According to the Sloan Consortium, the nation’s largest association of institutions and organizations committed to quality online education, more than one million students (k-12) are now taking classes online.   This is a 47 percent increase in only two years.

Education and the Internet have much in common; both are advocates for access.  Online learning serves a wide range of needs, from remedial to accelerated instruction, and four out of five school districts use more than one provider of online classes, including postsecondary institutions, virtual schools within a district’s home state, independent vendors, and education service agencies.  It is an incredibly exciting prospect.  Children in Wisconsin can learn Russian or an engineering student in Boston can take a class on Emily Dickinson.

Online learning is unlikely to replace the physical classroom just as e books are unlikely to replace hard backed just as hard backed books are unlikely to replace paperbacks; however, more options equal the ability to meet more information needs and curiosities.

For a full report, check out www.sloanconsortium.org

Because of the great success of “electronic learning” tools such as Wii Music, Guitar Hero, and Mattel’s”I want to Learn Guitar;” people in charge of major online tools are taking notice. Apple is announcing the evolution of its Garage Band software. Now in addition to making music, the creators are working on new ways to utilize the program to teach music. It is said that it will use iTunes for the Lesson Store which will offer buyers access to a video to learn with the artist of the song. The video plays and the student plays along.

What has this industry have to do with books, I mean honestly, reading the classics are a far cry from rockin’ out to Guns’n'Roses on Guitar Hero right? Not really. The same idea is in both, bringing a visual and interactive media to teach along with having fun. Learning should be enjoyable.

Nothing is better than an education, except the will to learn. If you can spark some ones interest in learning they will never stop looking for that challenge that will bring them more. Just like setting goals in learning music gives an individual the will to learn the next technique, the next score the more challenging piece. Reading online is the spark, the spark to start the blaze of seeking out knowledge.

With the great book selection at Wizz-e you can read, learn, play and enjoy!

Comic books seem to bring back memories of doing just enough chores to run to the store getting the latest edition of Superman, a bottle of Crush and a pack of Bubblicious Gum. Ahh, those were the days. But have no fear the Internet is here. Now you can share with your kids the excitement of reading those same comics and some new ones. 

At Marvel Kids you can read about everyone from Spiderman to The Hulk and even some new characters. Kids can watch videos, read digital comics and learn about the characters and their authors. 

You may be asking why kids need to read comics at all, never mind online; well, here is why. They get to use their imagination, explore something that is beyond reality, share in an adventure and be apart of something bigger than they are. Reading these things online, gives them an insight into the stories and a lifelong interest in wonder and creative thought.

According to Behaviorists, imaginative play is key to a toddlers and young child’s cognitive growth and development. 

…we discovered that education is not something which the teacher does, but that it is a natural process which develops spontaneously in the human being. It is not acquired by listening to words, but in virtue of experiences in which the child acts on his environment. The teacher’s task is not to talk, but to prepare and arrange a series of motives for cultural activity in a special environment made for the child. (Dr. Maria Montessori)

It is not just about the words being heard as a child is read to but the interaction between him and the reader. Thus, online reading for children is a great way to combine great interaction as well as cognitive stimulus. 

 

 

If you have been to college or university or know someone who has you understand that buying a textbook for $100+ dollars, using half the book and selling it back for $7 is not the best investment. College students spent a whopping $5.543 Billion (NACS.com) on course required materials. What? That is madness; good for the presses but bad for students. In action against this model, students have founded site that download textbooks in the same way as music file sharing is done. I hear you asking, illegal, yes. Publishers are catching on to this new trend and with a vengance seeking a way to stop it fast. I mean, they have to eat too. 

The students that support these textbook download sites are arguing that given the opportunity to downlaod legal copies of the books without paying insane prices they would. It is faster, more convient and allows books to be taken anywhere a laptop/MP3/4 divice could. 

Is there really a market for this? You betcha. Sales on college campus bookstores are down 14% (The Chronicle of Higher Education) and downloads are up with student speaking out about it.

The growing market for ebooks, whether online or downloaded,  opens up so much possibility for those who they were written to educate. If college students had that option, with legal and open parameters to use this form of technology they would and they would actually open the book to read it.

The average weight of a high school student’s backpack is 20 pounds and contains about 6 textbooks. In comparison, the average weight of an ebook reader, capable of holding hundreds of books and instantly accessing hundreds of thousands more, is less than a pound.

Lugging a heavy backpack around for extended periods of time can lead to back pain, shoulder pain, and also bad posture.

So, my question is why aren’t more chiropractors championing the advent of e books!?

Every parent wants to turn their little one into a big reader, and there is much talk about how this can be done.  Experts stress the “don’ts” as much as the “do’s”, and after much research, yours truly has compiled a list of the major points:

Don’t

Create associations between reading and stress.  Turning reading into a goal, a treacherous bridge suspended between success and failure, will only make a child resent books.

Present learning as toil or pressure.

Compare them to their peers.  For example: “Did you know Suzie is reading Moby Dick!?”  Every child will have an unique relationship and struggle with words.  Honor that!

Do

Take advantage of a child’s natural interest in the world.  Point out the written word wherever you go.  Read street signs, plaques, license plates.  Treat learning like play rather than work, and you may learn something in the process too.

Incorporate reading into daily activities.  Cooking with a recipe or a bed time book will not only familiarize a child with the act but also its joy and utility.

Provide a good example.  Read the paper, read online, read while waiting, read out loud.  Children are natural learners, constantly absorbing what they are exposed to.

Trade letters with your child.  This not only nurtures writing and reading skills (which are complimentary by the way) but it also strengthens the bond between parent and child.

Make weekly trips to the library, and present them as a treat.  Explore the shelves together and ask questions about what kind of stories and characters they like.

And most importantly,

Keep reading this blog : D

“There are many little ways to enlarge your child’s world. Love of books is the best of all.” - Jacqueline Kennedy

If the internet in its humble beginnings was a brain child of the military, can we (can we can we can we?!) possibly hope that flex screen color OLED displays could enter civilian life?  For those of you unfamiliar with OLED, it stands for Organic Light Emitting Diode.  Basically, it is the golden standard for display screens with its fast response times, wide viewing angles, fantastic color reproduction, incredible contrast levels, and high brightness.

“The device combines the significant energy savings of Universal Display’s phosphorescent OLED technology with the inherent benefits of a flexible OLED into an ultrathin display with a crisp beautiful picture, a wide viewing angle and a novel form  factor. In addition to military field communications, this device suggests a number of exciting possibilities for consumer-oriented products.” - Steven V. Abramson, President and Chief Executive Officer of Universal Display Corporation, as quoted at OLED Display.net (via TechMeme).”

The military is working on a four inch OLED screen prototype that may aid soldiers in communicating clearly, but the possibilities of such a display enhancing consumer gadgets like e books is both very exciting and very close.

The future’s looking more vivid already!  Full Story

Stephen Downes, an education research specialist, recently published an update of his eloquent and visionary essay, The Future of Online Learning.

I’m only attaching a few excerpts and commentary, courtesy of the P2P Foundation and the Hennistalk Blog, but I highly recommend the essay to anyone interested in the dramatic changes in store for the way we perceive and organize education.

Main argument

“Today, and for the last century, education has been practiced in segregated buildings by carefully regimented and standardized classes of students led and instructed by teachers working essentially alone.

Over the last ten years, this model has been seen in many quarters to be obsolete. We have seen the emergence of a new model, where education is practiced in the community as a whole, by individuals studying personal curricula at their own pace, guided and assisted by community facilitators, online instructors and experts around the world.

Though today we stand at the cusp of this new vision, the future will see institutions and traditional forms of education receding gradually, reluctantly, to a tide of self-directing and self-motivated learners. This will be the last generation in which education is the practice of authority, and the first where it becomes, as has always been intended by educators, an act of liberty.”

Schools and Learning in the Future

There is not a single school of the future. We are still in a classroom based paradigm, which will slowly erode, making place for a number of different schools and learning methods.

“As learning evolves slowly from a classroom-based and deliver-based type of instruction, and toward wide-ranging learning activities that are largely selected and managed by the students themselves, the dedication of space in schools to classroom instruction will be reduced. Instead, schools will be converted into meeting facilities, workrooms and laboratories, multimedia studios, and more.

The convergence of digital life with in-person life is not, therefore, a mere addition of a digital dimension to the in-person life we lead today. It transforms and reshapes that life, removing from it elements that could be done more efficiently (or more pleasantly) in a digital environment, and opening up opportunities for new and more types of in-person activities.

We should also look toward the development and deployment of learning facilities in traditional working environments. Students of all ages will be able to learn about law in learning facilities made available at courtrooms. Galleries at legislatures and town council meetings will be equipped with internet access (of course) and supported with installed facilities for learning and visualization (such as, say, a zoomable hologram of the city, allowing members and visitors along to see zoning changes and planned construction). Farms and greenhouses will employ student workers, who will study and catalogue plant and animal life as they work with it.”

Learning is a social activity, and happens within communities, where knowledge and skills are demonstrated, criticized, and merged: it is not merely the acquisition of new information and skills, but becoming educated in a discipline is..

“to learn the habits, patterns, ways of thinking and ways of thinking characteristic of that discipline.”

Downes proposes two distinct types of learning communities; communities of interest and peer-based, real-life communities. The value of a community lies in its diversity.

The role of the technology, or tool (such as a weblog, or Second Life), was

“to create a space – virtual or otherwise – in which people can communicate, and then the members built the rest.”

….

Online, for example, we would expect not only to find the instructor and any administrative services, but also resource libraries, other students, and digital tools or platforms on which distributed work may be performed. The online component of a person’s learning environment will tend to me more distributed, based on communications and connections of a cognitive nature.

Offline and locally, by contrast, we would expect to find not only coaches and facilitators but also one’s immediate friends and family. We would also expect to find local facilities, along with facility managers and other support staff. The offline component of a person’s learning environment will tend to be more localized and immediate, based on personal relationships, support and emotional attachment.

Typically, the role of the online environment would be to inform and assess, while the role of the local environment would be to reaffirm and to advocate.”