Trends and Topics

LearnCentral.org is like a Facebook for educators, in that it allows users to specify the details of their teaching or curricular interests and then find others with whom they could collaborate. But it is much more than that. LearnCentral will also have a robust content-sharing repository for learning objects and lesson plans, full-featured discussions forums, and public [...]

Dennis Lembree has re-built Twitter with web accessibility and strict web standards. Check out this accessible web application here.

A recent study from the Sloan Consortium (Sloan-C) reports that online learning offers a lifeline to rural schools and predicts that “blended learning” could be the way most students learn in the future.
The complete report is available here.

Gez Lemon gives an overview of some accessibility issues with Twitter and provides a rather simple solution to most of them. To read Gez’s overview and learn about his simple solutions for accessibility issues, click here.

President Obama has chosen Vivek Kundra, 34, the chief technology officer for the District of Columbia, to oversee a push by the federal government to expand uses of cutting-edge technology.
To learn more about Vivek Kundra and President Obama’s expectations, click here.

According to a study published in Computers & Education, the ability to pause podcast lectures and rewind them to review difficult concepts helped college students who viewed their lectures online to score almost 10% higher on a test than their peers who attended traditional lectures. To read the full report (purchase necessary), click here.

A special report for eSchool News considers factors contributing the rising popularity of cloud computing among businesses and organizations in the current economic downturn: cost advantages, simplicity, and speed. 
To read the report, click here.  
Gregg Downey, editor and publisher of eschool News, discussed the future of cloud computing at the NCTI 2008 Technology Innovators Conference. To review Gregg’s presentation materials [...]

The New York Times produced a three-part series examing how other countries have deployed broadband Internet service to glean lessons for better broadband deployment in the United States. To read each installment in the series, click on the links below.