education

14-year-old arrested over texting in class

It was math. It was, no doubt, more opaque than the truth about A-Rod. So a 14-year-old Wisconsin girl texted away.

Until she was taken away.

She was confronted by a school security officer at Wauwatosa High School, after she had ignored the math teacher's request to look at numbers instead of texting them.

At first, according to the police report, she denied having a phone. However, two of her class mates declared that this was not true. The phone, a Samsung Cricket, was then recovered from her person. From "the buttocks area," to be precise.

She was cited for disorderly conduct … Read more

Worker-monitoring tool now eyeing student cheaters

Norwegian high school students can now use state-provided laptops during exams. But they'd better not access notes, chat with friends, or surf the Web. Cheating will be detected immediately.

The system that will check on the students was originally developed to monitor corporate and government employees for productivity. As British security company 3ami, which created the software, puts it: "If you do not monitor, you do not know if they are doing any work."

The software, called "Monitoring and Audit System" or MAS, is now available in an Education Edition being pioneered by the Norwegian … Read more

U.K. schools under open-source pressure

Education, at least here in the United States, always seems to be underfunded. Apparently, it's much the same across the pond in the United Kingdom, where the BBC News reports on a growing furor to stretch limited education dollars with open-source software.

Although the U.K. has been under pressure to look more closely at open source, it turns out that there are some valid reasons for delaying a move to open source--or, really, to any new solution: it takes time and money to evaluate new technology, and schools don't often have much of either. It can also … Read more

Study: Nintendo brain games don't make the grade

Nintendo's brain games may not help put your kid on the Nobel Prize track after all, according to one professor who put the titles to the test.

Alain Lieury, a professor of cognitive psychology at the University of Rennes in Brittany, France, surveyed a group of 10-year-olds and concluded that homework, reading, or playing Scrabble or sudoku produced benefits that matched or beat the supposed memory-enhancing properties of such titles as Big Brain Academy, Brain Training, and Brain Age.

The latter game contains several types of puzzle challenges designed to stimulate and keep the gray matter "young" and sharp.

"The Nintendo DS is a technological jewel. As a game it's fine," the Times Online quotes Lieury as saying. "But it is charlatanism to claim that it is a scientific test."

Lieury, a memory specialist, split 67 10-year-olds into four groups, according to the Times Online. The first two took part in a seven-week memory course on a Nintendo DS game console, the third did puzzles with pencils and paper, and the fourth went to school as usual.

Before and after the course, the kids were given tasks including logic tests, memorizing words on a map, doing sums, and interpreting symbols. Researchers found that children using the Nintendo DS system didn't show any significant improvement in memory tests. They did do 19 percent better in math, but so did the pencil-and-paper group, while the fourth group did 18 percent better.

"If it doesn't work on children, it won't work on adults," Lieury said.… Read more

Tech giants team on education push

Microsoft, Intel, and Cisco plan to announce Tuesday that they are working together to help ensure that proper standards are created for measuring digital literacy.

The three companies aren't coming up with the assessment criteria themselves, but rather bringing together a group of education leaders and academics to identify the characteristics that should form the basis of global standards.

While such standards have emerged for math and science, they are also needed for other kinds of 21st century skills, Microsoft Vice President Anoop Gupta said in an interview last week.

To head the effort, the troika has tapped professor … Read more

Intel unveils tablet Classmate PC design

Intel has revealed the design for a tablet version of its Classmate PC, a low-powered Netbook designed for use in primary schools.

The tablet-format Classmate, which was unveiled Friday at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, will let manufacturers build Classmate PCs that can be used either as a standard clamshell laptop or--with a 180-degree swivel of the display--as a touch-screen tablet. As with most Netbooks, it will run on Intel's Atom processor.

"Education is one of the best ways to improve the future for individuals, villages or nations," Lila Ibrahim, the general manager of Intel's emerging-markets platform group, said in a statement Friday. "There are 1.3 billion school-age children around the world and of those only five percent have access to a PC or the internet. The IT industry has a huge opportunity to contribute to how technology can improve students' learning and students' lives."

Ibrahim's division developed the reference design for the convertible Classmate PC based on ethnographic research. Child-friendly features include a water-resistant keyboard and a sturdy frame. Another feature is dubbed "palm rejection"--in tablet mode, the user can rest their palm on the touchscreen while writing, without the screen registering the palm's pressure as input. … Read more

OLPC slashes workforce in half, cuts salaries

The One Laptop Per Child project announced Wednesday that it is slashing its workforce by 50 percent, reducing salaries for the remaining staff, and restructuring its operations.

Nicholas Negroponte, founder of the group that aims to provide low-cost laptops to children in developing countries, announced the cuts in a company blog post:

Like many other nonprofits that are facing tough economic times, One Laptop per Child must downsize in order to keep costs in line with fewer financial resources. Today we are reducing our team by approximately 50% and there will be salary reductions for the remaining 32 people. While … Read more

The UK's new education program: 'Technology, not tradition'

The UK's primary school education program has remained roughly the same since it was instituted in 1904. That's all about to change.

As reported in The Times, the UK will soon introduce a series of sweeping changes to the nation's primary school education, "aimed at producing a curriculum for the 21st Century" which will see information technology classes given equal standing with English and Math.

Proponents of the new system argue that it's not a matter of discarding the core subjects of English, Math, Science, etc., but rather of teaching them in new ways in order to make them more easily digestible by students.

The material is proposed to be taught around six learning areas: understanding English, communication, and languages; mathematical understanding; scientific and technological understanding; human, social, and environmental understanding; understanding physical health and well-being; and understanding arts and design.

Sir Jim [Rose, author of the report,] said that combining traditional subjects in themed "learning areas" and introducing more practical and applied teaching would help pupils to make use of their knowledge in real-life situations, such as in managing their own finances.

The idea is to give teachers more latitude to cover topics in more depth, rather than breadth, and to take a cross-disciplinary approach.

Some critics suggest that the new approach risks leaving children with shallow foundations in core subjects like Math, which provide a firm foundation for appreciating and understanding other topics. … Read more

Awards go to groups bringing power, homes, health to the poor

A group working to save land in Namibia, projects bringing power to Indian villages and building earthquake-resistant homes in Indonesia, the maker of a single-use syringe, and a group that uses technology in classrooms in India were the winners of the Tech Museum awards held Wednesday.

The Biomass Energy Project, Cheetah Conservation Fund in Namibia won the 2008 Intel Environment Award. The group converts invasive bush into clean fuel. It employs 15 people at a biomass processing plant that uses a high-pressure extrusion process to create an economically viable alternative to firewood, coal, and charcoal. The fund is working to … Read more