How artificial intelligence could help teachers do a better job
Jill Barshay, The Hechinger Report, 2018/08/02
I can't imagine there are too many teachers who would welcome the opportunity to be corrected by an artificial intelligence. Yet we move one step closer with "a computer model that came close to an expert educator’s ability to discern when a teacher was asking students an 'authentic' question." The model doesn't tell you what makes a question authentic - that would take the human evaluators who trained the model. More...

Where Do Educators Turn for Research into the Effectiveness of Technology Tools?
David Nagel, THE Journal, 2018/08/02
It's like our whole media world wrapped up in an educational technology article. "Educators are most likely to turn to media outlets and ed tech vendors for information about education technology. But they don't necessarily find the information from those sources reliable." I would ask, why don't they look elsewhere then? But where? The survey was conducted by the International Society for Technology in Education (ISTE) and the Jefferson Education Exchange (JEX). More...

Computer Science 20 - Saskatchewan
Dan Schellenberg, Saskatoon Public Schools, 2018/08/02
This link is to Dan Schellenberg's own copy of this openly-licesed computer science resource and will be updated over time - the official Saskatoon Public Schools of the CS 20 curriculum resource can be found here. Either way you have a nice clean workbook that will take students through Scratch, the Reeborg environment, and Python. More...

The Information on School Websites Is Not as Safe as You Think
E.K. Moore, New York Times, 2018/08/02
Because there's nothing good in todays' world that won't be spoiled, we have this: a study of 159 public school websites "from among the nation’s largest and most tech-savvy districts" showed that all but one of them employed some sort of surveillance or tracking tool. More...

My Face is Personally Identifiable Information
Eric Hellman, Go To Hellman, 2018/08/03
Good brief analysis. " The reason that face-identity is so scary is that it's a type of identifier that has never existed before. It's globally unique, but it doesn't require a central registry to be used. It's public, easily collected and you can't remove it." So what do we need to do? " We need to start by treating facial profiles and photographs as personally identifiable information. More...

The 2017 national survey of online learning in Canadian post-secondary education: methodology and results

Tony Bates, International Journal of Educational Technology in Higher Education, 2018/08/03

This article (17 page PDF) summarizes the process and results of the 2017 pan-Canadian survey on online learning. The main result: "Online learning and distance education were clearly alive and well in Canada in 2017." That said, "most institutions reported that lack of adequate resources was a major barrier to online learning. More...

For Some Reason, These Quantum Mechanics Toys Didn’t Catch On
Allison Marsh, IEEE Spectrum, 2018/08/03
These were aluminum blocks created by Costas Papaliolios in the 1960s to help students understand quantum mechanics; they were hollow and had polarized filters through which you would shine light. More...

Domain Camp
Alan Levine, Domains of Our Own, Ontario Extend, 2018/08/01
This is a set of four weeks of content (and a catch-up week) on the idea of creating a domain of one's own. It's an introductory course (though even the experienced will learn a thing or two) but more to the point it covers content completely skipped over in this era of living in online silos like Facebook and Twitter. More...

Apple’s Longtime Education VP Shares Frustrations With Slow Pace of Change
Jeffrey R. Young, EdSurge, 2018/08/01
For someone who says we have to "rewire education" John Couch says a lot of things that sound like the same old thing. Apple’s former vice-president of education is plugging his new book Rewiring Education: How Technology Can Unlock Every Student's Potential. More...

Mixed Reality: A Revolutionary Breakthrough in Teaching and Learning
Sue Workman, EDUCAUSE Review, 2018/08/01
This article focuses mostly on the anatomy lab at Case Western Reserve University which is focused on providing virtual reality simulations rather than cadavers. It's also a bit of an advertisement for Microsoft's HoloLens. More...