According to Project Tomorrow CEO Julie Evans, "Today's students have their own 'student vision' for how they want to use technology for learning. That vision," she said, "is really a statement of how students want to learn in general." Speaking at FETC National Conference in Orlando, FL last week, Evans covered data from the 2010 and 2011 editions of the Speak Up Survey, with a specific focus on the use of digital media for learning. The Speak Up surveys include input from hundreds of thousands of teachers, students, parents, and administrators each year. What the data pointed to, she said, is a growing "frustration among students, not just with the lack of technology in their schools, but by the lack of sophisticated use of that technology." According to Evans, the data from...   more

Utah classrooms may soon be making the switch to open-source online textbooks that can be cheaper and easier to update. The Utah State Office of Education announced this month it will develop and support the open textbooks for language arts, science and math. The agency is urging schools and districts to adopt the books this fall. Officials say open textbooks are written by experts, vetted by their peers, and posted online for free downloading and use by anyone. They also can be printed. Pilot programs provided printed open textbooks to more than 3,800 Utah high school students at a cost of $5 per book, down from an average cost of $80 for a science book. State superintendent Larry Shumway says the new strategy will help keep textbooks up to date.     ...   more

Hardware is only a tiny part of the problem we need to solve to get educational resources into kids’ hands (both literally and figuratively) at scale. My ZDNet colleague, Jason Perlow, and I often bat around ideas of hardware and software combinations that could be truly useful (or better yet, totally disruptive) in education. I spend a lot of time thinking about ed tech, he spends a lot of time thinking about hardware and highly scalable information systems, and the combination of the two always at least makes for some interesting chats. His weekend post, titled “Textbook of the Future: The challenges“, is the first volley into a series of articles that we’ll be posting that will take a fairly deep dive into the changing face of textbooks, learning...   more

  New technologies like iPads and cloud computing are driving changes in the way students learn and the way teachers educate. But change is about much more than the device, according to Rushton Hurley, executive director of Next Vista for Learning. "Change is both frightening and liberating," said Hurley, who delivered a session Wednesday at the FETC 2012 National Conference called "iPads, Android Tablets, Chromebooks, and What's to Come." It's frightening because it requires us to engage something new, something unknown; and it's liberating because in doing something new, we can free ourselves from any preconceived notions of what the outcomes should be. That, he said, really is powerful. The Power of the Cloud According to Hurley, the cloud is one of the things...   more

This year's graduating class will be the first not to know a world without the Web. According to Google Chromebooks Group Product Manager Rajen Sheth, this has serious implications for how we educate. In his keynote session at FETC 2012 National Conference in Orlando Wednesday, Sheth, opened the conversation with a question: "How many of you," he asked, "remember the world before the Web?" Nearly every hand in the room went up. "It's interesting," said Sheth, "Not long ago it occurred to me that this year's graduating class of high school seniors will be the first group of students to not know the world before the Web. Every student in every classroom from here on out will be part of the Web generation." That, he said, has serious implications for how we educate. Learning...   more