News

The District of Columbia Public Schools (DCPS) is working with Bookshare (www.bookshare.org) as its accessible media producer, which allows students to download digital files (DAISY) onto assistive technology devices and portables to hear text read aloud. Learn how the District of Columbia has embraced the accessible instruction materials (AIM) provision related to NIMAS and the NIMAC in the IDEA 2004 reauthorization to help students with print disabilities.

The Assistant Secretary for Special Education and Rehabilitative Services proposes priorities for competitions in fiscal year (FY) 2011 and later years to improve outcomes for individuals with disabilities.

The Center for Technology Implementation needs elementary schools to field test PowerUp WHAT WORKS-Reading in grades 4-6 classes. This online resource is designed to improve teaching and learning for students with disabilities and their classmates using evidence-based and technology-enhanced practices.

The National Center of Education Research (NCER) in the US Department of Education is looking to support research in Postsecondary and Adult Education writing. NCER is accepting applications for exploratory, development, evaluation, and measurement work to improve student outcomes in Adult Basic Education, Adult Secondary Education, Adult English Language, and introductory college-level writing courses.

CoSN’s latest EdTechNext Report explores the transformative role and educational impact of eContent in today’s K-12 classroom.

The American Association of People with Disabilities (AAPD) has partnered with the University of Michigan and their disability studies department to support a national disability survey to learn more about your disability connections and the meaning of disability in your communities.   This information will help AAPD better direct its programs and policy work.  
Take the survey [...]

New York Times
Two education foundations said Wednesday they are working to develop 24 new online reading and math courses that will be aligned with the common core national standards. The courses will be developed by the Pearson Foundation — associated with the major textbook company — and will include video, social media, games and other [...]

The Denver Post
The growing influence of technology is creating “new literacies” in which traditional skills of reading and writing are merged with 21st-century skills. Researchers say that technology requires students to think more critically when faced with an overwhelming amount of information available on the Internet, but that it also can prompt deeper reading as [...]

Edutopia Blog
Neurologist Judy Willis explains in this blog post the scientific reasons students are motivated by video games, and suggests ways that such a model can be used in the classroom. Willis writes that video games offer the brain a mixture of challenges and rewards that make students want to continue progressing — and learning. [...]

The 2011 AAPD Leadership Gala and Anniversary Celebration featured the policy makers, decision makers and thought leaders who successfully forged and passed the landmark Americans with Disabilities Act and subsequently founded AAPD, the largest cross disability membership organization in the United States, working toward the economic self-sufficiency and political power for the more than 50 million Americans with disabilities.

New York Times
More K-12 students across the country are taking at least some of their courses online — from electives and Advanced Placement to credit recovery — a trend proponents say is expanding opportunities for students. However, the growing popularity of the courses concerns some about the lack of research on whether online classes offer [...]

American Academy of Pediatrics
Pediatricians should be aware of online risks to youths, such as Facebook depression, cyberbullying and sexting, and should advocate parent-child discussions of Facebook use, according to the social media guidelines of the American Academy of Pediatrics. The guidelines, published in Pediatrics, said Facebook friend lists and status updates may negatively affect children, [...]

New York Times
The writers of this New York Times blog recommend using social media, such as Facebook and Twitter, to teach students about concise writing. In one activity, students write a personal essay in 140 characters; and in another, students create an example of authentic writing, such as an advertisement that could appear on eBay. [...]

Explore the concept of personalization and its application to diverse student populations, its limitless possibilities for innovation, and its ability to tap into previously underused areas of the human mind.

Explore the national broadband speeds map created by the Dept. of Commerce. Find out how your users and collaborators experience the Internet.

The new digital divide is about productivity through access to high-quality content through high-speed connections – and affordability of that quality.

eSchool News
Blended learning, in which students are taught partially online and partially in a brick-and-mortar setting, could serve to transform education but may face some potential pitfalls, a new report shows. The Innosight Institute report found that blended learning — which has increased exponentially in recent years — has the potential to meet individual student [...]

Education Week
Full-time online learning requires a high level of parental involvement, prompting some to ask whether e-learning inherently excludes students whose parents cannot make such a commitment. Advocates of online learning say accommodations can be made for students, but they admit that those with involved parents are most likely to succeed. The problem is particularly [...]

Edutopia Blog
Educators must use caution and teach students about the basics of digital citizenship before incorporating technology into the classroom, high-school technology specialist Andrew Marcinek writes in this blog post. He suggests having students search for examples of inappropriate use, teach each other about possible repercussions and become familiar with their social-media privacy rights.
Full story

The Washington Post
George Washington University has opened a private college-preparatory high school that will operate entirely online, one of the nation’s first “virtual” secondary schools to be affiliated with a major research university. The George Washington University Online High School, a partnership with the online learning company K12 Inc., is competing with brick-and-mortar prep schools [...]

NICHD invites project applications for the Learning Disabilities Research Centers Program, focused on generating new scientific knowledge to inform the institute’s understanding of learning disabilities and comorbid conditions.

Digital Education
A combination of online and in-person instruction is the future of virtual education and will propel much of its growth, according to a new white paper from Innosight Institute. The report argues that half of all classes could be taught through a blended approach by 2019, while classes taken only online will total 10%. [...]

Nintendo and the American Heart Association (AHA) have come together in a first-of-its-kind campaign, Active Play Now, to help people find fun ways to stay physically active.

Special reports from the technology team at Education Week Digital Directions aim to highlight the progress made in the e-learning arena, as well as the administrative, funding, and policy barriers that some experts say are slowing the growth of this form of education.

Deadline: January 14, 2011
Notification of awards: February 14, 2011
Team Orlando, a unique military collaborative alliance supplemented, supported and augmented by academic and industry leaders in the modeling and simulation, human performance, and training domains, urges game developers to submit papers detailing their innovative creation and use of games in the DoD environment for the Innovations [...]

The Washington Post
The government should create incentives for employers to retain disabled workers on their payrolls as a way of slowing unsustainable increases in the number of people receiving Social Security disability benefits, according to a new report.
Full story

The 2011 Games for Health conference will be held on May 18-19 in Boston, MA and includes simultaneous tracks, a poster session, exhibits, and special topic rooms. Pre-conference events on mobile games, games accessibility, and game-based medical learning, modeling, and simulation will take part on May 17.
The main Games for Health Conference features five tracks [...]

U.S. Rep. George Miller (D-CA), chairman of the House Education and Labor Committee, today asked the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) to examine the effectiveness of federal programs that exist to help students with disabilities transition from high school to college or the workforce. Recent studies show that about only half of students with disabilities [...]

eSchool News 
The American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education (AACTE) and the Partnership for 21st Century Skills (P21) are calling on teacher education programs to update their curricula to better prepare future teachers to integrate 21st-century skills into their instruction.
The groups released a paper on Sept. 23 seeking to establish a shared vision for infusing [...]

Education Daily
The Justice Department’s amendments to Title II and Title III of the ADA were published in the Sept. 15 Federal Register. The new rules will take effect March 15.
Title II of the ADA prohibits discrimination on the basis of disability by state and local government entities, including schools. Title III prohibits such discrimination by [...]

New York Times
Quest to Learn is a school organized specifically around the idea that digital games are central to the lives of today’s children and also increasingly, as their speed and capability grow, powerful tools for intellectual exploration. Katie Salen, a professor of design and technology at Parsons the New School for Design, also directs [...]

Beyond School (Education Week Blog) 
An assortment of education groups is urging Congress to make funding for the 21st Century Community Learning Centers program flexible and open to expanded school day schedule initiatives, as well as after-school and summer school efforts.
Only a few weeks ago, a Senate subcommittee approved a plan to expand funding for the [...]

CNET 
Applications for Apple devices are helping children with autism and other special needs find more ways to communicate. The apps, such as Proloquo2Go and Adastrasoft’s Expressionist, are part of the growing trend of augmentative and alternative communication — or AAC — apps that are allowing children to tap icons to express how they’re feeling. The [...]

Rural Education (Education Week Blog)  
A senior manager for an educational research firm says Race to the Top results reinforce the contention that small, rural schools are left behind by competitive grant funding. “RTT requirements seem best suited to densely populated and urban states. Awards have born this out, with funding going to states on the [...]

CNET 
U.K. researchers are testing a child-sized robot to help teach social skills to children with autism. The robot named Kaspar — or Kinesics and Synchronization in Personal Assistant Robots — is designed to have minimally expressive features that will help children with autism interpret expressions without becoming overwhelmed. The robot is designed to resemble an [...]

Yahoo! News  
According to a government report released Aug. 26, consolidation over the past decade has left just four big carriers in control of 90 percent of the wireless market, making it harder for small and regional companies to compete. The study by the Government Accountability Office, the investigative arm of Congress, could help fuel the [...]

Education Week  
Billions of dollars in American Recovery and Reinvestment Act broadband grants have begun to flow toward the nation’s rural communities, aimed at erasing critical gaps in service and speed that hamper many rural schools or simply shut them out.
The grants and projects vary widely, from funding fixed wireless broadband in Michigan to providing mobile [...]

Education Week 
A new 50-member Digital Learning Council will research best practices for digital education and release its findings this year, according to former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush and former West Virginia Gov. Bob Wise. The 50-member council includes John D. Couch, vice president of education at Apple Inc.; Shafeen Charania, director of education product group [...]

Politics K-12 (Education Week Blog) 
The results are in, and the list of Race to the Top winners in Round Two includes an eclectic mix of 10 states that had put together very different kinds of applications in their funding bids for the $3.4 billion in remaining federal funds. The winners in this second and final [...]

Inside Higher Ed 
The increasing popularity of online learning is creating an increasing number of accessibility issues for students who cannot see. Many students rely on assistive technology to complete coursework, but the technology is not keeping up with the development of the latest resources for online learning, some advocates say, and little progress has been [...]

PC World  
Waterloo Labs has developed a technology that enables users of the Nintendo Entertainment System to play “Super Mario Bros. 2″ with eye movements. The system works, according to this report, because the human eye is polarized and creates its own electrical field, which can be synchronized with the electronics integrated into a video game.
Full [...]

eSchool News  
Massive social media advertising campaigns have proven effective for colleges and universities large and small, and a new analysis shows that institutions that invest the most in social media ads spend less per student on marketing than do campuses who stick to traditional strategies.
Campuses considered “moderate-to-heavy” investors in social media marketing to alumni and [...]

Wallet Pop 
A new FCC study is reporting dramatic differences between the “up to” figures touted by phone and cable companies in promoting their web connections and the internet speeds consumers actually get. According to the FCC, the differences exist no matter how consumers get their broadband. “Actual download speeds experienced by U.S. consumers lag advertised [...]

New York Times 
There are many benefits to students accessing their textbooks electronically, such as shared highlights and search capabilities. Surprisingly, though, it’s not the iPad and other eReaders that are driving the eTextbook market, but PCs and netbooks. The iPhone and Android are making some inroads in the digital textbook market, however.
Isabella Hinds is director [...]

Yahoo! News  
Colleges and universities across the United States are going beyond simply creating web sites and pages on Facebook for students to “friend” or “fan”; they’re also working with technology companies to build their own social networks and integrate them into campus life to boost admissions and retain students. One new app from San Francisco-based [...]

CNET 
Engineers at the University of Washington are testing a tool called MobileASL that uses motion detection to identify American Sign Language and transmit images over U.S. cell networks. The engineers are now working to optimize compressed video signals for sign language, increasing the quality of the images around the face and hands to reduce the [...]

CNET 
A group of four Democratic politicians claims that a proposal announced last week by Google and Verizon does not give the federal government enough authority to regulate the internet. The companies’ net-neutrality proposal does not grant the Federal Communications Commission sufficient “oversight authority” and should permit the agency to slap new regulations on wireless services, [...]

eSchool News 
As celebrities, politicians, and students alike increasingly use social media to stay connected, education experts say they have noticed a growing number of companies turning to social media to determine grant award winners. And education is not alone. Sherrie A. Madia, director of communications for the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, said [...]

GothamSchools.org 
A former teacher has developed a website that allows teachers to form networks and share ideas and lesson plans. Alex Grodd, a Teach for America graduate, created BetterLesson.com — which is accessible to teachers all over the world — as a resource for those looking for new ideas on specific curriculum topics.
Full story

PC World 
Despite much opposition, Google is defending its net-neutrality proposal co-authored with broadband and wireless provider Verizon. The search giant on Aug. 12 issued counterarguments on six points (Google calls them myths) that the company believes have been misunderstood about its proposal.
Google says the proposed framework defends net neutrality, would protect the current internet we [...]

Washington Post  
The new legislation that President Obama signed this week to stave jobs losses among teachers will cut $302 million in federal broadband grants to help pay for the measure. The Education Jobs Fund will send $10 billion to budget-constrained states so they can avoid layoffs of educators.
The broadband cuts come from the National Telecommunications [...]

On Special Education (Education Week Blog)  
Several initiatives to improve special education are benefiting from recently announced federal Investing in Innovation grants, according to Education Week reporter Christina Samuels. Samuels cites a number of these programs, including a plan to expand arts-based learning for students with disabilities in a New York City district and a proposal [...]

Gizmodo Australia  
A software application designed for Apple’s iPad tablet computer offers a sign language version of a children’s book for those who cannot hear or who have hearing impairments. Children use the computer’s touch screen to turn the pages of “Danny the Dragon Meets Jimmy,” while a videotaped narrator translates the story’s text into sign [...]

BusinessWeek  
A new survey reveals the vast majority of medical school students believe that technology in the form of virtual reality exercises could help them develop the skills they will need as future doctors. The survey of 200 medical students from the University of Michigan and the University of Wisconsin-Madison found nearly all (98 percent) believing [...]

Yahoo! News  
The adoption of high-speed internet service in homes has slowed to a crawl this year after a decade of rapid growth, and it looks as if broadband is going to be a tough sell for those who don’t already have it. The Pew Internet & American Life Project said 66 percent of U.S. adults [...]

New York Times 
Facebook said it would not support a proposal by Google and Verizon to regulate internet access, while an AT&T executive called the plan a “reasonable framework.” Most media companies have stayed mute on the subject, but in an interview this week, the media mogul Barry Diller called the proposal a sham. And outside [...]

USA Today  
Compared with traditional textbooks, the iPad and other devices for reading digital books have the potential to save on textbook costs in the long term, provide students with more and better information faster, and lighten the typical college student’s backpack. Yet the track record on campus for eReader devices so far has been bumpy.
Early [...]

eSchool News 
To help spur interest in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics, many schools have begun to integrate robotics into the curriculum—but are younger students and their teachers ready for a new wave of robotic teaching assistants?
Many researchers and robotics experts agree that robot teachers are no longer the stuff of science fiction—they’re part of a [...]

Education Week  
Fully 24 percent of the i3 winners plan to use their grants to help improve teacher effectiveness. You may have heard of some of the big-ticket winners, like Teach For America, which will use its $50 million grant to grow the size of its teacher corps by 80 percent by 2014.
Full story

eSchool News 
Verizon Communications and Google Inc. have crafted a joint policy proposal they hope can serve as a framework for Congress and the Federal Communications Commission in drafting so-called “net neutrality” rules to ensure that phone and cable providers cannot favor their own services or discriminate against certain kinds of internet traffic that compete with [...]

eCampus News 
A close look at college students’ reaction to Facebook privacy policies revealed concern about online identities as news outlets pushed the issue to the forefront with increasing coverage in 2009 and 2010, according to a report released this month.
Eszter Hargittai, an associate professor at Northwestern University’s communication studies department, and Danah Boyd, a researcher [...]

eSchool News   
Thanks to the democratizing power of technology, which lets anyone with an internet connection tap into resources from all over the globe, it’s now easier than ever for students to start their own companies or collaborate with peers to solve the world’s problems. In fact, technology is empowering students in ways that earlier generations [...]

eSchool News  
A new ruling from the U.S. Copyright Office will affect how higher-education students and teachers can use digital material in the classroom, thanks to the efforts a university professor who says that increasing students’ digital literacy is a responsibility educators can’t afford to brush off.
The change is part of a new interpretation of the [...]

Education Week 
In its biggest effort yet to influence education reform, the San Francisco-based NewSchools Venture Fund is launching its fourth fund, a $100 million investment to spur innovation in teacher preparation, school turnarounds, and charter-school management. The new fund is meant to help advance a new, federal agenda that’s focused on innovation. The new fund’s [...]

Education Week 
The U.S. Department of Education announced 49 winners of a high-profile grant competition to promote innovations in education. On that list are a striking number of proposals specifically targeting reading and STEM education.
Full story

eSchool News 
Student response system (SRS) technology has caught on in classrooms nationwide as a tool for boosting class participation, as well as helping teachers ensure that students understand what’s being taught before they move on to another concept. But the current generation of the technology has its limitations. For one thing, the lag time between [...]

Education Week 
In choosing the slate of winners for innovation grants totaling $650 million, the U.S. Department of Education decided to invest heavily in big-name teacher-training and school turnaround organizations while reserving one-fifth of the money for more-experimental programs it believes show promise. Last week, the department announced that 49 districts, schools, and nonprofit groups beat [...]

eSchool News 
In what could be called a 21st-century teachers’ fair, Microsoft chose a select group of educators to participate in the company’s annual Innovative Education Forum (IEF)—a showcase of the best teacher-created projects that incorporate 21st-century skills and effective uses of education technology. IEF is part of Microsoft’s Innovative Teachers program, a global community of [...]

New York Times  
Educators are concerned that the Internet may be contributing to a growing prevalence of plagiarism and a changing view among students about what constitutes authorship. “Now we have a whole generation of students who’ve grown up with information that just seems to be hanging out there in cyberspace and doesn’t seem to have [...]

San Francisco Chronicle 
School is starting in late August, and already a few universities are touting their decision to make the iPad a part of the classroom. But these universities might run into problems in making the device’s functions work for the average college student. The lack of a USB port limits the iPad’s ability to [...]

Education Week 
There’s been building momentum to address the discrepancy between the demand for workers in computer science fields and the supply of qualified candidates produced by the educational system. Now, the U.S. Congress may have a chance to enact legislation on it.
Colorado Rep. Jared Polis, a Democrat, introduced the Computer Science Education Act on Friday, [...]

Ars Technica 
As seasoned internet veterans know, just because a site shows up high on Google’s search rankings doesn’t mean it’s the most credible source on a topic. But that bit of wisdom apparently has not made it all the way down to the current generation of college students. According to research out of Northwestern University, [...]

eCampus News 
Wikipedia enthusiasts may have a new way to argue their case to professors skeptical of the online encyclopedia: Cancer researchers said in June that Wikipedia was nearly as accurate as a well-respected, peer-reviewed database, although the wiki entries were a bit more boring.
Yaacov Lawrence, an assistant professor in Thomas Jefferson University’s Department of Radiation [...]

New York Times  
The internet, with its unparalleled ability to connect people throughout the world, is changing the way that many people learn languages. There is no still way to avoid the hard slog through vocabulary lists and grammar rules, but the books, tapes, and even CDs of yesteryear are being replaced by eMail, video chats, [...]

Education Week  
A Senate subcommittee added $100 million to the proposed fiscal 2011 appropriation for the 21st Century Community Learning Centers program yesterday. This sounds good, right? But not so fast, as after-school advocates say the addition may actually take money away from after-school programs and shift those dollars to efforts to support longer school days [...]

THE Journal 
Three leading consultants in educational technology offer their opinions on the best Web 2.0 tools for encouraging collaboration in learning and teaching. Blogs, Google Docs, and Twitter are among the standouts — for reasons including their ease of use and their ability to reach many users instantaneously — that can be used by students [...]

Washington Post 
Sen. John F. Kerry, D-Mass., plans to introduce an online privacy bill that would create standards for how consumer information is collected and used for marketing. The bill also would give users more control over how their internet activity and profiles are accessed by advertisers and web sites. Kerry’s bill, announced in a July [...]

Education Week 
The federal Race to the Top program would be renewed for another year under a spending bill approved today by the Senate Appropriations subcommittee that deals with education spending—but wouldn’t receive nearly as much money as President Barack Obama has sought. Also under the Senate language, districts would be allowed, for the first time, to [...]

Education Week 
Education Secretary Arne Duncan picked 19 finalists, including Hawaii and Arizona as surprise picks, to compete in the interview portion of the Race to the Top Round Two competition. That means each state will assemble a group of five people to come to Washington the week of August 9 to make their final, last-ditch [...]

eCampus News 
The Education Department proposed much-anticipated regulations July 23 that would cut off federal aid to for-profit college programs—including many of the nation’s largest online schools— if too many of their students default on loans or don’t earn enough after graduation to repay them. To qualify for federal student aid programs, career college programs must [...]

eSchool News 
It looks like an iPad, only it’s one-fourteenth the cost: India has unveiled the prototype of a $35 basic touch-screen tablet aimed at students, which it hopes to bring into production by 2011.
If the government can find a manufacturer, the Linux operating system-based computer would be the latest in a string of “world’s cheapest” [...]

Yahoo! News  
The Obama administration on July 23 offered a series of proposals aimed at enhancing access to web sites for people with disabilities. Most of the proposals are aimed primarily at improved access for the deaf and the blind. With the 20th anniversary of the Americans with Disabilities Act on July 26, the Justice Department [...]

eSchool News 
In a move to help rural schools keep pace with more developed districts, the U.S. Department of Education (ED) said it will create an Online Learning Registry that will provide access to historical, artistic, and scientific primary-source materials. The registry is one of the recommendations the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) made in its National [...]

CNET 
Seven Republican senators have announced a plan to curb the Obama administration’s push to impose net-neutrality regulations on the internet. On July 21, Sen. Jim DeMint of South Carolina and six other GOP senators introduced legislation that would dramatically limit the Federal Communications Commission’s ability to regulate broadband providers. The new bill—called the Freedom for [...]

THE Journal 
Faculty at the University of Arizona are developing a Facebook application to empower students in grades 6-12 to take charge of their own education. The Teach Ourselves program allows users to earn points by completing homework, critiquing others’ writing, demonstrating how to solve math equations and creating Web-based learning tools. The project will focus [...]

Education Week 
Advocates for education redesign are encouraged by a U.S. House of Representatives Appropriations panel’s decision to extend the Race to the Top program for an additional year.
If the extension makes it into the final spending bills for fiscal year 2011, advocates say, that could mean more states will take the reform-minded steps emphasized in [...]

THE Journal 
A new program at Carnegie Mellon University is aimed at capitalizing on students’ interest in robots to encourage them to study science, technology, engineering and math. Officials with the Fostering Innovation through Robotics Exploration — or FIRE — initiative plan to create robotics competitions, develop computer programs for students and create computerized tutors to [...]

HealthDay News 
U.S. researchers said they were able to distinguish children who are developing normally from those who were diagnosed with autism or language delays by analyzing the sounds from a recording system worn by young children during the day. More research is needed, but the device potentially could be used to screen for language delays [...]

Ars Technica 
According to new research out of Northwestern University, students who use social networking sites don’t seem to suffer academically. In a recent paper titled “Predictors and consequences of differentiated practices on social network sites,” researchers found that heavy use of sites like Facebook and MySpace doesn’t affect college students’ grade point averages. In fact, [...]

eSchool News 
Working with national arts organizations, the Partnership for 21st Century Skills (P21) has developed a first-of-its-kind Arts skills map that clearly defines how arts education promotes key 21st-century skills. The map, the fifth in a series of core content maps from P21 (others include Geography, Science, Social Studies, and English), gives examples how critical [...]

eSchool News 
Google Inc. is giving researchers nearly a half-million dollars to test the academic value of its rapidly growing online library. The grants announced July 14 will be used to help pay for 12 humanities projects studying questions that will require sifting through thousands of books to reach meaningful conclusions.
Google is hoping the research will [...]

Yahoo News   
Federal officials are beginning work on a comprehensive inventory of the nation’s radio spectrum in hopes of finding more capacity for wireless high-speed internet connections. Federal Communications Commission Julius Genachowski said his agency is working closely with the Commerce Department’s National Telecommunications and Information Administration to catalog current spectrum usage. The FCC and NTIA hope [...]

Education Week  
Online credit-recovery programs are being established in many school districts, including Boston, New York City and Chicago, as part of efforts to improve graduation rates and student achievement under No Child Left Behind. The programs often allow students to earn credits based on subject mastery rather than time spent in the classroom — which [...]

Education Week 
Given the ways computer technology—from the iPhone and YouTube to uses in medical research and national security—is changing so many facets of life, you might imagine that schools have been stepping up students’ exposure to computer science to help drive the digital revolution.
But recent data suggest otherwise. One survey indicates a sizable drop in [...]

USA Today 
Digital librarian Brewster Kahle is campaigning to double the number of titles in the Internet Archive, a virtual library he founded to provide free access to books for people with dyslexia or visual or physical impairments. The archive contains more than 1 million titles that can be downloaded to a hand-held device in a [...]

Education Week 
Experts say for-profit providers of online courses—long seen as an option for home-schoolers and a potential rival to public schools—are breaking into the public education mainstream as more schools mix face-to-face classes and online courses to expand their curricular offerings. With demand for that “blended” approach expected to grow, other players in the online-coursetaking [...]

Education Week 
A rural education non-profit frustrated with the i3 grant process says it will investigate how small and rural school districts fare under the Obama administration’s policy of federal competitive grants.
The Rural Schools and Community Trust reported in Rural Policy Matters that it would look at the process and outcome of the current Investing in [...]

eSchool News 
An interface that allows hearing-impaired people to communicate with others using an augmented-reality environment took home the grand prize of $25,000 in the eighth annual Imagine Cup Worldwide Finals in Poland, a prestigious international programming contest for high school and college students. Team Skeek, a team of university students from Thailand, was responsible for [...]

eSchool News 
U.S. schools’ average overall scores on an annual survey designed to measure their progress toward implementing 21st-century classrooms and learning skills increased less than 1 percent from 2009, even though schools did improve on four out of five measures of progress.
The Vision K-20 survey, from the Software & Information Industry Association (SIIA), was developed [...]

New York Times 
Google is bringing Android software development to the masses. The company will offer a software tool, starting July 12, that is intended to make it easy for people to write applications for its Android smart phones. The free software, called Google App Inventor for Android, has been under development for a year. User [...]

New York Times  
Computer scientists are developing machines that can teach people simple skills, like household tasks and vocabulary. In a handful of laboratories around the world, computer scientists are developing robots: highly programmed machines that can engage people and teach them simple skills. So far, the teaching has been very basic, delivered mostly in experimental settings, [...]

New York Times  
Researchers are finding little educational benefit to students in low-income households having computers at home and, in some cases, are finding a decrease in students’ academic performance. A study by Duke University professors found that math performance declined among middle-school students — primarily from low-income areas — after broadband service was installed. Another [...]

eSchool News 
Educators say there’s a simple reason they believe the Apple iPad pilot programs coming to colleges and universities this fall will run smoother than previous trials with popular eReaders: the apps.
Sprawling research university campuses and rural community colleges alike will test the iPad in small groups when students return to school in August and [...]

Washington Post 
Most people agree that the internet has and will continue to be positive for social relations. But according to a survey by the Pew Research Center, it’s also presented many more challenges, and perhaps opportunities, for how reputations are made, tarnished, and remade.
In its annual future of social relations survey, the Pew Internet & [...]

eSchool News 
School districts would get $10 billion in additional funding to help them avoid laying off teachers, and college students would get $5 billion more in Pell Grant money to account for a shortfall in that program, under a supplementary spending bill passed by the U.S. House of Representatives July 1. But the additional funding [...]

Yahoo News   
When it comes to accessing the web over mobile devices, Americans are far behind their internet-connected counterparts in Japan, South Korea, and parts of Europe. The latest survey from the Center for the Digital Future, conducted last year, found that 25 percent of U.S. internet users went online using their cell phones. That is [...]

Yahoo! News   
Video chat is all the rage when it comes to new smart phones like the HTC Evo 4G and the iPhone 4, but Samsung’s latest Android smart phone comes to the fore with a different would-be killer feature: a tiny “pico” projector, good for throwing an image up to 50 inches across on a [...]

eSchool News 
As eReading devices and the software that runs them become more advanced in an increasingly competitive market, researchers are creating applications that could take reading to a whole new level, with tools such as Text 2.0—a reading technology that personalizes the user’s experience by tracking eye movements.
Created by researchers Ralf Biedert, Georg Buscher, and [...]

eCampus News 
Colleges and universities will be among the anchor institutions in an ultra high-speed nationwide internet network after President Obama on July 2 announced more than $760 million in grants designed to expand broadband web access.
Among the grants that most directly affect higher education is the $62.5 million set aside for a national education research [...]

CNET 
Video game aficionados might have to enter a credit card or find another way to verify their age before playing a networked game, thanks to a new push from advocacy groups who say they want to protect minors from in-game advertising messages. In-game marketing has become so advanced that it “allows advertisers to track game [...]

Yahoo! News  
U.S. President Barack Obama is slated to announce on July 2 nearly $800 million in loans and grants for the build-out of broadband networks to reach homes, schools, and hospitals. The grants and loans, which will be matched by another $200 million in outside investment, are part of Obama’s massive federal stimulus package. The [...]

Education Week 
Demand is far outpacing resources in one hot segment of the education innovation market, as districts, schools, and nonprofits pitch reform proposals worth $12.8 billion for competitive grants to be awarded under the federal Investing in Innovation Fund, or “i3”—nearly 20 times what the U.S. Department of Education has available.
The $650 million competition funded [...]

eSchool News 
According to a new report, 21st-century teaching and learning can only occur if teachers and school staff work together as a collaborative team; simple adjustments to antiquated school policies and structures that are already in place won’t help.
The research brief, titled “Team Up for 21st Century Teaching and Learning: What Research and Practice Reveal [...]

The Seattle Times  
An elite group of student engineers will gather in Poland from July 3-8 to crunch code for Microsoft’s Imagine Cup. The competition will feature students showing off software aimed at fighting global problems—such as reducing hunger and poverty, and improving education and child health.
The Imagine Cup competition has drawn 325,000 students from 100 [...]

Indiana Assistive Technology Blog 
As Apple launches their iPhone 4, new accessibility features will be available to help people with disabilities. Accessibility features provide support for vision, hearing, and physical and motor skill disabilities. The following are some of the new accessibility features that the new Apple iPhone 4 will provide: Screen Reading with VoiceOver, Support for Wireless [...]

eSchool News 
School librarians fear another round of budget cuts in districts across the nation could severely impair students’ development of information literacy and other key 21st-century skills.
As the school budget crisis deepens, administrators have started to view school libraries as luxuries that can be axed, rather than places where kids learn to love reading and [...]

Digital Education 
More students and teachers appear open to online learning, according to a survey showing that enrollment in virtual high-school courses rose to 27% in 2009. About 14% were enrolled in such courses in 2008. However, even as more students appear interested in online learning, officials say limited funds have hindered the availability of the [...]

eSchool News 
Just 8 percent of high school teachers said that technology is fully integrated into the classroom; and the technology that is available is primarily used by teachers, and not students, according to the results of a national survey of more than 1,000 high school students, faculty, and IT staff members. As a result, 43 [...]

eSchool News 
Contrary to popular opinion, newer teachers aren’t any more likely to use technology in their lessons than veteran teachers, and a lack of access to technology does not appear to be the main reason why teachers do not use it: These are among the common perceptions about education technology that new research from Walden [...]

Newsweek   
A slew of recent studies show that the problem for women in math and science is related to something both larger and more nuanced: culture. In high school, girls only take 17 percent of computer-science AP tests. They earn only 18 percent of computer and information-science degrees in college, and they make up just under [...]

Education Week 
K-12 and postsecondary institutions are moving toward a vision of technology-rich, 21st-century education, albeit very slowly, says a new survey by the education division of the Washington-based Software and Information Industry Association, or SIIA. The vision, outlined by SIIA, measures schools on 21st century tools, anytime/anywhere access, differentiated learning, assessment tools, and enterprise support. [...]

eSchool News 
Schools with one-to-one computing programs have fewer discipline problems, lower dropout rates, and higher rates of college attendance than schools with a higher ratio of students to computers, according to the results of a major new study. But for one-to-one programs to boost student achievement as well, they must be properly implemented, the study [...]

eSchool News 
Two large coalitions of states are competing for federal “Race to the Top” dollars to create a series of new national academic tests to replace the current patchwork system. In the current system, every state gives a different test to its students. In some states, passing the exam is a graduation requirement.
The federal government [...]

New York Times 
The Obama administration is seeking to nearly double the wireless communications spectrum available for commercial use over the next 10 years, an effort that could greatly enhance the ability of consumers to send and receive video and data with smartphones and other hand-held devices. President Obama will sign a presidential memorandum on Monday [...]

eSchool News 
Some of the nation’s largest online colleges could be barred from tying recruiters’ pay to the number of students they enroll if the Obama administration’s new list of rules for for-profit institutions becomes federal policy. The administration’s set of 14 proposed guidelines for for-profit colleges—announced June 16—was created in response to widespread student complaints [...]

eSchool News 
In a high-stakes legal battle with important implications for the future of the internet, U.S. District Judge Louis Stanton in New York sided with Google Inc. on June 23 as he rebuffed media company Viacom Inc.’s attempt to collect more than $1 billion in damages for alleged copyright infringement by the Google-owned web site [...]

eSchool News 
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. [...]

CNET 
McAfee’s study, Secret Life of Teens, is a reassuring portrait of how most young people are exercising reasonable caution in their use of technology. The study, conducted by Harris Interactive, reported that “almost half of youth (46 percent) admit to having given out their personal information to someone they didn’t know over the internet,” but when [...]

Make your voice heard! The NAEYC has produced a position paper on the importance of access to technology for young children. They are inviting comments until July 16, 2010. Be sure to represent the needs of children with disabilities and special needs.

CNET 
In a preliminary study a few years back, researchers found that an educational, online comic strip geared toward 8- to 10-year-old black girls helped them eat better and exercise more. Now, the program’s creators are set to really put the comic strips to the test when they launch a larger study, with 400 volunteers and [...]

Education Week 
The Education Department has made good on promises to disclose more data on the 1,600-plus applicants for the $650 million Investing in Innovation, or i3, fund.
Officials have created a user-friendly Web portral that allows you to splice the information apart in dozens of ways. You can examine the data by geography, and figure out [...]

USA Today 
Efforts are under way nationwide to recruit tech-savvy students to pursue careers in protecting the safety and security of the Internet. College and high-school students are being encouraged to participate in contests that pit the young cyber-experts in virtual battles against hackers, spies and data thieves, while two Maryland school districts are working cybersecurity [...]

THE Journal 
Arizona State University’s first completely online graduate certificate program will offer educators training in the teaching of online K-12 courses. The program is designed for teachers who want to develop, implement and assess Web-based or hybrid online programs at their schools, and it will include classes in policies, theories, course development and field applications [...]

New York Times  
For the deaf and hearing impaired, more captions are coming to the web versions of shows on television, where captions are mandated—and yet there is still great disparity among various content. Media companies say they are working hard to make online video more accessible. YouTube, the world’s biggest video web site by far, [...]

New York Times 
A new technology called Swype allows users to glide a finger across the virtual keyboard of their mobile phone to spell words, rather than tapping out letters. Back in the 1990s, typing out “hello” on most cell phones required an exhausting 13 taps on the number keys, like so: 44-33-555-555-666. That was before [...]

eSchool News 
Federal regulators are reconsidering the rules that govern high-speed internet connections, wading into a bitter policy dispute that could be tied up in Congress and the courts for years. The dispute has important implications for schools and colleges, many of which are hoping for clear rules that prevent service providers from discriminating against certain [...]

HealthDay News  
Technologies, including robots, toys and computer-generated avatars, are helping children with autism learn skills and improve their social interactions. Studies have shown that practicing with some of these tools has helped some children smile, clap and look at people when talking with them.
Full story

Digital Education 
Closing the digital divide by providing access to computers with high-speed Internet to all students seems like an admirable and worthy goal, but a new study by researchers at Duke University’s Sanford School of Public Policy suggests that having a computer at home may actually lower student test scores, especially for low-income students.
Full story

New York Times 
A company called SocialShield has launched new technology aimed at keeping children and teens safe on social networking sites like Facebook. Using patent-pending “Safety Engines,” the service scans a child’s social networking profile to look for inappropriate, dangerous, or otherwise suspicious content or behavior. When it finds questionable material, parents are alerted immediately [...]

eSchool News 
Reluctant faculty members, challenges in scanning old texts with foreign characters, and conflicting ideas about whether information should be commodified or made free on the internet have been barriers to educators and librarians who advocate for digital libraries, according to research conducted by digital media experts from Rice University and the University of Michigan.
Their [...]

The Idea of Order: Transforming Research Collections for 21st Century Scholarship was released June 2 by the Washington, D.C.-based Council on Library and Information Resources, a nonprofit group that advocates for greater access to information. The research examines factors that have been barriers to educators and librarians who advocate for digital libraries, such as reluctant faculty members, challenges [...]

Education Week 
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that as many as 35 percent of teens have experienced some kind of “electronic aggression,” threats, rumors or other bullying behavior expressed through cell phones or the Internet. But if students are using their own computers and their own time to bully others, administrators’ hands are [...]

eSchool News  
While such use of the technology is not quite the subject of a national dialogue yet, Vail and other districts have helped launch a discussion among experts about the benefits and drawbacks of merging Internet access with school transit. As with every new technology idea, concerns arise about cost, online content filtering and safety, [...]

New York Times 
Ever since the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks exposed the communications difficulty that police, fire, and other personnel had in a crisis, government and public safety officials have wrestled with how to rebuild the nation’s emergency networks. Nine years later, that effort has reached a showdown between the FCC and public safety officials. [...]

eSchool News 
Some schools are using tools such as speech recognition technology to give students a personal reading coach inside the classroom. Others are taking advantage of mobile technology to help students build the skills they need for reading fluency in their spare time, wherever they might be, by downloading audio books or applications to their [...]

WIRED 
Two prominent United States Senators have told the Federal Communications Commission that it’s time to fast track “white space” devices for sending and receiving broadband. “We request that you prioritize action on white spaces and urge the FCC to adhere to its Broadband Action Agenda and complete final rules in the third quarter of 2010,” [...]

PC Mag 
Apple’s latest version of the iPhone features a new video application called FaceTime that can be used by people who cannot hear to communicate from separate locations using sign language. The application is similar to tools such as Skype and iChat but expands videoconferencing to mobile technology.
Full story

eSchool News  
Whether teachers are in a school like Quest to Learn or a traditional classroom, providing professional development to address the challenges presented by transitioning to game-based teaching and learning methods is essential to supporting effective instruction, experts say.
Locating and undergoing the training necessary to integrate games into the classroom is difficult, however, and that [...]

eSchool News  
Virtual schools have become a popular alternative for students with special needs who may not be successful in traditional school environments, but experts differ on whether online learning — in its current form — is a good fit for special education. Many educators say the benefits include fewer distractions, a self-paced curriculum and the [...]

SmartBlog 
From easy computer access to the “passback effect” (parents passing their mobile devices to the back seat of the car to keep children occupied), children as young as  age 3 are preparing to take part in the social-media revolution. The good news and bad news is that children are natural socializers and are rarely shy [...]

New York Times 
Schools across the country are incorporating project-based engineering lessons into the science curriculum — even at the kindergarten level — prompted by concerns about preparing U.S. students to compete in a global economy. Supporters say the engineering focus stimulates creativity and problem-solving while reinforcing science and math skills, but critics question whether students [...]

eSchool News 
A new encrypted search feature that internet search giant Google Inc. rolled out last month is causing problems for schools, which say the service keeps them from complying with the Children’s Internet Protection Act (CIPA) and could put their federal e-Rate funding at risk. The service lets users search the web in a way [...]

Digital Directions 
Just a few years ago, social networking meant little more to educators than the headache of determining whether to penalize students for inappropriate activities captured on Facebook or MySpace. Now, teachers and students have a vast array of social-networking sites and tools—from Ning to VoiceThread and Second Life—to draw on for such serious uses [...]

eSchool News 
The national Parent Teacher Association (PTA) and Facebook are joining forces to promote internet safety through a set of tools and resources for children, schools, and parents. The world’s largest online social network and the National PTA will work together to build a program to provide information and support about such issues as cyber [...]

eSchool News  
How can technology be leveraged to deliver a world-class education affordably to students in developing countries? That’s the question a new competition asks, and the best idea will earn $10,000 for its creator.
Many school-age children in developing countries need access to educational opportunities, and the publication The Economist and InnoCentive Inc. have turned to [...]

eSchool News 
Research and a recent pilot program that put eReaders in college students’ hands suggest that most students aren’t ready to read their textbooks electronically, despite the proliferation of internet-ready mobile devices on campuses nationwide.
In fact, 74 percent of students surveyed by the National Association of College Stores (NACS), a nonprofit trade organization representing 3,000 [...]

eSchool News  
A federal online safety task force issued a report June 4, noting that the real world and the online lives of today’s students are overlapping. Although internet safety education is essential, the report says, scare tactics do little to influence the behavior of children and teenagers, who spend a large part of their lives [...]

New York Times 
Wal-Mart is dipping its toe into the online-education waters, working with a web-based university to offer its employees in the United States affordable college degrees. The partnership with American Public University, a for-profit school with about 70,000 online students, will allow some Wal-Mart and Sam’s Club employees to earn credits in areas like [...]

Science Daily  
VI Fit, a project at the University of Nevada, Reno, helps children who are blind become more physically active and healthy through video games. The human-computer interaction research team in the computer science and engineering department has developed a motion-sensing-based tennis and bowling exergame.
Full story

CNET  
A new study finds that educational iPhone apps can increase a child’s vocabulary acquisition by as much as 31 percent within two weeks. The study is part of a larger look at the relationship between technology and education, administered by PBS and funded by a grant from the Department of Education.
Full story

Pittsburgh Post-Gazette  
Twenty states will receive $250 million in federal stimulus money to create longitudinal data systems and track students’ performance throughout the educational careers, the Education Department announced Friday.
Full story

Popular Science 
Researchers at the University of Southern California are using robots to study how children with autism recognize and respond to facial expressions and social cues. A shortage of trained experts to diagnose, study and treat the growing number of children with the disorder has prompted the approach, which researchers say holds promise for improving [...]

Yahoo! News 
The Federal Communications Commission wants to find out whether broadband providers are delivering internet connections that are as fast as advertised—and so the agency is seeking 10,000 volunteers to take part in a study of residential broadband speeds. Specialized equipment will be installed in homes across the country to measure internet connections. Those results [...]

Science Daily 
Four out of five children can’t tell when they are talking to an adult posing as a child on the internet, according to researchers working on software to track pedophiles online. Computer Scientists at Lancaster University have been working on a tool which can work out a person’s age and gender using language analysis [...]

eSchool News 
The Education Division of the Software & Information Industry Association (SIIA) showcased some of the leading growth companies in the education technology market and recognized the best among them as part of the Innovation Incubator Program at its annual Ed Tech Industry Summit, held May 24, 2010, in San Francisco. The Innovation Incubator Program [...]

Pittsburgh Post-Gazette 
Research shows that video games — even violent games — can improve vision and other brain functions, including math performance, according to presenters at a New York University conference on using games for learning. One researcher said she believes video games will eventually become part of school curricula. “We are testing this hypothesis that [...]

A new report from the Pew Internet & American Life Project, Reputation Management and Social Media, suggests that young adults are leading the pack in online reputation management, especially when it comes to social networking sites. The study found that young adults ages 18-29 are the most likely to limit the amount of personal information they share online—and the least likely to trust [...]

Education Week 
After a couple of false starts in recent weeks amid partisan wrangling, the U.S. House of Representatives today approved a bill to reauthorize the America COMPETES Act, legislation that contains a strong focus on improving education in the STEM fields—science, technology, engineering, and mathematics.
The final vote was 262 to 150, with 17 Republicans joining [...]

eSchool News 
From public relations in social media to the potential marketing power of “mommy bloggers,” colleges and universities are offering graduate-level certificates focusing on the business side of Twitter, Facebook, and a host of other sites that draw Americans from every demographic.
Social media courses have sprung up on college campuses as social media web sites—once [...]

A survey sponsored by Intel indicates that 89 percent of health care decision makers believe telehealth technology, specifically video conferencing and collaboration, will have a significant positive effect on patient care and the health care industry over the next ten years. Many survey respondents predicted that it will improve patient care as well as lower [...]

New York Times 
Two top Democratic legislators said Monday that they would begin a process to modernize telecommunications laws that were last overhauled in 1996 but barely mention the internet. Senator John D. Rockefeller IV of West Virginia, chairman of the Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee, and Representative Henry A. Waxman of California, chairman of [...]

THE Journal  
The 2010 We Can Change the World Challenge awarded top prizes to teams of K-8 students that developed the best plans rooted in science, technology, engineering and math that would spur community action to improve the environment.
Full story

Education Week  
President Barack Obama has said that America faces “few more urgent challenges than preparing our children to compete in a global economy.” Being able to understand and make use of the world’s vast telecommunications infrastructure is certainly part of that preparation. So it was no surprise when the White House issued its Cyberspace Policy [...]

eSchool News 
A project to show youth-produced videos on 2,200 Los Angeles city buses, the next generation of a graphical programming language that allows young people to create their own interactive features, and an online game that teaches kids the environmental impact of their personal choices are among 10 winning projects that will share $1.7 million [...]

eSchool News 
The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has proposed new e-Rate rules designed to simplify the program and bring discounts on networking services to more schools and libraries. Among other actions, the FCC wants to index the e-Rate to inflation. That would result in the first increase in funding to the $2.25 billion-a-year program since it [...]

MercuryNews.com  
One chapter is closing—and another is opening—as Stanford University moves toward the creation of its first “bookless library,” a smaller but more efficient and largely electronic library that can accommodate the vast, expanding, and interrelated literature of Physics, Computer Science, and Engineering. “The role of this new library is less to do with shelving and [...]

eSchool News 
It was strike two for a major science funding bill on May 19 as House Republicans again united to derail legislation they said was too expensive. Going down to defeat was an updated version of the America COMPETES Act, legislation that would have committed more than $40 billion over three years to boost funding [...]

eSchool News 
School libraries are an important resource that should be leveraged as state and local leaders implement the recommendations in the National Education Technology Plan, the American Library Association (ALA) says. In comments filed with the U.S. Department of Education (ED) on May 17, ALA said it applauds many of the plan’s recommendations. The organization [...]

CNET 
The Federal Communications Commission warned May 20 in a new report that the wireless industry is becoming more concentrated. In its annual report on competition, the FCC reversed years of findings that the market is competitive. The report didn’t say that the market is not competitive, rather that it has become more concentrated over recent [...]

Pittsburgh Post-Gazette 
A Web-based science game being designed to interest more girls in science and gaming technology won $200,000 in the MacArthur Digital Media and Learning Competition. The Carnegie Science Center’s Click!Online game will feature a fictional spy agency where girls can solve real-world challenges in environmental protection, “expressive technology” and biomedical science. “Senior agents” will [...]

eSchool News 
Researchers at the University of Southern California have created an online game that simulates the college-application process for students. More than 100 students in Los Angeles-area high schools tested the Pathfinder game this year, and USC hopes to win funding to offer the Web-based tool for free to schools, where resources for college counseling [...]

Yahoo! News  
The American Heart Association and Nintendo Co. are teaming up to promote the popular Wii video game console as the health advocacy group concedes that its campaign for traditional exercise isn’t working. The surprising partnership, announced May 17, comes amid growing concern about obesity among kids who spend much of their time watching television [...]

NY1 (New York City) 
A new device is being tested to help people with visual impairments walk with canes. The WiiCane features Wii motion-tracking technology to help users practice making turns indoors and walking in a straight line — offering audio signals based on whether they’re off course. “Evidence shows that once learned, those skills are [...]

eSchool News 
Alarmed at what they see as a potential setback in federal support for education technology, several dozen state and national education groups and high-tech companies have sent letters to House and Senate lawmakers, urging them to continue funding the Enhancing Education Through Technology (EETT) block-grant program in fiscal 2011.
The letters expressed concerns about President [...]

Scotland and the Netherlands both invest significantly more federal money per student in information and communications technologies (ICT) than the United States, and they both view ICT as essential to classroom teaching and learning and in developing 21st-century skills, a delegation of education technology advocates discovered during a recent visit to the two countries. The [...]

Education Week  
Do you have some big ideas about the way that online learning can help overcome barriers to universal education in developing nations around the world? If so, you may be a candidate for the 21st Century Cyberschools Challenge, hosted by The Economist and InnoCentive Inc., which fosters innovation in corporate, government, and nonprofit organizations.
People [...]

eSchool News 
The social networking web site Ning, which many educators have used to establish online groups with similar professional interests, will remain free for educators despite moving to a fee-based model this summer, the site announced May 4. But some education technology experts believe Ning could see dwindling interest among teachers and college professors because [...]

eSchool News 
A small but growing number of schools across the nation are turning classroom lessons into engaging experiences with augmented reality (AR), a technology that overlays digital information on top of real-world surroundings as viewed through a smart phone or other handheld, GPS-enabled device.
Full story

New York Times 
Google is continuing with its effort to become the one-stop translation shop, announcing May 11 that it has added speech capabilities to more languages on Google Translate, its polylingual text translation tool. The feature uses the open-source speech synthesizer eSpeak to turn text into sound, giving Google Translate users the ability to hear [...]

Federal Computer Week 
The Education Department is being urged to revise its draft version of the National Education Technology Plan to include measures on adult education and on accessibility for people with learning disabilities. The department published the draft plan in March and welcomes public comments until May 14. After that date, the draft will be [...]

Yahoo! News  
Even as audio versions of best-sellers fill store shelves and new technology fuels the popularity of digitized books, the number of titles accessible to people who are blind or dyslexic is minuscule. But a new service by the nonprofit Internet Archive in San Francisco is trying to change that. The group has hired hundreds [...]

Yahoo! News  
Federal regulators plan to examine whether Apple Inc. is violating antitrust rules by requiring software developers to use Apple programming tools to create applications for the iPhone and iPad.
Full story

Disability Scoop  
A new online tool from the Department of Labor is intended to clarify the protections afforded employees with disabilities, given the unique circumstances of each work environment. The interactive Disability Nondiscrimination Law Advisor allows users to input details of a particular employment situation such as the number of employees a company has and whether [...]

The results from Unleashing the Future: Educators “Speak Up” about the use of Emerging Technologies for Learning, a recent survey on education technology, suggest that schools are making progress on integrating technology into the curriculum—but the survey also reveals key disparities in how students, educators, administrators, and even aspiring teachers think of various technology tools.
To read [...]

The Washington Post 
The chairman of the Federal Communications Commission has indicated he wants to keep broadband services deregulated—even as a federal court decision has exposed weaknesses in the agency’s ability to be a strong watchdog over the companies that provide access to the web. The FCC currently has “ancillary” authority over broadband providers such as [...]

eSchool News 
Aiming to engage students who are multitasking with different forms of technology, companies are creating collaborative learning spaces online where students can help one another solve homework problems and study—all while building important 21st-century skills.
Full story

Education Week 
At a time when it’s hard to find bipartisanship in Washington, it appears that legislation to reauthorize the America COMPETES Act may prove a noteworthy exception. Yesterday, the House Science and Technology Committee by a vote of 29-8 approved a wide-ranging bill to reauthorize the law, which includes a strong emphasis on improving education [...]

New York Times 
Twitter’s donation of its archives to the Library of Congress offers vast potential—as well as challenges—for historians. Twitter users now broadcast about 55 million Tweets a day. In just four years, about 10 billion of these brief messages have accumulated. Not a few are pure drivel—but, taken together, they are likely to be [...]

Education Week 
Just as the model of blended learning is pulling the worlds of virtual and brick-and-mortar schools together, new theories within virtual learning are bridging the divide between synchronous and asynchronous instructional methods. Online educators say they once debated whether to deliver courses synchronously, by allowing access to instruction during a given time, or asynchronously, [...]

Education Week 
While there are examples of innovative funding models for virtual schools and online course programs, most struggle to secure sustainable, adequate, and equitable funding, experts in the field say. One of the biggest areas of funding concern for online education advocates is state-led programs, the vast majority of which are paid for through state [...]

Education Week  
As educators and experts look to create an online-learning framework that spans the country — or maybe even the globe — some say that restrictive policies and other barriers will need to be removed. Funding is also an obstacle to creating online-learning networks that are not restricted to a single state. And while publicly [...]

eSchool News 
Since Ning launched its social network that lets members create groups on any topic back in 2007, thousands of educators have used the online tool to connect with their peers across the globe. Now, the company says it soon will “phase out” its free service, forcing educators to find other alternatives or pay to [...]

Education Week  
Not all school accreditation agencies are set up to handle the operations of online education providers, but the accelerating growth of virtual schools is prompting many accreditors to adapt to evaluate those types of programs.
Full story

New York Times 
To make up for a decline in visits, many museums are taking their programs to the classroom through traveling programs, video conferencing, or computer-based lessons, reports the New York Times. Over the last few years, many schools have eliminated or cut back on museum trips—partly because of tight budgets that make it hard [...]

eSchool News 
In a move that could spur more widespread use of online tools for communicating and collaborating within K-12 education, software giant Microsoft Corp. has announced a strategic partnership with ePals, which provides a safe online platform for teachers and students to share information and work together on projects.
Full story

eSchool News 
Many health experts point to the amount of “screen time” that today’s students are logging as a key contributing factor in the child obesity epidemic. Now, backed by a campaign launched by First Lady Michelle Obama earlier this year, some schools are using the same technologies that have many kids glued to their cell [...]

eSchool News 
Handheld devices that display 3-D animation could soon be used in the classroom, technology advocates say. New 3-D technology being developed for devices such as Nintendo DS could help students engage in learning with technology they are already using to play video games outside of school, the advocates suggest. “3-D will really benefit education [...]

March 2010 statistics revealing the employment landscape for people with disabilities have been released. Learn more about the labor force representation of individuals with disabilities.

Yahoo! News  
Apple’s new iPad and its applications are attracting interest from advocates who are considering its potential as a cost-effective communications tool for people with disabilities. The device’s large touchscreen is also an improvement over the smaller screens of the iPhone and iPod Touch, the executive director for the Alliance for Technology Access said. “It’s [...]

eSchool News 
Federal officials are leading the charge to develop a new generation of summative, end-of-year exams that are delivered and scored by computer; focus on a deeper understanding of the curriculum, instead of just multiple choice; and can measure students’ readiness for college or a career more accurately.
Full story

eSchool News 
The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) on Feb. 18 approved a motion allowing school systems to let members of their community use e-Rate funded infrastructure after school hours. The FCC’s order waives the rule requiring schools to use e-Rate funded equipment and services only for “educational purposes,” and it’s part of the agency’s larger strategy [...]

eSchool News  
Distance-learning enrollment in American community colleges jumped by 22 percent during the 2008-09 academic year, an increase fueled in part by an influx of nontraditional students who require the flexibility of online courses, according to a survey conducted by the Instructional Technology Council (ITC).
Full story

Business Insider  
Facebook has named the first recipients of its new fellowship program for Ph.D. candidates doing research in areas related to “the social web and internet technology,” reports the San Francisco Chronicle. The five fellowships went to students working in cloud computing, social computing, behavioral economics, machine learning, and internet economics. The fellowships cover tuition [...]

THE Journal  
Cloud computing and gaming are among the six technologies that will have a major positive impact on K-12 education in the next few years, according to researchers. But education also faces some critical challenges in that timeframe, including challenges that may require fundamental changes to the way we educate in the United States. This [...]

eSchool News  
While many school stakeholders say there’s a lot to like in the new National Education Technology Plan (NETP), such as its emphasis on Universal Design for Learning (UDL) and using open educational resources to improve instruction, others are concerned about what they see as a fundamental conflict between the plan’s call for innovation on [...]

Associated Press  
Facebook has launched a revamped internal site designed to help people stay safe and report threats while on the popular online hangout. Facebook’s “”Safety Center,”” which features new tools for parents, teachers, teens and law enforcement, is the first major endeavor from the social networking site and its four-month-old global safety advisory board.
Full story

New York Times 
Students’ online behavior is getting more attention as an important part of teaching children how to use the Internet. Schools in a number of states are considering the use of a free curriculum by Common Sense Media, which provides research-based lessons on a number of ethical issues associated with Internet use, including students’ [...]

Yahoo! News  
The Federal Communications Commission said April 8 that it intends to move forward quickly with key recommendations in its national broadband plan—even though a federal appeals court this week undermined the agency’s legal authority to regulate high-speed internet access. The FCC needs that authority to push ahead with many parts of the broadband plan, [...]

New York Times 
A number of websites have compiled free online resources for educators. The OpenCourseWare Consortium offers free course materials and lectures in multiple languages from 250 universities worldwide, as long as members post 10 courses within two years. Another Massachusetts Institute of Technology website offers introductory courses in calculus, physics and biology to prepare [...]

New York Times 
Putting free courseware online was a first step in reimagining education. So what now? Wiki universities, smart courses, and—maybe—improved learning. A decade has passed since MIT decided to give much of its course materials to the public in an act of largesse. The MIT OpenCourseWare Initiative helped usher in the “open educational resources” [...]

eSchool News 
The Southern Regional Education Board (SREB) and the International Association for K-12 Online Learning (iNACOL) have teamed up on a new awards program that will recognize an outstanding online teacher for his or her exceptional contributions to virtual K-12 education.
Full story

Digital Education  
The report, from the Cyberbullying Research Center, used data from nearly 2,000 randomly selected youths from a large school district in the south. Of those students, it found cyberbullying victims were almost twice as likely to have attempted suicide as those who hadn’t experienced cyberbullying.
The study noted a connection between all forms of bullying [...]

eSchool News  
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia ruled that the FCC lacks the authority to require broadband providers to give equal treatment to all internet traffic flowing over their networks. That was a big victory for Comcast Corp., the nation’s largest cable company, which had challenged the FCC’s authority to impose [...]

eSchool News 
More than 150,000 applications for Apple’s iPad are now available for download, and many have been designed for students and teachers. One application offers students a visual exploration of the periodic table, and one sponsored by the language-learning site Hello-Hello.com allows users to study Spanish or connect with native speakers of that and other [...]

THE Journal  
The company Realityworks has developed a set of Internet-based games to help students experience scenarios and apply business strategies to solve problems. The Entrepreneurship Game teaches students how to launch a product and respond to consumer and market demands, while The Business Game teaches them the basics of bringing a new product to market. [...]

eSchool News 
Employers are looking for candidates who can navigate, critically evaluate, and make sense of the wealth of information available through digital media—and now educators have a new way to determine a student’s baseline digital literacy with a certification exam that measures the test-taker’s ability to assess information, think critically, and perform a range of [...]

eSchool News 
Employers are looking for candidates who can navigate, critically evaluate, and make sense of the wealth of information available through digital media—and now educators have a new way to determine a student’s baseline digital literacy with a certification exam that measures the test-taker’s ability to assess information, think critically, and perform a range of [...]

Fast Company 
Smartphones and other hand-held, networked devices have the ability to revolutionize the way educators teach and children learn — and companies, government entities and organizations alike are launching programs to unlock their potential. The Education Department has set aside $5 billion for pilot technology programs, foundations have started educational-investing ventures and companies such as [...]

New York Times 
As companies turn to social media to engage customers on a personal level, several top business schools are incorporating courses on social networks into their curricula, reports the New York Times. These include Harvard Business School, London Business School, and Insead, the international business school based in Fontainebleau, France. Social networking courses aim [...]

PC World 
Imagine controlling Apple iTunes from inside Microsoft Word without having to switch applications. That could be possible thanks to the efforts of researchers at the University of Washington who are working on a project that could essentially make any proprietary software act like open source. “Microsoft and Apple aren’t going to open up all [...]

WIRED  
For most blind computer users, surfing the internet or catching up on e-mail means reading just one line at a time, because commercially available braille displays can’t show full pages of text. Researchers from North Carolina State University now say they have devised a display that would allow visually challenged users to read a full [...]

Digital Education  
iNACOL’s parents’ guide to choosing online programs aims to make sure parents get the information they need to make informed decisions about their children’s education. The document breaks down the different types of programs and talks about how to evaluate the quality and effectiveness of each. It outlines a list of questions that parents [...]

eSchool News 
School officials need to share information via a variety of media platforms in order to reach today’s “on-the-go” news consumers, a new study suggests.
According to the study from the Pew Internet and American Life project, while 99 percent of American adults access news daily, only 7 percent use just one media platform to do [...]

New York Times  
Social-networking tools are proving a vital link for people who are disabled or seriously ill, letting them share essential information and build much-needed support networks, according to research. From general socializing to dedicated networks targeting specific diseases or disabilities, the Web and social networks serve as a valuable source of emotional support and [...]

Digital Education 
Most educators seem to have an open mind about using open-source software for teaching and learning. But they might have to study up a bit more before they can use it for online testing.
That is the conclusion of a study released today(PDF) by technology research firm Grunwald Associates that fuses 81 interviews with testing, [...]

The Hill 
A new coalition, called the Digital Adoption Coalition, has formed with the goal of spurring the increase of broadband Internet adoption among the poorest households in the U.S. The coalition includes One Economy, Connected Nation, AT&T, Comcast, Dell, Intel, Time Warner Cable and USTelecom, among others. The group intends work with the Department of [...]

Positive Gaming™ has released the Positive Gaming™ iDANCE2 software. The dance game contains an array of features that make it ideal for creating a fun and engaging environment for players of all ages while also providing cognitive, social and physical development benefits. The system was designed specifically for environments such as fitness centers, schools, YMCAs, [...]

Education Week 
A Game Boy-like device now being used by 40,000 students in 15 states aims to improve the reading skills of K-2 students. Much attention has been paid to how mobile-learning devices can be incorporated into middle and high schools, but Seth Weinberger is targeting a different set of students: kindergartners through 2nd graders.
“The sweet [...]

Education Week  
Experts say more-rigorous research is needed to build a case for mobile learning. For their fans and promoters, mobile devices—whether smartphones, gaming gadgets, MP3 players, or netbooks—have the potential to transform teaching and learning by engaging students more deeply in lessons and promoting anytime, anywhere learning. Only problem is, they can’t quite prove it [...]

KomoNews.com
A group of computer and engineering students at the University of Washington has created five mobile-phone applications to help simplify everyday tasks for people with disabilities. An application called BrailleLearn helps children learn Braille through a virtual pet game, while another program helps people with visual or hearing impairments determine their location and find points [...]

Roll Call
A coalition of business groups is lobbying Congress for more federal support for science and math education programs. The Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics Education Coalition wants to set a goal of graduating 400,000 university students in STEM subjects by the year 2020, which is double the number today. “We need to help the [...]

Education Week
The National Broadband Plan released by the Federal Communications Commission today outlines a number of recommendations that could directly affect K-12 schools: revamping the federal E-rate program to offer more flexible use of the aid and streamline the application process; removing technological and policy barriers to online coursetaking; and improving the collection and transparency [...]

Digital Education
The Information Technology and Innovation Foundation held an event on March 11, 2010 featuring FCC Broadband Strategy Director Blair Levin and the National Purpose team. FCC Education Director Steve Midgley started his portion of the presentation by showing examples of the positive impact broadband technology could have on education, such as personalizing instruction and offering higher quality [...]

eSchool News
FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski announced the creation of the FCC’s “Children’s Agenda for Digital Opportunity,” which he said will build on the four pillars of digital access, digital literacy, digital citizenship, and digital safety. The Children’s Agenda is part of the National Broadband Plan to be released this week.
Full story

Education Week
A new business and industry coalition set to be announced tomorrow aims to “”enhance and elevate”” the U.S. commitment to STEM education, with participants representing diverse sectors, from the aerospace, manufacturing, and even entertainment industries to biotechnology, software engineers, and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.
Full story

eSchool News
Four universities are giving students the chance to complete certificate and degree programs by downloading class material to mobile devices like iPhones and iPods in a distance-learning initiative that could be one day be commonplace.
Full story

Education Daily
In a race to reauthorize the America COMPETES Act this year, the House Science and Technology Committee gleaned input from industry stakeholders on ways to advance student achievement in science, technology, engineering and mathematics by scaling effective programs authorized in the legislation and through other strategies such as public-private partnerships.

THE Journal
In a presentation to stakeholders Wednesday, FCC Director of Education Steve Midgley provided a preview of the forthcoming National Broadband Plan, which will be formally released next week. The plan, as it pertains to education, calls for an expansion of E-Rate and new federal supports for the promotion and delivery of online learning.
Full story

Education Week
A new study finds that scientists’ initial interest in their subject is often sparked before they enter middle school, a conclusion the researchers suggest has implications for rethinking policy efforts aimed at getting more young people to become scientists.
The federally funded study examines the experiences reported by 116 scientists and graduate students that first [...]

Education Week
With millions of grant dollars on the line, representatives of the 16 state finalists for federal Race to the Top prize money will go to Washington next week to make final, in-person pitches to the U.S. Department of Education for investment in their brand of school reform.
Full story

Google News
First lady Michelle Obama is calling on video-game and software developers to design applications that encourage children to adopt a healthier lifestyle. As part of her “Let’s Move!” campaign against childhood obesity, the Apps for Healthy Kids challenge offers winners a share of $40,000 in federal prize money. Developers who create programs that help [...]

USA Today
At a handful of institutions, students working toward degrees online are meeting outside of class via the web to form online clubs as well. These extracurricular organizations offer online students what many feel they are missing: the social and professional opportunities that historically have been part of the college experience.
Full story

CNET.com
Researchers at IBM, India’s National Institute of Design and the University of Tokyo’s Research Center for Advanced Science and Technology are collaborating to create mobile devices that are more accessible for a range of people, including those with disabilities. “By focusing on mobile devices, which have a tremendous potential to empower them, we believe the [...]

eSchool News
James Shelton, assistant deputy secretary for ED’s Office of Innovation and Improvement, acknowledged that the innovation pipeline is fractured and there are obstacles making it difficult to get from the research and development phase to taking a product or idea to scale. Specifically, Shelton said he is worried that applicants might have problems providing [...]

eCampus News
Student response systems, or clickers—not unlike gadgets used on television game shows—first appeared in college classrooms over a decade ago and have since spread to just about every college and university in the country, thanks to cheaper and better technology. But as clickers have become commonplace, a divide has emerged over just how sophisticated [...]

Education Daily
Educational technology advocates told policymakers federal education technology funding streams should not be consolidated, as called for by the Obama administration’s FY 2011 budget request, in order for education reforms to succeed.

eSchool News
The federal government’s investment in education technology is an opportunity for the publishing industry, which must respond by creating more engaging content that is relevant for today’s tech-savvy students, said Education Secretary Arne Duncan.
Full story

The New York Times
Google’s network pushes the limits of translation technology and has become a favored source of translations for millions of people. The company’s free Google Translate service handles 52 languages, more than any similar system, and people use it hundreds of millions of times a week to translate web pages and other text. [...]

CNET.com
Google is building on its partnership with the World Bank, U.S. Census Bureau, and other gatherers of statistics to present an array of data in visual form within Google Labs. Google Public Data Explorer went live March 8. The site takes public data regarding schools, population, crime, and other topics to construct charts and graphs [...]

Education Daily   
Stakeholders on Capitol Hill this week urged Congress to salvage the main federal education technology funding stream, which President Obama proposed to eliminate in his FY 2011 budget request. More than 200 educators at the Washington Education Technology Summit pledged to work with legislators to restore funding for key initiatives they say are necessary [...]

Yahoo! News
Federal regulators trying to bring high-speed internet connections to all Americans will propose tapping the government program that now subsidizes telephone service in poor and rural areas. The Federal Communications Commission will include a proposal to revamp the Universal Service Fund (USF) as part of a national broadband plan due to Congress on March [...]

MercuryNews.com
YouTube has begun automatic captioning of most of its videos in a move that will make the site — including educational content such as university lectures — more accessible to people who are hearing-impaired. Using speech-recognition technology, the auto-captioning is initially available in English only but will eventually allow for translation into multiple languages.
Full story

THE Journal
Researchers at Pennsylvania State University have developed an early-intervention program to improve academic and behavioral skills in kindergarten students thought to be at risk for low achievement. The Focus on Learning program includes laptop applications and games that help students develop reading and vocabulary abilities, an approach to literacy that has students focus on [...]

Science Daily
Regardless of gender or nationality, young people who are exposed to violent video games are more likely to behave more aggressively, and be less caring, than those who are not.
Full Story

Science Daily
Teens who spend more time watching television or using computers appear to have poorer relationships with their parents and peers, according to a report in the March issue of Archives of Pediatrics & Adolescent Medicine, one of the JAMA/Archives journals.
Full Story

Wired.com
The Intel Classmate PC has been around for the last three years as a low-cost notebook meant for children to use at school and for learning. Now, Intel is looking to refresh the design with a new, convertible model that can also be used like a tablet. The convertible Classmate PC can be twisted into [...]

Archives of Adolescent & Pediatric Medicine
A recent report on whether toddlers who watched an educational DVD for six weeks improved their word learning found there were no real vocabulary differences between the two groups, except in cases where parents intervened to teach the words to their children.
Researchers from the University of California, Riverside, studied 96 [...]

Education Week
A bipartisan group of U.S. senators this week introduced legislation to promote and improve engineering education in schools.
Full story

eSchool News
Students aren’t getting enough instruction in school on how to use technology and the internet in a safe and responsible manner, a new poll suggests. Released by the National Cyber Security Alliance (NCSA) and supported by Microsoft Corp., the survey found fewer than one-fourth of U.S. teachers have spent more than six hours on [...]

eSchool News
The federal government’s plan to provide fast internet connections to all Americans will have to include some basic instruction in Web 101, a new survey reveals. According to the survey, nearly half of adults who don’t subscribe to broadband say the internet is too dangerous for children—a finding that suggests policy makers and educators [...]

NCTI attended FOSE this year and were surprised at how few IT accessibility and workplace accommodations booths, vendors, and solutions were present. Learn what we did on CAP’s workplace accommodations programs and buyaccessible.gov’s work.

A new educational software application features interactive scenes and graphics to help visual learners — such as students with special needs and non-native English speakers — relate vocabulary to actions, objects or descriptions. The application was designed by an Irish educator to help students with autism, Down syndrome or other cognitive disabilities that make it [...]

A wheelchair developed by researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology features technology that allows users to power the device using their tongue. Scientists said the wheelchair, which is being tested, can be used by people with the most severe spinal cord injuries because the tongue bypasses the spinal cord and is connected to the [...]

Just in time for the 2010 Winter Olympiad taking place in Vancouver, BC this February, NBC Universal (NBCU) has teamed up with the National Science Foundation (NSF) to produce “The Science of the Olympic Winter Games,” a 16-part educational video series that gives students extensive insight into the physics, physiology, and related science of sports [...]

Officials are expected to announce the creation of the National Center for Research in Advanced Information and Digital Technologies, a grant-providing trust to explore how schools, libraries and other nonprofits can best use the latest digital technology. The fund will receive an initial federal appropriation of $500,000 and will also seek funding from private sources.
Read [...]

Americans between the ages of 8 and 18 devote an average of 7 hours, 38 minutes a day — or 53 hours a week — to media use, according to a report by the Kaiser Family Foundation. That is up by more than an hour from five years ago, when a similar study was conducted. [...]

When most people think of electronic book readers, Amazon’s thin, white Kindle probably springs to mind. But that could be about to change: A cascade of new eBook readers will hit the market this year, taking the devices far beyond gray-scale screens with features such as touch navigation and video chatting–and probably lowering prices, too.
It’s [...]

Researchers theorize that the ever-accelerating pace of technological change might be creating a series of mini-generation gaps, with each group of children uniquely influenced by the tech tools available in their formative stages of development.
Read the full story from the New York Times.

Nickelodeon, whose pre-school television shows focus on teaching social skills as much as letters and numbers, is moving squarely into the academic realm with the introduction of “Team Umizoomi,” which it said is the only pre-school series focused entirely on teaching math to children.
Read the full story from the New York Times.

Facebook could be a distraction that drags down grade point averages, or a popular online hangout spot that has no impact on college students’ academics — depending on which university study you read.
Read the full story from eSchool News.

The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) ran into a potential setback Jan. 8 in its push to draft rules that would require internet providers to give equal treatment to all data flowing over their networks.
In hearing a legal dispute between the agency and Comcast Corp., a three-judge federal appeals court panel questioned the commission’s authority to [...]

The push to install technology-rich language labs is growing, so much so in some places that parent fundraising organizations are making it the focus of their efforts. Educators who use the labs say that they allow students to spend significantly more time doing language-practice exercises, such as hearing themselves speak. The labs also take away [...]

Readability is a simple tool that makes reading on the web more enjoyable by removing the clutter (ads, flashy text, etc.) around what you’re reading. Users choose text style (newspaper,novel, eBook, or terminal), text size (small, medium, large, extra large), and margins for the page (narrow, medium, wide, extra wide). Users then click the Readability [...]

Researchers are testing new tutoring software that gauges and responds to students’ confidence and frustration levels. Building on the success of existing artificial-intelligence programs such as Cognitive Tutor — used in 2,600 schools nationwide — the new digital-tutoring programs rely on sensors to assess and respond to a student’s emotions with the help of animated [...]

Textbook publisher Flat World Knowledge and Bookshare, the largest online library for individuals with print disabilities, have teamed up to make more content available to students who cannot turn a page or who cannot see standard print books. Bookshare, a nonprofit launched in 2002, has steadily expanded its catalog thanks to a $32.5 million federal [...]

Nationwide Children’s Hospital has published results from a recent study which suggest that teenagers are more willing to provide sensitive health information via a computer interface than directly to a health care provider or parent. In the study, teenagers used a handheld device, called the Health eTouch pad, to answer questions about sexual activity, drug [...]

The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has pledged $12.9 million to fund technology-focused initiatives at community colleges across the U.S. Hilary Pennington, who serves as the director of education, postsecondary success, and special initiatives for the Foundation, says these grants are targeting “the best new ideas that hold the greatest promise for improving the odds [...]

After struggling for years with an anti-snitching culture that made witnesses to crimes or potentially dangerous behavior too afraid to come forward, police across the country are getting help from text-a-tip programs that allow people to send anonymous text messages from their cell phones — and in many cases, the programs have been used to [...]

The increasing availability of free or cheap apps for education have made the devices a popular choice among some techie teachers, and even helped some schools and districts move toward 1-to-1 computing. But with 100,000 apps out there, how’s a teacher to find, review, and decide which ones will work best with students?
The Joan Ganz [...]

Reflecting the expanding responsibilities of technology directors and heightened demand for schools to build students’ 21st-century skills, the Consortium for School Networking has updated its framework detailing how chief technology officers, or CTOs, can become educational leaders in their districts.
The revised “Framework of Essential Skills of the K-12 Chief Technology Officer,” released last week, comes [...]

Missoulian
Questia, an online library of humanities and social-sciences research material, recently launched a new iPhone application. The application allows college students to perform academic research on their mobile phones. The Questia app, which launched in September, costs 99 cents to download and includes a one-week access to the entire research collection. After that, it costs [...]

Yahoo! Tech
Historic manuscripts by Sir Isaac Newton, Benjamin Franklin, and other groundbreaking scientists will be published online for the first time. The Royal Society, the world’s oldest scientific institution, will release famous literature on the web that it has published in its journals over the centuries as part of celebrations to mark its 350th anniversary. [...]

U.S. National Ed Tech Plan, released March 5, 2010, sets an ambitious agenda for using technology to transform teaching and learning. Add your comments to the Plan.

USA Today
General Motors is set to announce today that it has joined with the National Federation of the Blind to develop a technology that will make hybrid and electric cars noisier. The cars barely produce sound when in motion and pose a safety risk for pedestrians, particularly those with visual impairments. The NFB is calling [...]

EdWeek
The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is giving planning grants of up to $100,000 each to nine school districts and charter groups to help them win Investing in Innovation, or i3, grants from the U.S. Department of Education. For i3, the chosen school district winners are: Philadelphia, New Haven, Conn., New Orleans, Minneapolis, Houston, and [...]

eSchool News
The chairman of the Federal Communications Commission says making broadband internet access universally available is this century’s version of building highways or extending railroads coast-to-coast. Broadband access is critical for the country’s economic development, Julius Genachowski said, adding that putting the infrastructure in place will create jobs, help small businesses, and make the U.S. [...]

eSchool News
The U.S. Department of Education, Office of Special Education Programs (OSEP) has awarded Bookshare $100K in supplemental funding to create the first accessible versions of open content digital textbooks. The initial planned conversion of open content textbooks, which are distributed freely under a license selected by the author, are math and science textbooks approved [...]

EA Sports
Throughout its history, EA SPORTS has developed video games to bring the challenge and entertainment of sport to players around the world. This year, through a partnership with VTree LLC, EA SPORTS has developed a game that addresses and entirely different set of challenges, yet for very much the same results – bringing the [...]

eSchool News
College and university library officials are largely disappointed with Google’s decision to exclude non-English books from its digital library in a concession to critics of a proposed legal settlement, saying the move would cut Google’s massive online collection in half and could hamper campus research.
The internet search giant will ease its control over millions [...]

eSchool News
President Barack Obama on Nov. 23 announced the launch of several nationwide programs to help motivate and inspire students to excel in science and math, including a grassroots effort called “”National Lab Day”” and a White House science fair. Obama identified three overarching priorities for STEM education: increasing STEM literacy so all students can [...]

The New York Times
At IBM, a team of nearly 100, including mathematicians and software developers, is working on a project to create an automatic translation tool that has the speed and accuracy to be used in instant messaging between speakers of two different languages.
Full story

EdWeek
Over at the  National Journal’s education blog, two top federal education officials have started a lively conversation on the role of innovation in education. The questions being posed by John Easton, the director of the department’s Institute of Education Sciences, and Jim Shelton, the chief of the office of innovation and improvement, are:
What are the [...]

EdWeek
As the U.S. Department of Education prepares final rules for the $650 million Investing in Innovation Fund, officials face strong concerns from school districts and philanthropies that requiring matching funds from the private sector is unworkable and would turn foundations into the gatekeepers for the federal grants. The influential Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the [...]

eSchool News
When school media specialists and educators make an effort to become familiar with the social-networking web sites and technologies that today’s students use each day, they can forge important learning connections with their students: That was one of the key messages to come out of the American Association of School Librarians’ annual conference, held [...]

THE Journal
HumanWare  has debuted a notetaker designed for students who are blind. The new BrailleNote Apex is small, a thin (0.78″”), and light (1.8 lbs.), making it easy to carry and use. It features a full-size Braille keyboard, 8 GB of internal memory, built-in WiFi, Ethernet, and Bluetooth. The BrailleNote Apex also supports high-capacity SDHC [...]

The New York Times
Google unveiled plans Thursday to employ technology that will provide text captions to many videos on YouTube, improving access for people who are deaf or have hearing impairments. The service will provide the captions in English but will allow for an automatic service to translate the captions into 51 other languages. Google [...]

eSchool News
As part of the organization’s latest effort to learn from colleagues abroad, a delegation of U.S. education technology leaders from the Consortium for School Networking (CoSN) visited Scotland and the Netherlands last week to learn more about the world’s first national intranet for education, international approaches to online safety, and more.
Full story

THE Journal
The implications for HTML5 technologies on learning are profound. As technologies become more “intelligent” and requirements shift away from the manual skills needed to use them, teaching and learning can focus more clearly on the processes of thinking and application. 
Full Story

CNET.com
The Federal Communications Commission met Nov. 18 to discuss obstacles to enacting a national broadband policy that will provide high-speed internet access to every American. One major issue has to do with the Universal Service Fund, a program funded through extra charges on consumers’ phone bills. Another issue is the fact that broadband service providers [...]

BBC
At an international Internet conference in Egypt, advocates and experts argued for improved Internet access for the estimated 650 million people worldwide who have disabilities. One conference speaker outlined challenges faced by many people with disabilities, including affordability and connectivity as well as accessibility of design. “One of the fundamental problems has been not consulting [...]

EdWeek
More than half of U.S. states now operate online-learning initiatives for K-12 students, an increase over the 15 states that did so just two years ago, according to a new survey. Most of the 26 states that have online programs have seen significant growth in enrollments in recent years, with a dozen of them reporting [...]

EdWeek
The co-founder of Wikipedia has launched a Web site designed to offer free access to thousands of education-related videos for students ages 3-18.
Larry Sanger, who helped create Wikipedia and has since left the organization, says the new site, www.watchknow.org, will allow students and teachers to sort through a library of online videos by content, and [...]

eSchool News
Train every pre-service teacher to teach online in teacher-education programs at colleges and universities; invest in the development of open courseware with federal and state funding; encourage the use of technology to create new forms of assessment that better measure student learning gains; provide national standards for school IT support, with recommendations for optimal [...]

Federal Computer Week
As more Web sites are designed to increase the federal government’s transparency, many still lack features that make them accessible for people with disabilities, advocates say. While many sites meet minimum standards of compliance, advocates argue that new common guidelines are needed to provide developers better accessibility standards to build to. An update [...]

THE Journal
The Tucson-based Partnership for 21st Century Skills has announced the release of its Milestones for Improving Learning and Education (MILE) Guide, a resource designed to aid schools and districts in fully and effectively integrating 21st century skills into policy and curricula. The MILE Guide offers a complete framework for 21st century skills integration into [...]

Featured presenters at day two of NCTI’s annual conference shared their vision for technology in education and policy needs to address research, implementation, funding and other barriers that block the way.

Do differences in individuals’ brains affect the way students learn? Experts speaking at the 2009 NCTI conference suggest that the answer is, “yes.” Confirming a commonplace notion, featured panelists reaffirmed that individual characteristics make differentiated learning valuable not only for students with disabilities, but for all students. Going further, our experts in residence focused light on a complex and sometimes misunderstood subject, sharing findings that individual brains learn differently, that apparently similar skills are not always transferrable, and ability to acquire skills works differently in different life stages.

With pervasive access to Facebook, Twitter, IM and a whole host of other online communication technologies, today’s students are our first generation of digital natives. But with technology coming more slowly to education than other disciplines, NCTI panelists and conference participants wrestled with an important question, “Can Teachers Themselves Become Digital Natives?”

NCTI’s first day keynote, Dr. Dan Domenech, asserts that today’s educational environment is still similar to that of yesterday’s one room schoolhouse. In a world of amazing tools and technologies, we still hold class with a sage on the stage, a piece of chalk and an old fashioned blackboard. In a world of information highways, why is it that the proverbial roadway to our schools remain unpaved?

EdWeek
A new podcast about hearing screenings for public-school students is available on the Web site of the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association. ASHA says undiagnosed hearing impairments can lead to poor academic performance among students.
Full story

THE Journal
PBS Teacherline, the online preK-12 professional development resource of the Public Broadcasting Service, will provide professional development courses and teaching resources to encourage the teaching of climate change topics in conjunction with science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) education. The new services are the result of a NASA Global Climate Change Education (GCCE) Grant.
Full [...]

THE Journal
The winners of the Worldwide Innovative Teacher Awards, presented my Microsoft Partners in Learning were announced Friday at Microsoft’s 2009 Worldwide Innovative Education Forum (IEF) being held in Salvador, Brazil. The awards recognize teachers who demonstrate exemplary use of technology in the classroom to improve student learning.
Full story

ABC News
The Rethink Autism Web site features online tutorials on applied behavioral analysis, one of the most expensive and desired treatments for children with autism. Jamie Pagliaro of Rethink Autism said the Web-based program is meant to help families that might not otherwise have access to ABA. “[It] shouldn’t preclude you from having access to [...]

EdWeek
Word slipped out at today’s meeting of the National Board for Education Sciences that the final regulations for the Race to the Top program, which are due to be published any day now, will include a big focus on science, technology, engineering, and math or STEM subjects.
Full story

Venture Beat
Creators of a $1,500 digital reader by Intel say the design of the device is based on years of research and is aimed at improving quality of life for people with visual impairments. Among other things, the device features text-to-speech technology to read books aloud at varying speeds to its users along with Braille [...]

EdWeek
The national board that advises the U.S. Department of Education on its research operations voted to weigh in yesterday on the proposed rules for the new Investing in Innovation or “”i3″” program—and just in the nick of time.
The window for commenting on draft guidelines for the $650 million grant program was scheduled to close at [...]

EdWeek
At the Johns Hopkins Center for Talented Youth, two epidemiology experts recently hosted a live online webinar about the H1N1 virus for middle- and high-school students nationwide. The “Swine Online” webinar is just one way scientists say they are using technology to give K-12 students insight into their work. “In school, we’re reading right out [...]

Try out this Leaders and Laggards interactive map that displays the 2009 data on state educational innovations and barriers. See how states match up on 8 dimensions.

The Salt Lake Tribune (Utah)
Recently developed video-relay technology is allowing people with hearing impairments to communicate over videophone using American Sign Language, which is translated by ASL interpreters into voice at nationwide relay centers. At a recent conference in Utah, a Gallaudet University professor emphasized that the effectiveness of the technology depends on properly trained [...]

THE Journal
Blackboard and Microsoft have joined forces to offer students access to information from their online courses on Web browsers.
Full story

THE Journal
In order to advance and compete, K-12 students for whom English is not a first language still must learn subjects in addition to English. Quite often, however, teachers are not fully equipped to teach these subjects effectively to English language learners (ELLs). In response, Math Solutions has devised a multimedia professional development resource aimed [...]

Computer World
The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation announced $1.85 million in funding for nine research projects involving the design of video-game technology to help people change behavior, manage chronic illness and improve communication. Among the projects that won funding: A study that will look at the effect of facial-perception video games on brain activity and facial-perception [...]

EdWeek
A forum at the Internet company focused on ways to use technology to improve schools.
Full story

Although parents, K-12 students, and educators agree that using technology is essential to learning and student success, parents are largely dissatisfied with the technology skills their children are learning in schools, according to a new analysis of survey data released Oct. 29 by the nonprofit Project Tomorrow and Blackboard Inc.
Read the full story from eSchool [...]

Amid a still-shaky economy, a troubling reality is starting to set in for states and school districts: The budget situation may get a lot worse when the federal economic-stimulus spigot runs dry. As helpful as many state and local officials have found the one-time stimulus aid in coping with current and anticipated revenue shortfalls, it [...]

The nanotechnology industry will employ an estimated 2 million people worldwide by 2015, and with President Obama calling on colleges to ready students for the field, an Illinois-based company has introduced a program designed to teach the complex subject to undergraduates. NanoInk introduced the 12-week learning system, called NanoProfessor, in May.
Read the full story from [...]

The federal stimulus package might have saved thousands of teaching jobs, but many thousands more remain in jeopardy – as well as virtual-school programs, higher-education funding, and other school initiatives – as a result of lingering budget crises in states from coast to coast.
Read the full story from eSchool News.

The director of the Academy Award-winning film “An Inconvenient Truth” wants his new upcoming documentary to fuel the same sense of urgency for improving education that his earlier one did for raising awareness of global warming. Geoff Canada, the president and CEO of the Harlem Children’s Zone, thinks the film will put the power of [...]

At last count, there were more than 1 million enrollments in K-12 online schools in the United States. And according to recent research, the number of students taking courses online will jump to more than 10 million in the next five years. But even with this rapid growth (up from zero enrollments in the mid-1990s), [...]

The reviews are mixed for a version of the Kindle DX electronic-reading device that has been adapted for people with visual impairments. Educators and technology specialists who work with people who have visual impairments said the device does not work well for people who have complete vision loss because it does not have text-to-speech features. [...]

The number of students taking courses online will jump to more than 10 million by 2014, according to data released recently by research firm Ambient Insight. Titled “US Self-paced eLearning Market,” the new report highlighted some of the dominant segments in online learning. Of the individual segments spotlighted in the research, healthcare was projected to [...]

On Nov. 16, the State Educational Technology Directors Association (SETDA) will have a new leader: Long-time ed-tech industry executive Douglas Levin will take the reins from current SETDA Executive Director Mary Ann Wolf–and with challenges ranging from state funding shortages to the formation of a new national broadband plan, he’ll have his work cut out [...]

The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation his taking unprecedented steps to spend millions to influence the way the federal government distributes nearly $5 billion in “Race to the Top” grants to overhaul public schools. The foundation is offering $250,000 apiece to help states apply, so long as they agree with the foundation’s approach. Obama and [...]

College students are using the new multimedia product Connect to browse notes, watch professors’ lectures, and practice exams. Connect expands on the textbook publisher and financial-information provider ’s success in the college and digital products markets, two bright spots in a tough publishing environment. College enrollments have continued to grow, while teachers and students have [...]

For wireless phone companies, the classroom is new territory that they say is worth experimenting with and exploring. Some wireless phone companies are teaming up with schools to demonstrate how smartphones and mobile technologies can be used to increase students’ academic performance.
Read the full story from Education Week.

Indiana University has received more than $1.8 million from the National Institutes of Health to collaborate on a $12.2 million, seven-university project described as a “Facebook for scientists,” IU reports. The goal of the project, known as Vivo, is to link researchers around the country in an online social and research network, while also protecting [...]

New research suggests that more young adults and teens — normally at the cutting edge of technology, but initially slow to adopt Twitter — are finally coming around to the micro-blogging service, using it for school, work, or simply to monitor the minutiae of celebrities’ lives. It is a rare instance of young people adopting [...]

Fees imposed on college students who take online classes can be more than $1,300 at some schools, according to a new survey claiming that internet-based education is often more costly for students than attending classes on campus. According to a survey of 182 institutions conducted by the Campus Computing Project and Western Cooperative for Educational [...]

The internet is set to undergo one of the biggest changes in its four-decade history with the expected approval this week of international domain names, or addresses, that can be written in languages other than English. The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, or ICANN—the nonprofit group that oversees domain names—is holding a meeting [...]

University IT officials concerned that corporate control of the internet would mean that only major schools could afford premium web access lauded the Federal Communication Commission’s step Oct. 22 toward barring broadband providers from discriminating against certain types of internet traffic. FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski argued that establishing so-called “open internet” rules would prevent web [...]

Colleges and universities have applied for tens of millions of dollars in federal stimulus grants designed to expand broadband internet access, arguing that university IT infrastructure makes campuses worthy recipients. More than 2,200 applicants asked for a total of $28 billion in broadband funds during this initial application process–roughly seven times the amount available. Most [...]

Project Tomorrow has kicked off Speak Up 2009, the latest in the organization’s series of annual surveys focused on 21st century teaching, learning, parenting, and administration. The survey is used as a gauge of opinion and practices in education, with a particular emphasis on technology topics, such as the use of Web 2.0 tools, mobile [...]

Twitter Inc. is selling the rights to mine its communications hotbed to both Google Inc. and Microsoft Corp. in dueling deals that underscore the growing importance of being able to show what’s on people’s minds at any given moment. Microsoft will offer another way to probe into the collective mindset of web users by indexing [...]

Digital books ordered for use on Amazon.com’s Kindle electronic reader soon can be read on personal computers. Amazon will provide a software application that can convert Kindle books to PC-readable ones. The move follows the launch this week of a competing device, the Nook, from bookseller Barnes & Noble that sports a similar function. The [...]

A new study out of Iowa State University finds that people who play video games for 40-plus hours a week have a harder time focusing on certain tasks than those who play just a few hours a week. The study also supports research published earlier this year that found a positive correlation between video game [...]

What does broadband access mean for the disability community? The FCC hosted an all-day workshop to find out.

As pervasive as the Internet has become, there is one group of people that is still unable to realize many of its benefits. However, thanks to the work of CANnect, a consortium of schools and philanthropists dedicated to overcoming this obstacle, the visually impaired may soon acquire unprecedented access to the Web and much of [...]

Increasing numbers of studies are being done that seem to support the notion that blended course delivery or program delivery really captures the best of every possible world and, as such, is an effective way of learning for students.
Read the full story from THE Journal.

Researchers at ArticuLab, part of the communication and engineering schools at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, are studying how humans communicate with and through technology and are helping autistic children participate in conversations by using virtual peers, life-sized, computer-animated children capable of carrying on realistic conversations. Virtual peers invite autistic children to interact and play [...]

What does innovation in education look like? How do we initiate and sustain innovations?  What are the barriers to doing so?  This report from the New Venture School Fund with contributions from the Stupski Foundation and Carnegie Corporation of New York  Foundation looks at these issues in a new report.   
Opener: “We find ourselves at a [...]

When high school and middle school science teachers engage in extracurricular research work, their students benefit. That’s the result of a new study published in Science last week by researchers at Columbia University. In addition, they found that such extracurricular research work can also bring economic benefits to schools and communities.
Read the full story from [...]

Preliminary results of a survey released in mid-September at the EdNET Conference in Chicago indicate a great deal of interest from educators in using online social networking to connect with colleagues and discuss best practices and ways to improve education. Sponsored jointly by edWeb.net, MCH, and MMS Education, the survey of more than 70,000 education [...]

With single-sex brick-and-mortar classrooms gaining in popularity as a way to tap into teaching methods that may appeal to one gender or the other, the world of online schooling is looking closely at the idea of targeting virtual classes at just boys or just girls. In addition to Michigan Virtual University’s math course aimed at [...]

Members of the U.S. House of Representatives struggled during a Sept. 30 hearing with how to stop the online bullying of children without violating free-speech rights. a House Judiciary subcommittee was told that federal law does not make it a crime to engage in “cyber bullying” that becomes destructive to its young victims. The worst [...]

Google has been aggressively marketing Google Apps to schools, recently launching a centralized site designed to recruit universities and colleges. Now, Google is tweaking Google Docs, which is a part of Google Apps’ productivity suite, by adding a few student-friendly features.
Read more from The Washington Post.

At seven college campuses across the U.S., students are participating in a pilot program to test Amazon’s Kindle DX. Professors and administrators say it is too early to make a determination on the academic applications of the device because students are still getting used to its features.
Read the full story from The Wall Steet Journal.

Yale Law School researchers will team up with a tuition-free online university to study how online higher education is perceived worldwide and document what it takes for internet-based institutions to achieve accreditation.
Read the full story from eCampus News.

A Federal Communications Commission task force says expanding broadband usage throughout the United States will require subsidies and investment in infrastructure upgrades of as much as $350 billion. The FCC is crafting a national broadband plan aimed at increasing usage in rural and urban areas. In a mid-course status report, an FCC task force said [...]

A research team at the University of Wisconsin-Madison has won $4.5 million in National Science Foundation grants to study the use of computer games for learning. UW-Madison researchers aim to create ‘computer-generated mentors’ and study gaming as an assessment tool.
The largest of the grants, for $3.5 million, will create a research consortium of three universities [...]

Legislation is being drafted to give web users–such as high school and college students–more control over their personal information. The rise in online social networking, coupled with the evolution of advanced data-tracking techniques, has created a goldmine for internet marketers who now can target their advertising in highly sophisticated ways to individual web users. High [...]

Educators nationwide are bracing for an expected wave of student absences because of swine flu by ensuring that learning can continue even when students are out of school. Many teachers are turning to online options such as posting assignments on a school Web site or interactive Wiki. The Department of Education is recommending teachers use [...]

Schools are increasingly using blogs, e-mail, and other online tools to bring scientific research within students’ reach. Around the country, scientists and education-advocacy groups have become ever more intent on making scientific studies and careers more attractive to young people, particularly underrepresented groups such as women and minorities. One goal is to quash the stereotype [...]

Schools are looking for ways to give students more choices at a time when teachers and classes are being cut. The Virtual High School, a Maynard-based nonprofit consortium, involves more than 400 middle and high schools worldwide and offers online courses taught by teachers all over the world. The collaborative includes more than 9,500 students, [...]

Take the Project RED survey today (www.projectred.org).
What works when integrating technology into teaching and learning?  Your answers will inform Federal and state policy leaders and provide input into the National Educational Technology Plan 2010.
More information about Project RED:
Project RED is a national research and advocacy plan directed by the non-profit One-to-One Institute that is dedicated [...]

U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan signaled last week that the Department of Education is poised to launch reauthorization efforts for the Elementary and Secondary Education Act. He used a packed meeting of key stakeholders here to underline his likely priorities and stress his sense of urgency.
The new version of the law, he said, will [...]

Designs conceived for the handicapped, such as voice commands for PCs, often lead to products for the masses. Apple (AAPL) is widely celebrated for making devices as easy to use as they are elegantly designed. These features aren’t exactly new—they evolved from software Apple created to help disabled people use PCs. Among them: the new [...]

A new report examines how districts can make the most of education technology funds, and an accompanying guide identifies effective school technology tools. Together, these resources are intended to help school leaders personalize instruction and give teachers the tools they need to succeed with low-income (Title I) student populations.
The report, Leveraging Title I and Title [...]

When the filing window opens later this fall, applicants will find no major changes to next year’s e-Rate, the $2.25 billion-a-year federal program that provides discounts on telecommunications services to eligible schools and libraries. What they will find instead is a program that is more dedicated to helping e-Rate newcomers–as many as half of all [...]

EyesFree, a new interface for Google’s Android mobile phone operating system, provides a way for blind people to use a phone with a touch-sensitive screen, but the corollary is that it also provides sighted people with an easier way to use the phone. In fact, they can make calls without even looking at it.
The idea [...]

As online high schools spread, educators are ramping up efforts to counter the social isolation that some students experience. At the same time, sociologists and child psychologists are examining how online schooling might hinder, or help, the development of social skills.
Read the full story from the Wall Street Journal.

Educators need to embrace Web 2.0 technologies in schools, but they should be given adequate professional development to ensure they learn the proper ways to engage their students through digital media, said experts at a Sept. 21 Capitol Hill briefing.
That was the general consensus of the panel members, which included representatives from the Consortium for [...]

A group of engineering students has developed a portable, low-cost Braille printer that lets the blind and visually impaired easily label objects that feel similar to the touch, like DVDs.
The 6dot Braille Labelmaker is cheaper and easier to use than other label makers, according to the students from MIT, the University of Toronto, and Stanford [...]

Wireless carriers shouldn’t be allowed to block certain types of internet traffic flowing over their networks, the chairman of the Federal Communications Commission said Sept. 21 in a speech that predictably got a cool response from the industry, but fell in line with what higher-education IT officials have lobbied for in recent years.
FCC Chairman Julius [...]

President Obama plans to make the nation’s economy more stable in the future by investing in education for high-tech industries. The president unveiled a new “innovation strategy” that builds on $100 billion of economic stimulus funds to support entrepreneurship, education, infrastructure, and other investments. The plan aims to make the U.S. economy more competitive and [...]

A pen that can read information on labels aloud for people who cannot see has been developed in England. The PenFriend scans small bar codes on adhesive labels to play recorded MP3 audio files. Users can record up to 70 hours of audio, labeling items such as medication for identification or later reference.
Read the full [...]

In a move that could help states procure part of the $4.3 billion Race to the Top Fund, the National Governors Association (NGA) and the Council of Chief State School Officers (CCSSO) on Sept. 21 released the first official public draft of their Common Core State Standards.
The college and career readiness standards in English and [...]

The organization Common Core, which calls for giving students strong grounding across academic disciplines, has organized an open letter critiquing the program put forward by the Partnership for 21st Century Skills, and calling for the group to revise its goals.
The Partnership for 21st Century Skills promotes the cultivation of a broad range of critical-thinking, creative, [...]

The Foundation for Technology Education in cooperation with Pitsco/Hearlihy and Co. has announced a $2,000 Pitsco/Hearlihy/FTE Grant for a K-12 technology teacher as a way to recognize and encourage the integration of a quality technology education program within the school curriculum. Teachers must provide evidence of an effective quality technology education program, show documented success [...]

A Michigan high-school student is suing Amazon.com, alleging the online retailer ruined his homework when it deleted a book from his Kindle. Amazon remotely deleted copies of pirated books from the reading device. A California man is also a plaintiff in the case, which seeks class-action status and asks for unspecified damages for all buyers [...]

The Tech Museum have announced The Tech Awards Laureates 2009, 15 innovators from around the world who have committed their groundbreaking work to solving humanity’s most pressing challenges. The Tech Awards recognizes Laureates in five categories: environment, economic development, education, equality, and health. These Laureates have developed new technological solutions or innovative ways to use [...]