Technology

The International Society for Technology in Education has initiated an online petition urging the White House to take action to invest in school broadband connectivity to bridge the digital divide in education.

With a few notable exceptions, the entriesin this mixed bag of high-tech offerings are aimed at casual readers enthralled by images of big, noisy machines–preferably the sort that carry guns and bombs.

From The Canadian Press: A recent dust-up between Wikipedia and Canada’s largest university raises questions about how collaborative the popular website that bills itself as “the free encyclopedia that anyone can edit” truly is. The online information portal recently took a professor from the University of Toronto to task for one of his classroom assignments. [...]

When I first started reading on my Kindle with some regularity, I would assiduously report typos and formatting issues via the “report content error” option you can get via highlighting a word (other options include looking up the word in a dictionary, which is handy indeed). When you tattletale on a misspelled word, you get [...]

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Monday, May 6, 2013, 3:00 - 4:00 PM ET School librarians play a key role in ensuring that students have the tools and knowledge to succeed. Now, in light of the Common Core's increased emphasis on college, career, and world readiness, is your school library equipped with the right next-generation digital resources for mastering 21st century skills? What criteria should librarians use to evaluate the digital resources available to students? And how can you best coach students to look at the resources they encounter online with the same discerning eye? Using examples from Britannica Digital Learning's exciting portfolio of digital solutions, this webinar will illustrate valuable criteria that school librarians can apply when evaluating online resources to support digital literacy development. Participants also will learn a new approach, using a third-party rubric, for guiding students through the objective assessment of resources they find when reading or researching online. This archive is no longer available

“You hear a lot about gaming and engaging kids in STEM subjects, says teacher Jason Sellers. "So, I wondered, what does gaming look like in English?” Sellers, a teacher at the French American International School in San Francisco, found out, basing a classroom lesson in Playfic, an online community where users write, share, and play games using Inform 7, a programming system for creating interactive fiction based on natural language.

Amazon’s recent acquisition of Goodreads will likely have a ripple effect on other social media sites targeted at book lovers, with LibraryThing and Bookish potentially drawing membership from any defectors unhappy with the sale. Meanwhile, many Kindle owners will be introduced to Goodreads for the first time, as the site’s social media functions are integrated with Kindle devices. “Goodreads was fully independent…. it made them the natural allies of people who wanted to avoid the consolidation of the industry, in particular publishers,” LibraryThing founder Tim Spalding told LJ.

The task for educators is not to drain this sense of open-ended exploration from student-fans but rather to make sure that it is accompanied by the Jiminy Cricket-like voice of critical literacy...

In her latest screencast, School Library Journal contributor Linda W. Braun test drives Versu in an assessment that considers the potential of interactive platforms that blur the lines between reader and creator—a particularly compelling concept when it comes to kids and teens.