Serendipity35

Via the Huffington Post: "Obama Administration's Challenge To Schools: Embrace Digital Textbooks Within 5 Years"

Education Secretary Arne Duncan and Federal Communications Commission chairman Julius Genachowski issued a challenge this week to schools and companies to get digital textbooks in students' hands within five years.

You may be interested to look at the "Digital Textbook Playbook" issued along with the announcement   http://www.fcc.gov/encyclopedia/digital-textbook-playbook

...The Obama administration's push comes two weeks after Apple Inc. announced it would start to sell electronic versions of a few standard high-school books for use on its iPad tablet.
Digital books are viewed as a way to provide interactive learning, potentially save money and get updated material faster to students.

Digital learning environments have been embraced in Florida, Idaho, Utah, and California, as well as in individual schools and districts such as Joplin, Mo., where laptops replaced textbooks destroyed in a tornado. But many schools lack the broadband capacity or the computers or tablets to adopt the technology, and finding the money to go completely digital is difficult for many schools in tough economic times. And, in some places, adopting new textbooks is an arduous process.

At a time when technology has transformed how people interact and even led to social uprisings in the Middle East, education has too often lagged, Duncan said.

 "Do we want kids walking around with 50-pound backpacks and every book in those backpacks costing 50, 60, 70 dollars and many of them being out of date? Or, do we want students walking around with a mobile device that has much more content than was even imaginable a couple years ago and can be constantly updated? I think it's a very simple choice," Duncan said in an interview.

Tied to Wednesday's announcement at a digital town hall was the government's release of a 67-page "playbook" to schools that promotes the use of digital textbooks and offers guidance. The administration hopes that dollars spent on traditional textbooks can instead go toward making digital learning more feasible.

Going digital improves the learning process, and it's being rolled out at a faster pace in other countries, such as South Korea, Genachowski said in an interview. Genachowski said he's hopeful it can be cost effective in the long run, especially as the price of digital tablets drops.

"When a student reads a textbook and gets to something they don't know, they are stuck," Genachowski said. "Working with the same material on a digital textbook, when they get to something they don't know, the device can let them explore: It can show them what a word means, how to solve a math problem that they couldn't figure out how to solve."

Vicki Windman is a special education teacher who regularly posts about tech, especially apps lately. Here are some apps that can help students diagnosed with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder.

iearnedthat-lite
(Free/ Full Version $1.99) Helps children develop desirable behaviors by working towards tangible goals. Choose a behavior for the child. Do not interrupt for 15 minutes during a 45-minute class period. Student then takes a picture of what he or she wants, such as computer time. The picture is broken down into puzzle pieces. Each time the student is successful, he or she adds another piece. Upon completion of the puzzle student receives an award. The app is good for all ages.

ireward $4.99 A motivational tool for iPhone, iPod Touch, or iPad. Create a star chart or token board to help reinforce positive behaviors using visual rewards. This type of praise or approval will help parents of typically developing children, children with autism, developmental delays, ADHD, and anxiety disorders.

Homeroutines $3.99 This app can be customized for any age. Create routine checklists, then complete them on chosen days of the week, with reminder notifications, and a gold star for each completed task. Checklists can automatically reset.

Alarmed-reminder timersFree Pop up reminder alerts. Includes 80 custom sounds, Nag me for auto repeating. Great for students to help remind them when they need to bring something to school.

ADHD organizer $1.99 Lets users set goals and record their success. Includes a memory bank section for thing frequently forgotten.

Audio-notes recorder $2.99 Record notes and export by email. Great for students who need to remember something without having to write it down.

Event Countdown $1.99 This is great for students who need to keep track of assignments. App shows remaining days, hours and minutes until the date.

Audionote recorder-notepad $4.99 Combines the functionality of a notepad and voice recorder.


Vicki has also posted about useful apps for assessment.

I'm not sure if we should call today a birthday party or an anniversary, but it is exactly six years (that's at least 30 years in blog years) since my first post here back in 2006. That was a post called "Why Serendipity35?" which wasn't much of a post because all I was doing was testing out our new installation of the open source serendipity software. There wasn't really any plan to start blogging seriously.

That post explains why it was Serendipity35 - a name that has proven to be a good one - but Tim Kellers (the tech behind the curtain) and I needed some sample posts for a workshop we were doing back then on three big new buzzing tools in higher ed and business - blogs, wikis and podcasts. Those were all pretty new things on campuses back then.

It only took a few weeks before the blog started to find its place as I started writing about educational technology (back then I was the Manager of Instructional Technology at NJIT) and people are still finding us and reading.

Last December, we averaged 4623 hits a day and had 143,317 hits for the month. For 2011, it was just under 1.5 million hits. I give credit to the "long tail" effect where older posts still pull in readers (and logically have the biggest total visitor hits). That rather slight first post even has 24,671 hits right now.

Thanks for dropping by and reading. We haven't made any money doing this (Truth? We did get enough off some ads for Tim and I to get 2 McGoo burgers and a few pints last year at McGovern's) but I have had some fun, and it does keep me paying attention to tech and learning.

Here's a CFP that is a call for em>participation (rather than proposals) for Open Education Week March 5-10, 2012 which will be held online and worldwide. It is organized by the Open Courseware Consortium.

Join your colleagues around the world to increase understanding about open education. Open Education Week occurs online and in locally hosted events around the world. The objective is to raise awareness of the open education movement and open educational resources.

There are several ways you and your organization can be involved:

1. Provide a pre-recorded informational virtual tour of your project, work, or organization. This should be focused on the work you’re doing in open education, designed for a general audience. These can be done in any language.

2. Offer a webinar. Webinars are well suited for topics of general interest, such as what’s happening in open education in a particular area or country, or topics that offer discussion possibilities. Webinars can be scheduled in any language, 24 hours a day. Organizers would also like to feature question and answer sessions in a variety of languages and time zones.

3. Pre-record a presentation on open education concepts. Do you have an inspiring presentation about open education? Can you discuss the issues that open education seeks to address in your country, region or globally? Organizers plan to feature short, introductory overviews of open education and OER for different audiences, such as those new to the idea, policy makers, faculty, etc. Presentations in any language are welcome.

4. Create or share text-based, downloadable information. This should be information on the open education movement, in any language, appropriate to introduce the movement and its important concepts to a variety of audiences. Specific information on your project can be linked to from the open education week website.

5. Sponsor or host a local event during the week of 5-10 March. This could be a community discussions, a forum on open education, a challenge and/or a celebration. Organizers invite you to get creative with planning events. Suggestions and support will be available on the open education week web site, and the planning group is happy to work with you to create bigger impact.

Let Open Education Week organizers know how you would like to participate by filling out the form at the www.openeducationweek.org website, or contacting them at openeducationwk@gmail.com. Please fill out the Open Education Week contributor’s form by January 31, 2012.

The OCW Consortium is coordinating this community-run event. There is no cost to participate.

Follow them on twitter at #openeducationwk and Facebook at facebook.com/openeducationwk

I was checking into a discussion on the College Open Textbooks Community site about Apple's move into textbooks. As you expect, that group has a very different definition of "open" than a company like Apple.

Apple announced this week that they plan to "transform" the classroom in a way similar to their assault on the music industry with iTunes and the iPod. Interactive digital textbooks seems to have been in Steve Jobs' plans for awhile, but it took a back seat to other efforts.

Jobs predicted that the iPad would knock out print books, and it has shaken things up. Textbooks seems to have been his next objective on that road.

At their announcement, Apple talked about three new apps as part of the larger iBooks 2 that gives students instant access to interactive digital textbooks through mobile devices.

An app called iBooks Author lets someone with some knowledge of Apple tools create books. It uses templated layouts that can have interactive 3-D models, photos and videos. (This is not really aimed at text-only books - interactivity is key.

The third app is for iTunes U which has been around since 2007. It allows teachers and students to connect using posted reading lists, streamed video of lectures etc.

The apps are free. Most importantly, for Apple to make this work, is partnerships with publishers. Houghton Mifflin, McGraw Hill, and Pearson are the first textbook publishing partners for iBooks 2. It was announced that high school e-textbooks will be sold for less than $15 in a partnership with the three major U.S. textbook publishers.

Audrey Watters makes a good point when she says:

"See, you can't really say that you're going to "change everything" when it comes to textbooks and announce that your partners are the 3 companies who already control 90% of the textbook market. You can't say that you're going to disrupt the textbook industry by going digital when Pearson -- one of those big 3 and, indeed, the largest educational company in the world -- made over $3 billion from digital content last year alone. That's not to say that digital content isn't shaking up the textbook industry. Like all publishers, our move from print to e-books is challenging these companies to rethink their revenue and distribution models. Add to the mix, the availability now of all manner of free content online, and it's clear that the necessity of purchasing textbooks -- at both the K-12 and the higher ed level -- is diminishing rapidly."


This new "iBook 2" and the apps is the first major "product" launch since Steve Jobs' death.

Apple Inc. is announcing tomorrow in New York what is expected to be a new initiative to enter the digital textbook business.

The best-selling biography of Apple’s Steve Jobs has Jobs saying that he saw a way to transform the textbook market by hiring prominent textbook writers to create electronic versions of them for the iPad.

This brings Apple deeper into the content business - a move that Amazon has also taken. Jobs also talked about offering textbooks for free might be a way to "get around" state certification requirements.

When I logged into my tumblr blog, i was given the option to " Black out my blog for the rest of the day to protest PIPA.

I chose not to - because I think it might be more effective to post about what PIPA is all about than to go black. (I can't wash the educator out of me)

Thanks to action by a broad and bipartisan coalition of Internet users, companies, and organizations, the U.S. House of Representatives has now put the brakes on SOPA, a well-intentioned but deeply flawed bill that would use Internet censorship to combat overseas copyright infringement. Even President Obama's White House has joined the opposition.

But nevertheless, the Senate is continuing to move forward — and fast — with its equally dangerous version of the bill, called PIPA, the Protect-IP Act.As written, PIPA would import censorship and surveillance techniques pioneered by countries like China and Iran, reversing longstanding U.S. policy on Internet freedom, betraying U.S. First Amendment values, damaging our standing around the world, threatening our job-creating innovators, and undermining Internet security for everyone.

Today is a day for action across the Internet.Learn about these destructive bills. Tell your Senator what you think. Congress needs to hear from you.