Learning Solution – Online Education

A caravan of buses dropped a large group of ed-tech advocates off on Capitol Hill well-prepared to school lawmakers on the challenges they face in trying to integrate technology and make learning more relevant and engaging for today’s digital natives.

Crowds at the National Educational Computing Conference flock to the exhibit hall for demonstrations of cool tools for the classroom, and free giveaways.

A NECC panel discussion hosted by Education Week’s Digital Directions turned into a free-flowing give-and-take between the panelists and the audience on topics ranging from the cost of online learning to using students for technology support.

The Digital Directions staff have been interviewing a plethora of notable ed-tech leaders at the NECC ‘09 conference in Washington D.C. this week. With topics ranging from students’ use of personal technology, educators’ ambivalence to cell phones in the classroom,…

Teacher-educator Lujean Baab gave tips on leading an online classroom at a NECC session today called “Managing Mayhem.”

This morning I joined a gathering of company leaders, school district administrators, as well as a few members of the press, to talk about the most pressing issues in cyber security for district technology administrators today.

A study published in Psychological Science suggests that increasing numbers of competitors can depress an individual’s motivation to compete.

Project Tomorrow analysis shows a disconnect between the demand for online learning options and teachers’ interest in teaching such classes.

Techies hit the town last night, spilling out of the NECC conference at the Washington Convention Center and into the many bars and clubs that hosted off-site networking parties throughout the city. These social happy hours provided a less formal…

Dear Deborah, The current effort to develop national standards in English and math is something to which we will surely pay close attention. I understand that you reject consequential curricular decisions made outside the school, but my view is that…

International Society for Technology in Education CEO Don Knezek spoke to reporters about the struggle to convince Congress to maintain federal funding for educational technology.

In an age when information can be easily manipulated through applications such as Wikipedia and Photoshop, who should be teaching our students about media literacy and what should they be learning about it?

The session on classroom learning stations today at NECC, led by Camilla Gagliolo, an instructional technology coordinator for the Arlington, Va., public schools, showed teachers how they could set up a number of learning stations with PDAs, computers, iPods, Nintendos,…

A report posted this morning by the Consortium on Chicago School Research suggests that more than half of Chicago’s teachers switch schools or leave the profession after four years on the job.

A few dozen educators, armed with hand-held devices, trekked around the National Mall to see how Web 2.0 tools can be used outside the classroom to engage students. But the educators’ tech tools didn’t work as well as some hoped they would.

I just got out of a packed session about library tools and resources where five librarians shared their best, mostly free, online resources. And luckily for everyone who can’t attend NECC, they’ve put that information up on a wiki for everyone to see and contribute to.

During a panel discussion about open-source software this morning, tech administrators and open-source experts seemed optimistic about where open-source is going in education while agreeing that there is much more potential to be tapped.

A short video with a compelling argument from TED:

Someone always asks the math teacher, “Am I going to use calculus in real life?” And for most of us, says Arthur Benjamin, the answer is no. He offers a bold proposal on how to make math education relevant in the digital age.

NECC ‘09 goes Hollywood with an Oscar-style show featuring digital shorts from teachers and students. And the winner is …

I’m out of the office on a reporting assignment. Look for posts again on this blog on July 1….