Ed-Tech Trends to Watch

Greetings, CCCTECH Blog.

Your colleague, Blaine, thought that you would find this story valuable:

"Report identifies ed-tech trends to watch"

at this address:

http://www.eschoolnews.com/news/showStoryts.cfm?ArticleID=6870

Here's what Blaine had to say:

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Virtual worlds, emerging forms of publication, and "massively multiplayer educational gaming" are among the emerging trends expected to have a huge impact on educational technology in the next few years, according to this report.
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If you'd like to respond to your colleague, the eMail address Blaine provided is bmorrow@palomar.edu. Please note that you cannot eMail your colleague by simply replying to this message.

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Foonz: (free) New Conference Call Option

Just came across this: Foonz (www.foonz.com), a free conference call service. Anyone want to try it out?

After I joined, here's the message they sent me, which does a good job of explaining it:

Welcome to foonz!
You can now start a group call, at any time, for free!

Your Foonz number is -------------- (I'm not posting that here). Program it into your phone now!

Starting a group call is as easy as 1, 2… you get the idea:

Set up groups of contacts in your contact list at foonz.com

Then call your foonz number from any phone and invite one of your groups to a call!

Your contacts will immediately get a text message from foonz inviting them to join your call, and when they dial the number in the invite, you can all talk together. If some people can't join the call, you can leave a message on Foonz and they will be invited to call in to get it.

People tell us that it's exciting and fun to be invited to a group call - so try it soon! Foonz is great for catching up with a group of friends at once, plan a get-together, work on a project, or talk with your family. It is totally free and we don't give any of your information to anyone, ever.

To help you get the most from Foonz, here are a few tips:

Tell your friends! The more friends you have on foonz, the easier it is to connect!

Get help anytime by pressing ∗ on your phone during a foonz call

Leave a message for friends by pressing 3 at any time

If you've got questions or suggestions, check out our Frequently Asked Questions or shoot us a note at info@foonz.com. Let us know what new features you'd like us to add! Please note that the Foonz service only works in the USA and Canada.

Thanks again for joining in the foonz community.--The Foonz Team

New Ed-Tech Standards

From Catherine McKenzie:


What's Happening in Ed Tech
New reports highlight trends and new technology standards.
By Jessica Springgay
Most people working in the education field do not doubt technology's impact on teaching and learning. While congressional leaders fight to maintain funding for such education initiatives as the Enhancing Education Through Technology (EETT) block-grant program, two recently-released reports highlight the importance of technology in education and focus on new technology standards and emerging technology trends.To keep pace with the changing demands of today's global and digital economy, the International Society for Technology in Education (ISTE) recently completed a draft of its National Educational Technology Standards (NETS) for students, and is asking educators for feedback on the draft....continued below ad
The original National Educational Technology Standards for Students were released in June 1998, and at least 45 U.S. states adopted the standards. In the original standards, the skills necessary to define technology proficiency were outlined across six categories: 1. basic operations and concepts; 2. social, ethical and human issues of technology use; 3. productivity tools; 4. communication tools; 5. research tools; and 6. problem-solving and decision-making tools. The revised draft standards also are organized into six categories: 1. creativity and innovation; 2. communication and collaboration; 3. research and information retrieval; 4. critical thinking, problem solving, and decision making; 5. digital citizenship; and 6. technology operations and concepts. The new student standards focus on the skills and knowledge required for students to learn and live productively in a digital society, with special emphasis on creativity and innovation with technology.Creativity and innovation are highlighted in another report that examines virtual worlds, emerging forms of publication and "massively multiplayer educational gaming" as emerging trends in educational technology.The New Media Consortium (NMC) and the EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative (ELI) released the "2007 Horizon Report," which seeks to identify and describe emerging technologies likely to have a large impact on teaching, learning, or creative expression within higher education. Each year, the report describes six areas of emerging technology that will have significant impact in higher education over the next one to five years. The six selected areas for higher education in 2007 are: 1. user-created content, 2. social networking, 3. mobile phones, 4. virtual worlds, 5. new scholarship and emerging forms of publication, and 6. multiplayer educational gaming. Download the Horizon report here. Or use https://mail.palomar.edu/exchweb/bin/redir.asp?URL=http://www.nmc.org/horizon/
Those interested in the ISTE NETS refresh can participate by responding to the NETS Refresh survey. Read the draft of the new National Educational Technology Standards for Students here.

Character-driven Online Communications

From Marti Atkinson (at @One):

Here's a pretty amazing demo from Oddcast -character driven communications.Click here: Oddcast Text-To-Speech Demos When you move the mouse around, her eyes will follow the pointer. When you write something in the left space and then click on "Say it," she says it! Adding punctuation will help voice inflections.You can also change persons doing the talking and the language they speak.
:-) Marti831 722.9898 office831 334.9898 cell

The Idea for this Blog

Do we need an emerging technologies blog or on the CISOA web site?
Catherine

Site of the Week for Wednesday, February 14, 2007 Follow the latest developments in cutting-edge technologies with CoSN's new emerging technologies blog The Consortium for School Networking's Emerging Technologies Committee has created a new blog where CoSN members and other participants can discuss, debate, and exchange ideas to accelerate the use of emerging technologies in education. Readers of the blog, which launched in October, can get news and ideas about emerging technologies they might want to incorporate into their own schools. Recent postings include information about the debut of the first leg of a substantial upgrade to the ultra-fast Internet2 network for research and education, which will increase data-transmission speeds of this 10 gigabit-per-second network tenfold; and a draft publication issued by the National Institute for Standards and Technology that identifies some of the security and privacy risks of radio-frequency identification (RFID) technology. The goal of this NIST publication is to make IT professionals aware of the risks so they can address these in their implementation of RFID technology, according to the blog. http://www.cosn.org/blogs/emerging-tech