A new study of how parents perceive mobile learning and devices finds that many want schools to accelerate their use of mobile devices in the classroom, Information Week reports. “Parents with kids in schools that mandate tablet use are significantly more enthusiastic about tablets,” Kevin Carman, education marketing director at AT&T, told InformationWeek/Education in a phone interview. Underwritten by AT&T, the Living and Learning with Mobile Devices Study was conducted by research and consulting firm Grunwald Associates and the Learning First Alliance, a partnership of 16 education associations…
…Read MorePodcast Series: Innovations in Education
Explore the full series of eSchool News podcasts hosted by Kevin Hogan—created to keep you on the cutting edge of innovations in education.
3 keys to gamification for education
Information Week reports that gamification promises good things for everyone: fun for students; a way for teachers to get and keep students’ attention; a cheap and easy source of material for administrators; profits for educational software companies; and a better way to engage, teach and test for everyone. It might even develop more common sense. But gamification can easily be oversold and done badly, so remember that a successful game depends on three factors…
…Read MoreGmail ditched by major university
In a potential blow to Google’s efforts to establish itself as a major player in enterprise software, a leading public university has ended its evaluation of Gmail as the official eMail program for its 30,000 faculty and staff members, InformationWeek reports—and it’s got some harsh words for the search giant. In a joint letter last week to employees, University of California-Davis CIO Peter Siegel, Academic Senate IT chair Niels Jensen, and Campus Council IT chair Joe Kiskis said the school decided to end its Gmail pilot, which could have led to campus-wide deployment, because faculty members doubted Google’s ability to keep their correspondences private. Many faculty “expressed concerns that our campus’s commitment to protecting the privacy of their communications is not demonstrated by Google and that the appropriate safeguards are neither in place at this time nor planned for in the near future,” the letter said. Google officials, for their part, insisted that their privacy controls are adequate. “Obviously there’s lots of opinions and voices on campuses,” said Jeff Keltner, a business development manager in the Google Apps for Education group. “By and large, it’s not typical of what we’re seeing in the market. We’re seeing lots of schools move their students and faculty onto Gmail,” said Keltner, who also noted that UC Davis students are continuing to use the service and that Gmail users’ privacy is protected by contractual assurances that govern data handling…
…Read MoreThree-fourths of professionals believe the internet makes us smarter
A survey of web users and professionals found that a majority of them believe the internet is making us smarter, InformationWeek reports—although some critics believe internet use is zapping our critical thinking skills. The web-based survey of nearly 900 prominent scientists, business leaders, consultants, writers, and technology developers found that three out of four believe the internet “enhances and augments” human intelligence. In addition, two-thirds of the respondents said the internet also improves reading, writing, and rendering of knowledge. The survey was conducted by the Imagining the Internet Center at Elon University in North Carolina and the Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project. The poll was motivated by tech scholar and analyst Nicholas Carr’s 2009 Atlantic Monthly magazine cover story, entitled “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” In a response to the survey, Carr stuck by his original argument that the internet shifts the emphasis of people’s intelligence away from meditative or contemplative intelligence and more toward what he called “utilitarian intelligence.” “The price of zipping among lots of bits of information is a loss of depth in our thinking,” said Carr, who participated in the survey. Other participants disagreed, such as Craig Newmark, founder of Craigs’s List, who said people use Google as an adjunct to their own memory. Respondent David Ellis, a professor at York University in Toronto, said that instead of making people stupid, Google was reinforcing intellectual laziness among people satisfied with the top 10 or 15 listings from search queries…
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