Have you seen the video of the one year old child trying to use a magazine like an iPad?  It makes for fascinating viewing and an indication that while today’s students consider the internet to be important in their lives, many of tomorrow’s students will not know a world without internet, particularly mobile internet.

Some schools are already tackling this mobile experience.  Brisbane Girls Grammar School is a secondary school in Queensland, Australia with 1000 students.   It has recognised the extent to which mobile devices, communications and technology play an integral role in business and consumer lifestyles and recently implemented a “bring your own device” strategy for students and teachers. It runs a wireless network across its campus that supports two personal devices per person — whether laptop, mobile phone or tablet — as well as school owned devices.  Up to 3,000 devices are supported on the network for educational purposes at one time.

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Tags: bring your own device, Brisbane Girls Grammar School, byod, Cisco, education, K-12, mobile, network, school, student, video, wireless

Education IT leaders continue to be challenged by declining budgets, rapidly changing technology and increasing demands to deliver platforms for 21st century teaching and learning.  In this current environment, a growing number of  IT professionals in education and government are leveraging next generation technologies like virtualization, collaboration, mobility and video to transform their organizations.

We’ll be sharing these best practices during the National Townhall, Celebrating how the Public Sector Connects, Innovates and Saves on March 1st at 11 AM, U.S. Pacific Time. Education speakers include:

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Tags: cost-savings, edtech, education, higher education

Distance learning for students and teachers is a growing trend as the leaders of today and tomorrow look for new, efficient ways to learn, educate, and inspire.

A recent Education Week article highlights some of the ways universities are improving their online professional development options. For example, Arizona State has partnered with the state’s Department of Education to host the IDEAL program, which offers online teacher education in language arts, math, and science instruction, as well as technology integration and classroom management. Boise State has also launched an online portal through which K-12 instructors can take an assortment of online, facilitator-led workshops. Read More »

Tags: edchat, edreform, edtech, education, education budget cuts, video conference, videoconferencing

In Part One, Flipping the Classroom – Is it Really All About Technology?, I promised to return in Part Two to discuss the actual technologies that can be used to flip the classroom.  This technology is, in a word: video.  The capture of lectures via video, the dynamic management of video assets, and the ability to share, store, and retrieve lectures are all critical components of any strategy to create a flipped learning environment.

As you’ll recall, Part One covered one of the best and most innovative high school teachers I know, Steve Hammack, a science teacher at Los Gatos High School.  He fully flipped his classroom this year, and his students continue to perform well above-average both on standardized tests and in semester grades.

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Tags: lecture capture video flipped classroom education edtech

There’s a different kind of college freshman on university campuses these days. According to EdWeek’s report on The American Freshman: National Norms Fall 2011 survey, today’s freshman bears more of the cost of his or her own education than did past first-year college students, and, as a high school senior, today’s freshman paid more attention to his or her studies than those who came before.

So what does this mean for colleges?

For one, today’s students’ higher academic engagement could translate into demand for more innovative, challenging courses. But with the survey showing more students taking out large student loans as their parents’ unemployment rates remain stagnant, universities cannot raise tuition price tags to hire more faculty to develop new classes. President Obama said as much in his January 24 State of the Union address, mandating that schools use tools like “better technology” to improve their course offerings without raising costs. Read More »

Tags: Cisco, classroom technology, distance learning, edchat, edtech, education reform, Education Week, sotu, tandberg, teleconferencing, video conferencing, videoconferencing, virtual