Dot Learnt

The school year is fast approaching and Bon is picking up right where we left off. Take a minute from your busy schedules and find out about the latest and greatest in edtech around the world!

Tech Talk

Online? Free? Two words that Bon loves to hear being used in the same sentence. The 2011 Global Education Conference will be held November 14-18 bringing together educators and experts from countries around the world. The sessions will take place in several times zones and in different languages in order to cater to the needs of a global audience. In an effort to increase opportunities for globally connected education projects, the organizers are seeking volunteers, commercial and non-commercial sponsors and an international advisory panel. Don’t miss out on this convenient and enlightening opportunity!

When it comes to graduation requirements, students in Pune, India have to look no further than Wikipedia. As of recent, over 843 students from the College of Engineering (PUNE) will be obliged to contribute to Wikipedia as part of their first semester bachelors technology degree course. Students from the electrical, computer, electronics and telecom, mechanical and production engineering fields will work alongside their professors at the university to contribute to the site. Wikimedia has also approached the Symbiosis School of Economics and Modern College of Engineering for similar programs. Wicked!

The World Innovation Summit for Education has recently announced twenty finalists for the 2011 WISE Awards, “Transforming Education: Investment, Innovation and Inclusion.” Some of Bon’s favorite projects include Freda Wolfendan’s Teacher Education in Sub-Saharan Africa which looks to improve school-based learning for teachers through open educational resources in twelve African countries and Teachable Solutions’ Scientifically Tailored Employability Program (STEP) providing Indian students with soft-skill computer training for job search. To find out about the rest of the finalists, check it out, here.

New Horizons

Blackboard, the well-known LMS and education technology solutions company, has recently announced new partnerships in Brazil and the Middle East. In hopes of meeting the demands of those interested in edtech in the region, “Blackboard has partnered with BME Holding S.A.L. (BME), a local company with offices in Beirut and Riyadh, to work closely with six partners to support clients throughout the Middle East.” While In Brazil, “Blackboard has partnered with Grupo A, a leading distributor of education publishing content, to expand access to Blackboard solutions.” Move over chalkboards, Blackboard is making waves.

MIT once again is reinventing the concept of schooling. Famous for its Open Course Ware initiative that provides learners around the world with free and open access to course content, they are now making access to knowledge even more convenient. This August, MIT Media Lab announced the establishment of the MIT Center for Mobile Learning. This institution will focus on using new mobile technologies and applications in order to allow people anywhere the ability to learn. Reach for your cell, it’s time get to class.

It All Comes From the STEM

The annual FIRST Robotics Competition looked to spark youth interest in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM). During the contest, over 11,000 students on 600 teams from 29 different countries had a go at designing, building and competing with robots. With a focus on “gracious professionalism,” the competition attempted to show students that competition and mutual gain are not separate concepts. Will.i.am, front man for the Black Eyed peas, came out in full support of the competition. His interview can be found, here!

I myself am more of a visual learner, so when I came across this infographic I could not help but be captivated by the graphics that depicted the current “STEM Dilemma.” The diagram represents the current problems that America faces in terms of STEM education and provides viewers with several statistics. It is crucial to maintain and recruit quality STEM teachers in order to ensure success for the youth.

In typical fashion, if you got something to say, say it! We love hearing your feedback and comments.

Keep Calm and Learn On,

Nora

Facebook

Twitter

Image Available Under CC Licensure by gcouros

Using Web 2.0 and Social Media to Encourage Deeper Learning from Bon Education on Vimeo.

This fall Bon Education co-founders, Anna and Chris Batchelder, will be creating and facilitating a course for Peer 2 Peer University’s newest initiative – The School of Education (pilot). Funded by the Hewlett and Shuttleworth foundations, P2PU is an open education project that knocks down the walls of the university by providing students and their peers with an open platform where they can teach courses and learn from one another for free. As the P2PU mission statement points out:

The Peer 2 Peer University is a grassroots open education project that organizes learning outside of institutional walls and gives learners recognition for their achievements. P2PU creates a model for lifelong learning alongside traditional formal higher education. Leveraging the Internet and educational materials openly available online, P2PU enables high-quality low-cost education opportunities. P2PU – learning for everyone, by everyone about almost everything.

To learn more about the founding of P2PU read Fast Company’s, “How Web-Savvy Edupunks Are Transforming American Higher Education.”

The P2PU School of Education will bring the model of open, community-based peer learning to professional development for K-12 teachers and administrators. Seven courses will be offered between September and November 2011, with a focus on innovative teaching methods. Anna and Chris were invited to create and facilitate “Using Web 2.0 and Social Media to Promote Deeper Learning.” The course is for K-12 teachers and administrators that wish to utilize web 2.0 and social media tools to promote student core content knowledge, critical thinking, collaboration skills, communication, self-directed learning and global outlook (components of what the Hewlett Foundation calls deeper learning). Teachers and administrators interested in participating can register here.

“Learning for everyone, by everyone about almost anything!” That is a motto we like!

Facebook

Twitter

The Ivy League is the crème de la crème of universities. Prestigious and world renowned for their academic rigor and their ability to prepare students for what is becoming an even more competitive job market, these schools entice students from all over the world. Recently, Stanford University has knocked down the walls of the classroom and pushed aside the admissions office. They’re providing high-quality education to anyone in the world, for free.

With a focus on the most common and talked about topics in technology today, the three courses including Machine Learning, Introduction to Artificial Intelligence and Introduction to Databases will take students on a self-paced exploration of what a typical Stanford student would see. Students partaking in the semester long course will be expected to devote time to reading course materials, completing assignments and taking exams and quizzes.

So the walls of the university have been knocked down – come one, come all! Similar programs such as Massachusetts’ Institute of Technology OpenCourseWare or Open Yale Courses all seek to unlock the world of knowledge and empower the minds of students, both in America and abroad.

Sebastian Thrun, a Stanford research professor teaching the artificial intelligence course explains that the current times have called for this academic shift. “Technology has progressed, connectivity has progressed and video has progressed,” it is time to take the “Stanford education out into the world to people who cannot afford it or who do not have access.”

Who would have thought that the day would come where anyone regardless of SAT scores, GPA, teacher recommendations or work experience could get an Ivy education? The degree though, that still comes with hefty tuition bill (for now at least).

Keep Calm and Learn On,

Nora

Facebook

Twitter

Image available under CC licensure

When it comes to going to school, we all know that the process does not just end at the school gates. In order to ensure that students absorb the information they learned at school, students often return home with assignments flowing out of their book bags.

Many times, students in impoverished areas come home not only to a list of chores and tasks that they must help their parents with, but to parents who are illiterate or unable to understand the language of their school assignments. This linguistic or academic gap even exists in more affluent homes. “Uploading an assignment on Blackboard,” my dad so inquisitively says. “What happened to just placing your homework on the teacher’s desk?”

An intellectual or language barrier between a student and his family can leave a child discouraged and frustrated. Unable to independently find an answer to a crucial question, a child more often then not, may choose to abandon the assignment or schooling all together.

Until of course, I came across EducateNcare.

EducateNcare has adopted the one-for-one style donation framework popularized by the shoe company, Toms, but has added a 2.0 spin on the model. Their motto? “Education is a right – not a privilege.” EducateNCare is a live, online, one-on-one tutoring program. With each student that enlists in a tutoring program in the USA, a percentage of the tuition is diverted and used to fund the online tutoring lesson of a child in Asia, Africa or Latin America.

As of now, EdcuateNcare has served over 800 students in the United States, and correspondingly, has offered 800 lessons to students in emerging markets. By merging the power of the Internet and the power of social good, EducateNcare has been able to bring after school help to untapped educational markets.

(more…)

Beyond the movies, the hospitality, the humor, the protests, the history, you find something that every Egyptian simply gets used to–traffic. At the nexus of overpopulation and a weak infrastructure emerges inefficiency.  Thinking about infrastructure in the context of school systems, we realize that schools are more than just teachers and students. To run smoothly they need countless resources, upkeep, processes and people. With so many moving parts at play, inefficiencies are bound to emerge.

Enter IntaFeen – the Arabic phrase for Where Are you? I’m sure most of you have taken note of the latest ‘check-in’ fad on Facebook. By grazing your minifeed, you can easily take note of where your co-workers are for lunch (and potentially crash the party) or which of your friends is attending the latest ISTE conference. With apps such as FourSquare continuing to gain popularity in the States, six Egyptian men, straight from the heart of the Silicon Valley have opted to return to their roots and introduce the Land of the Pharaohs to ‘check-in’ culture.

Allow me to highlight what a tool like IntaFeen can do for school districts in Egypt (and other societies challenged by education infrastructure inefficiencies). Imagine a school that integrates the IntaFeen technology into their administration system. A teacher running late on the day of an exam can instantly ‘check-in,’ giving administration an estimated time of arrival. More often than not, exams are canceled due to teachers getting caught off guard by unbearable traffic. The school’s administration could then designate another teacher to administer the exam or predetermine an alternative plan of action.

(more…)

Early this month, the social media hegemon laid down the law and stated it was acquiring Push Pop Press, a digital bookmaker that is famed for their dynamic digital content for Apple’s ipad. Dare I say it? These are not just books. These are elegant, visually teasing, intellectually stimulating packages of knowledge.

So what’s the deal? Is Facebook trading in their status updates for a bunch of e-books? Not necessarily. What the multibillion-dollar company is doing though, is recognizing the growing market for e-books and asking for a piece of the pie, or at least claiming rights to it. A Push Pop representative explains how the “ideas and technology behind [their company] will be integrated with Facebook, to give people an even richer way to share their stories.”

Let’s talk e-books for a minute. As of recent, the Association of American Publisher’s released data showing e-books as the bestselling category in American publishing. Just a few months ago, Amazon came out and stated that after four years of selling e-books, they are “now selling more of them than printed books.” E-books allow users to engage in the learning process as readers dive deeply into the content with the use of multimedia and interactive text-supporting features. For example, in Al Gore’s first e-book, published and created by Push Pop Press, Our Choice allows readers to explore audio, video and interactive graphics as they read. Users become more than readers, they become a part of the story itself.

Through the fusion of access, content and connectedness individuals, organizations and governments alike are hopping on board the digital and mobile technology train. Just recently, the government of South Korea has mandated that all school-age curricula will become digitized by the year 2015. In one the New York Time’s recent opinion piece, Virginia Heffernan discusses how 65% of today’s grade-school youth will end up doing work in a field that has not even been invented yet. Such developments should only push us to embrace technology use in the classroom, as technology will help us better prepare for society’s evolution. How’s that for knocking down the bookcase?

(more…)

Recently, I had the pleasure of speaking with Sid Djerfi, a Teach First ambassador and current Associate Director of Regional Expansion at Teach First. Prior to his current position, he worked on implementing the Teach First model in Lebanon and the UAE. It was during this interview that Djerfi unveiled his viewpoint on the biggest problems that countries in the MENA region are facing in terms of education, and how we can help solve them. You’ll find the full interview below, followed by highlights from our conversation.

In your opinion, what challenges do MENA education systems face when it comes to taking advantage of education technology in schools?

There are obvious issues we can talk about such as the issue of connectivity or the issue of accessibility, but I’d like to focus on the bigger picture. The problem that MENA countries face is that in a lot of places, students have sufficient access to knowledge, but unfortunately they do not know how to utilize that information. They do not know, for instance, how to decide on which Ted Talk they should listen to. Also, a lot of the information out there is in English, and many of the students might not be able to understand.

So what you’re saying is that it goes beyond giving them access to technology, it is more about teaching them how to implement the technology. Correct?

Absolutely. There have been a lot of initiatives that have focused on getting computers into schools. But how do you use the computers? If a teacher asks a student to find research on cancer for instance, the student will return with a variety of different sources. Can the student tell what is biased information from what is not? Can they put in the right keywords when searching for things on Google? It is as if the library has been built in the town, but the kids are unable to figure out which book to read for the answers. (more…)