The iPhone 3GS is the most advanced converged mobile device and as such, is one that teachers and educators need to be familiar with. Its really a signpost on the road to ubiquitous computing, where mobile, miniaturised, wirless and cloud-based devices proliferate.
Report says classroom walls and industrial-age schooling can go
“Educators can’t truly deliver 21st-century instruction in schools that reflect Industrial-Age designs, with rigid schedules, inflexible facilities, and fixed boundaries between grades, disciplines, and classrooms, according to a new white paper from the Partnership for 21st Century Skills (P21).
Sponsored by Cisco Systems, the paper–titled “21st Century Learning Environments”–describes the kinds of school structures that have been shown to facilitate successful 21st-century teaching and learning: from flexible learning spaces that can be rearranged to fit different class sizes and subjects, to more malleable units of time than the typical 50-minute class period.”
Can your Smartphone do this?
Google & the Future of Books
Best IT Solution For a School?
Fixed-line internet Population Passes One Billion
Education and the Twitterverse
Twitter, twitter, twitter. Like the chattering that its name implies, micro-blogging turned mass communication tool Twitter now seems to be heard everywhere. So overwhelming has it been that while I joined some time ago, I’ve got serious in the last month and now consider it the fourth leg of my personal learning network after Google Reader, Facebook, and Email discussion lists. In one day I came across a three great articles blogged by others, a wiki, and even a story in my Brisbane paper (a sure sign that its now going mainstream if they know about it). So For all my friends and fellow Educators who are still asking what is Twitter and why does it matter, have a look at these:
Horizon scanning, or “In 4 years, will my teaching be ready for this?”
Microsoft to move further into cloud computing
Sorry to all the Microsoft fans out there, but if MS is getting into cloud computing (as they have by announcing MS Office and Windows 7 will feature cloud-connectivity), then you know that its probably already a happening thing. This article picked up by the automated tech news blog techmeme indicates that MS will shortly unveil a further cloud computing initiative for Windows Mobile devices that will compete with Apple’s MobileMe and the Google cloud-services built into the Android mobile OS. So How many Educators are tapping into such services? How many students are being taught about them? Read more about MS plans here:
> http://www.techmeme.com/090119/p27#a090119p27
200,000 netbooks for NSW Education
If anything besides the rise of mobile phones illustrates the ubiquitous, everywhere direction that digital technology is taking, its the recent development of netbooks – small but generally-capable laptops that sell for between $300-600. The NSW department of Education obviously has detected this trend, and has announced a tender process for the purchase of 200,000 such devices. Even better, rather than just buy consumer hardware off the shelf, they have specified education-focused conditions – a wonderful but sadly rare example of this happening. You can go here to read more:
> http://www.australianit.news.com.au/story/0,,24934750-5013040,00.html