The top 10 ed-tech stories of 2010: No. 8

New advances could make mobile computing via smart phones even more powerful.

Using cell phones as tools for learning actually began a few years ago, but a number of developments occurred in the last year to help accelerate this trend.

For one thing, smart phones have gotten even smarter. At an ed-tech industry summit in May, Qualcomm’s Peggy Johnson showed a graph indicating the growth over the last decade in MIPS (millions of instructions per second) that cell-phone chips can handle. The curve of the graph started rising steeply in 2004, when cell-phone chips could handle roughly 400 MIPS; today, that figure stands at nearly 2,000.

Today’s smart phones give users “all the power of a laptop in your pocket,” she said.…Read More

Summit: Mobile computing is education’s future

Students in a Project K-Nect math class use smart phones to learn algebra.
Students in a Project K-Nect math class use smart phones to learn algebra.

Speakers at a recent education technology industry summit had a key piece of advice for the company executives who make and sell products for schools: Go mobile.

Hosted by the Software and Information Industry Association (SIIA), the summit was intended to keep company executives abreast of the latest trends and recent developments in school technology. But its content also gives educators a glimpse into where business leaders see the ed-tech industry heading.

Keynote speaker Peggy Johnson, executive vice president of Qualcomm Inc., pointed to a successful initiative in North Carolina, called Project K-Nect, that uses mobile phones to help teach algebra as an example of how mobile technology can empower learning.…Read More