The right stuff: Teaching kids about copyright

By TARA WOODALL, eSchoolNews

It can be hard to get moral compasses to twitch when discussing the intricacies of copyright law, public domain, fair use, and Creative Commons. Those concepts seem abstract and removed from the concerns of adolescents. It can be even harder to break them of the habit of doing a Google image search and grabbing the first relevant and powerful image they see.  But remember that John F. Kennedy famously talked about the importance of doing the “hard stuff” in his “moon speech” at Rice Stadium in 1962. He spoke of the importance of getting to the moon, but I think that we can take the spirit of his words and apply them to teaching this particular tough corner of digital citizenship. I’m here to argue that we should choose to teach copyright not because it is easy, but because it is hard, because the goal of understanding copyright will serve to measure the best of student energies, skills, and citizenship.

https://www.eschoolnews.com/2017/09/07/teaching-kids-copyright/

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from Educational Technology http://people.uis.edu/rschr1/et/?p=31666

Teachers: 6 social assignments for online learning

BY SCOTT RAGIN, eSchool News

A handful of customizable online assignment ideas that will keep online learning students interested and motivated in their work. Online learning students, like any other students, like to spend time procrastinating before they get to completing assignments given in class. Many teachers struggle to come up with tasks and projects that really engage and motivate students to skip procrastination and get working. Teachers: if you find yourself at a roadblock when it comes to designing engaging projects, here are a few easily customizable online assignment ideas that will keep your students interested and motivated. These assignments can also be applied to many different subjects, as they aim to test a variety of skills and abilities at once.

https://www.eschoolnews.com/2017/06/30/social-online-assignments/

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from Educational Technology http://people.uis.edu/rschr1/et/?p=29573

Amid IT layoffs, edtech startups see soaring demand

Nilesh Christopher&Sanghamitra Kar, ETtech

Amid IT layoffs, edtech startups see soaring demandOnline learning platforms are seeing a double-digit spike in registrations by Indian IT professionals in the last three months, as companies and employees are starting to realize the importance of reskilling in a rapidly changing industry. “The growing realization among Indian workforce that reskilling is the only way to stay competitive led to a 37% increase in Indian registrations during the Feb-April period compared to last year,” said Raghav Gupta, India Country Director, Coursera. Online learning platform Simplilearn saw its growth double in the last quarter. “The spike in January has led to great demand for some courses such as AWS, Azure, Big Data, Data Science,” said Krishna Kumar, CEO, Simplilearn.

http://tech.economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/internet/amid-it-layoffs-edtech-startups-see-soaring-demand/59225667

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from Educational Technology http://people.uis.edu/rschr1/et/?p=29221

Apple Swift Draws Support from Robotics, Drone Makers

By Dian Schaffhauser, THE Journal

Alongside other companies that have picked up integration with Apple’s Swift coding language, Lego Education has announced its own support for the iPad programming app for beginners. The company said it would be pairing Mindstorms Education EV3 with the Swift Playgrounds learning platform to allow students to program their Lego Mindstorms robots and other creations with motors and sensors. Mindstorms already comes with its own programming app, which is controlled by dragging and dropping icons into a line to form commands. Swift is a highly visual programming environment that allows the user to tap on assorted options for creation of runnable code.

https://thejournal.com/articles/2017/06/12/apple-swift-draws-support-from-robotics-drone-makers.aspx

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from Educational Technology http://people.uis.edu/rschr1/et/?p=29058

On-Campus Enrollment Shrinks While Online Continues its Ascent

By Dian Schaffhauser, Campus Technology

More than 6 million students took at least one online course in 2015, representing more than a quarter (29.7 percent) of all higher education enrollments that year, according to a new report from Digital Learning Compass. Among that 29.7 percent, it’s almost evenly split between students who took some but not all courses online (15.4 percent) and those who took every class online (14.3 percent). In contrast, total online enrollments in 2002 came in just under 10 percent. Put another way, the number of students who have taken a “distance education” course rose by 3.9 percent in 2015, adding an additional 226,375 online students to the virtual attendance rolls. Between 2012 and 2015, the number of on-campus students has declined by 5 percent, losing a total of 931,317.

https://campustechnology.com/articles/2017/05/02/on-campus-enrollment-shrinks-while-online-continues-its-ascent.aspx

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from Educational Technology http://people.uis.edu/rschr1/et/?p=27401

Online Music Composition Tool Helps Students Engage, Learn and Socialize

By Shelley Emslie, THE Journal

A fifth grade teacher from Montana reflects on how Soundtrap helped an unmotivated, unfocused student discover his voice and passion. One day in class during Genius Hour, I noticed this student really engaged on a Chromebook. He had earphones on, so I could not hear what he was listening to, but the smile on his face went from ear to ear. I had to find out what had him so captivated. After asking him what he was up to, he said, “I’m doing Soundtrap.” I had never heard of it, but soon learned about it from my colleague, Brianne Fuzesy, our music and band teacher. It is an online collaborative music and audio recording studio that runs on multiple platforms, including Chromebooks. Very easy to use, it gives students the tools to create music or podcasts and share them through the web with fellow students within an invited group.

https://thejournal.com/articles/2017/04/13/online-music-composition-tool-helps-students-engage-learn-and-socialize.aspx

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from Educational Technology http://people.uis.edu/rschr1/et/?p=26505

UI makes winter-session classes permanent

by Julie Wurth, News-Gazette

A pilot program that allowed students to take courses during winter break for the past three years will now be part of the permanent schedule at the University of Illinois. A winter class session will be added to the academic calendar starting in 2017-18, following the campus Academic Senate’s approval of the change Monday. The UI has had summer-session and “intersession” classes — between summer classes and the spring or fall semesters — for many years. In 2014-15, the UI experimented with a new winter session: online courses offered by UI faculty during the four-week break between the fall and spring semesters, from Dec. 22, 2014, through Jan. 16, 2015.

http://www.news-gazette.com/news/local/2017-04-04/ui-makes-winter-session-classes-permanent.html

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from Educational Technology http://people.uis.edu/rschr1/et/?p=25962

Report Urges Schools to Encourage African-American Girls to Pursue Engineering

By Dian Schaffhauser, THE Journal

In 2015, less than 1 percent of all U.S. engineering bachelor’s degrees went to African-American women. Of the 106,658 engineering bachelor’s degrees awarded that year, 937 went to African-American women, just a third of the number that were achieved by African-American men. That gap, among others, represents “ignored potential,” according to a new paper put out by Purdue University, the National Society of Black Engineers (NSBE), the Society of Women Engineers and the Women in Engineering ProActive Network. As the report noted, STEM jobs are expected to increase by 10 percent by 2020.

https://thejournal.com/articles/2017/03/30/african-american-women-in-engineering-ignored-potential.aspx

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from Educational Technology http://people.uis.edu/rschr1/et/?p=25822