at University High School in West Los Angeles.
What could reduce an otherwise bright, [...]

Source: boston.com

By: Jennifer Batog

It’s a James Bond tool for the mainstream world, a digital pen that acts like a portable, personal whiteboard.

Anoto Inc., a Westborough technology company, recently launched Anoto penPresenter, which records notes and displays them on a screen during presentations.

The pen, which is about the size of a fountain pen, combines a digital [...]

Juan Hendrix, an earth science teacher at John F. Kennedy High School in Silver Spring, knows that when it comes to cellphone use in schools, looks can deceive.

“A classroom can appear quiet and orderly, but it may be abuzz with chatter,” Hendrix said.

Text messaging has spawned an era of uninterrupted contact among friends, especially young people. Students often tap out silent conversations beneath their desks, even though most Washington area public schools forbid them to use cellphones on campus during school hours.

To defuse the conflict, a Montgomery County student leader has proposed a compromise: Let students text while they eat.

A resolution before the county school board would allow high school students to use cellphones on campus at lunchtime. Quratul-Ann Malik, the board’s elected student member and sponsor of the measure, is seeking to define an appropriate place for iPhones and BlackBerrys at school.

Source: www.herald.ie

By: Claire Murphy

Schoolchildren are sending requests to their teachers to be linked up as their ‘friend’ on social networking sites.

A number of teachers have been asked to become “Facebook friends” or “Bebo buddies” by their students.

The Association of Secondary Teachers Ireland (ASTI) has advised teachers to be cautious [...]

Looking for ideas on how to spend federal stimulus dollars to enhance educational technology? Project Tomorrow has a suggestion: Listen to what students say they’d like to see in their schools.

The nonprofit organization is touting the results from its annual Speak Up survey as a means of giving lawmakers–as well as state and local education leaders–some guidance on how stimulus funds can be used to improve teaching and learning.

Project Tomorrow highlighted the results from this year’s survey during a March 24 briefing on Capitol Hill. According to the group’s report, students can be viewed as a digital advance team: They are early adopters and adapters of new technologies, creating new uses for various technology products to meet their sophisticated needs.

“What kinds of technologies are students using, and which are the types of things that students can use in school?” asked Julie Evans, chief executive officer of Project Tomorrow. Those are questions many educators are now asking as well–and the survey’s results provide some answers.

Teachers who spend time actually thinking through assignments that align with the learning outcomes of a course are the most effective in assessing the learning that has taken place. It’s debatable that evaluating learning in the purest sense might ever really be possible given the scope of variables in any context of learning, but when assignments are linked closely to outcomes, the results are more significant.

Additionally, when assignments are creative and applied so that all learning styles and aspects of course content can be integrated, students are usually more positive about their performance. When assignments are vacuous and seem only to present “busy” work to students with no apparent application to reality, students become frustrated and often feel misrepresented and diminished in the process.

This may all sound familiar to anyone who is an educator, but it seems that even the most creative teachers are being stretched like never before in regards to creating assignments that work in technology-rich learning environments. How can these assignments be rigorous, accessible, and holistic–yet also specific–and all the while remain student-centered and integrate technology freely? How can teachers really create assignments that demonstrate what students know both in content and in technology skill development?