Join Khan Academy founder Sal Khan and Stanford professors Peter Norvig and Sebastian Thrun discuss the future of technology in education. Using a Google+ Hangout, these three leaders in massive open online learning discuss the realities and possibilities. They take your questions from multiple university campuses live on Google+.

http://youtu.be/LtmdiPUGGe8

Jordan Houseman, a 10-year-old student at the South Dakota School for the Blind and Visually Impaired in Aberdeen, is one of the 10 percent of the blind nationwide who are learning to read and write Braille. The number of students learning Braille has declined each decade since the 1950s, when more than 50 percent of the blind learned it, according to a 2009 report from the National Federation of the Blind. The reasons are many, including widespread integration of visually impaired students into the classroom, medical procedures that can improve vision, computer voice recognition technology, audio texts and other technology, according to the report.

http://www.aberdeennews.com/news/aan-use-of-braille-is-decreasing-but-school-still-teaches-it-20120128,0,878850.story

There are now more than 500,000 iPhone apps, and one of them is the creation of Rumi Khan, a 12-year-old student at Newark Charter School. The Delaware Department of Education recently recognized Rumi’s efforts to create and distribute “Dare to be Square: The Adventure of the Red Square.” Rumi designed the game, wrote the code and drew the graphics for the game, which has 10 levels where the main character, the square, fights enemies to ultimately recapture his lost memory. He created everything but the music. A snippet of the game is at grabbyarmgames.com, the website for Grabby Arm Games, which he founded. “I look at this as a way to express myself creatively,” Rumi said. “If music-making is a form of art, why can’t game-making be?”

http://www.delawareonline.com/article/20120129/NEWS03/201290347/12-year-old-app-creator-goes-above-and-beyond-

Purdue University North Central Elementary Education students who were enrolled in the fall semester online section of the course, Integrating Technology into the Classroom have created a variety of inquiry-based web resources for use by the teachers and students of Lake Hills STEM Magnet Elementary School in Michigan City. During the fall 2011 semester, Erin White, PNC coordinator of Learning and Technology and continuing lecturer in Education, who taught the “Integrating Technology into the Classroom” online course, initiated the WebQuests project. It was decided that the class would create WebQuests to highlight the Science, Technology, Engineering and Math (STEM) disciplines in response to the statewide emphasis placed on the STEM curriculum in the elementary grades. White and Shelley Deutscher, Lake Hills STEM coordinator, agreed to have the technologically-savvy PNC students apply their newly acquired skills to produce 18 different Indiana Standards-based WebQuests.

http://www.nwitimes.com/news/local/porter/valparaiso/pnc-students-develop-webquests-for-elementary-students/article_d2055585-99f7-5e0e-bd90-0db49c1b3f48.html

An online course for women in science, engineering and technology jobs (SET) that helps them return to work after a break has been praised by one of its organisers. Run by the UKRC and Open University, the course aimed to address the issue of the large number of women who fail to return to their career and stem the gender gap in the industry. While many participants returned to their SET career, author of a report into the course, Clem Herman from the Open University, said that many ’soft outcomes’ also came about from the project, such as increased confidence and self esteem.

http://www.womenintechnology.co.uk/news/online-it-course-for-women-returning-to-work-praised-news-801281884

For the past two years, Faculty Focus conducted a survey on Twitter usage in higher education, this year we expanded the survey to include Facebook and LinkedIn, while changing a number of the questions as well. Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn are considered “the big three” in social media, and we thank those who recommended we take a broader look at the landscape.  All three platforms have their strengths and weaknesses, and are better used for some things than others. But how are the three being used in higher education today? It’s our hope that these survey results provide at least some of the answers while lending new data to the discussion.

http://www.facultyfocus.com/wp-content/uploads/images/2011-social-media-report.pdf

Education administrators block social media because they believe it threatens the personal and emotional safety of their students. Or they believe social media is a distraction that diminishes student engagement and the quality of the learning experience. Schools also block social media to prevent students from accessing inappropriate content. I have often wondered what are schools really blocking when they block social media. Working in a high school this year has given me added perspective. In one class my graduate assistant and I are working with a teacher in a Technology Applications class. Our goal is to reinvent the classroom and, more important, the learning that takes place. We structured the learning to be autonomous, self-directed, creative, collaborative, and networked. We decided to let the student teams pick which digital media project they wanted to pursue. Some students elected to team together to produce a series of Public Service Announcements (PSAs) that target teens. These students liked the idea of using digital media to tell compelling stories about the challenges of teen life. Other students wanted to produce short narratives. They were excited about creating worlds, characters, and narrative dilemmas that allowed their artistic identities to flourish.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/craig-watkins/what-schools-are-really-b_b_1245209.html

Westerville North junior Noel Hilling uses her cellphone in her U.S. history class. Students were tweeting about the lesson; teacher Damon Mollenkopf keeps an eye on his tablet computer to watch their dialogue. “I can say, ‘Hey, this person makes a good point,’” he said. Teachers in some classrooms confiscate smartphones from students caught texting or surfing social-media websites. amon Mollenkopf doesn’t bother. The teacher at Westerville North High School actually encourages students to chat with one another on social-networking websites, with the hope that they’re talking about history. The kids can be having a separate conversation, but it can be quiet, on Twitter,” said Mollenkopf, who keeps an eye on his tablet computer to watch their dialogue.

http://www.dispatch.com/content/stories/local/2012/02/01/schools-link-smarts-phones.html

The Khan Academy has pioneered the use of technology to encourage unstructured learning outside the classroom and now provides teaching supplements in 36 schools around the country. For instance, recent reports describe a San Jose charter school using Khan’s instructional videos in ninth-grade math classes to tailor lessons to each student’s pace.

http://www.insidehighered.com/views/2012/02/03/essay-massive-online-courses-not-game-changing-innovation

Google has revamped its site for educators, creating a redesigned repository for all its educational tools and resources for teachers, schools, and students. The newest feature is News and Calendar, a listing of all events and deadlines for Google’s education endeavors. Google also created an online booklet called Google in Education: A New and Open World for Learning, which lists the company’s initiatives and programs within the education realm, such as the Computer Science for High School program — university-created workshops for local high school and middle school computer science teachers teachers.

http://mindshift.kqed.org/2012/01/google-launches-new-education-site/