Repost: UPDATE: NUITEQ's Snowflake: Updated, improved, and retitled-- Snowflake MultiTeach®

I wrote a post published on October 13, 2013 about Snowflake ABC, a software suite of entertaining educational apps developed by NUITEQ®.

Fast forward to 2016, and I now work with NUITEQ® as a K-12 technology specialist, and realized that the post needed some updating.  So here's the update!

Many great improvements have been made by the NUITEQ® team since Snowflake ABC was released. Along with the changes came a new name, Snowflake MultiTeach®. 

Snowflake MultiTeach® was designed for multi-touch, multi-user displays and tables, but can be used on single-touch displays or traditional computers/laptops with a mouse. It works well for "front-of-class" presentations and has many features that support collaborative group work.



So what is new?

The Lessons app was added to the suite of applications, along with Nodes, a concept-mapping and presentation application that supports project and problem based learning, STEM, and STEAM.

The Lessons app is a powerful addition to Snowflake MultiTeach®.  Within this app,  teachers (and students) can build a variety of interactive, engaging lessons, learning games, and quizzes, with little effort. 

Snowflake MultiTeach® can support several lessons and apps running at the same time, using the Zones feature, which makes it ideal for students working in pairs or small groups.

To compliment the Lessons app, the online MultiTeach® Lessons Community  was developed to provide a way for teachers to share lessons they've created.  The lessons posted on the MultiTeach® Lessons Community can be accessed from within the Lessons home screen.  Lessons can be searched by subject and level and imported directly into the Lessons home screen.  

Lessons created with Snowflake MultiTeach® can be exported directly from the Lessons home screen to the MultiTeach® Lessons Community so they can be shared with others. Snowflake MultiTeach® and sign-up to the MultiTeach® Lessons Community is required for access.

To support teachers as they make the transition from single-touch whiteboards to multi-user displays, the MultiTeach® Pinterest site was created.  There you can find curated and regularly updated information about how to use Snowflake MultiTeach®, 21st century teaching and learning, free digital resources for the classroom, and much more.

For information about how teachers can integrate Snowflake MultiTeach® into their classrooms, take some time to read the following blog posts. Share with your peers!

Infuse Arts into STEM Projects Using Collaborative Touch Screen Technology

Collaborative STEM Education and Careers Exploration

How to MultiTeach®: Introduction to Snowflake MultiTeach® Nodes App

Differentiated instruction through Snowflake MultiTeach®

Like what you see?

If you are interested in replacing your current single-touch interactive whiteboard with a multi-touch display, contact a representative fromNUITEQ® by following the email link on the website, and you will be connected to someone in your region who can assist you. 

(Here is the old post for reference, scroll down to see information about ABC.)

Working with NUITEQ as a K-12 Tech Specialist

I'm happy to announce that I am working with NUITEQ as a K-12 Technology Specialist. NUITEQ has made a commitment to developing educational solutions to meet the needs of students and teachers in today's technology-rich classrooms.

Take a look at a recent post I wrote for the NUITEQ blog:

The 21st Century Classroom and Multi-touch Technology


You might also be interested in the new Pinterest site I created as resource for teachers who will be using NUITEQ's multi-touch software, MultiTeach. The Pinterest boards will be regularly updated:

MultiTeach Resources on Pinterest

Below are some pictures of a little guy I know and love, happily exploring what MultiTeach has to offer:

What I like about the NUITEQ team is that it aims to put users front and center at each phase of development.  For education, this means teachers and students.  

Note:  I will continue to share my interactive multimedia and emerging technology discoveries in future Interactive Multimedia Technology posts!

Back-to-School Reads For Innovative Teaching and Learning

It is that time of year.  

Teachers, students, and parents know that in a few days or weeks, school will begin for the 2015-16 academic year... 

The good news?  

Some teachers have been busy sharing their ideas, strategies, and resources as they plan ahead.  Here are a just a few good links to get started:

8 things every teacher can do to create an innovative classroom
Trevor Shaw, eSchool News, 8/3/15

Elementary Classroom Hacks:  Big Ideas at Little Cost
Samantha McBurney, Edutopia, 8/3/15

The MindShift Guide to Digital Games and Learning
Ki Sung, Mind/Shift, 11/18/14


Educational Uses of Digital Storytelling
University of Houston, 2015

15 Characteristics of a 21st-Century Teacher
Tsisana Palmer, Edutopia, 6/20/15

Engage NY (Common Core Lessons)
New York State Education Department Website

Fractions are hard
David Wee, The Reflective Educator

Seeing Struggling Math Learners as 'Sense Makers', Not 'Mistake Makers'
Katrina Schwartz, Mind/Shift, 8/4/15

Mistake Makers or Sense Makers, David Wees

More to come!

Learning to Teach through Mixed Reality: UCF's TeachLivE

Imagine this.  A mixed-reality environment designed to provide pre-service student teachers and teachers looking to improve their skills a chance to try out new strategies, without messing up with real kids!   TLE TeachLiveE™ was developed by researchers at the Synthetic Reality Lab located at the Institute for Simulation & Training at the University of Central Florida. It  looks like a great training tool for young college students who are planning to take on the challenge of a career in education.  

With modifications, the TeachLivE system looks like it would be a good tool for building skills of principals-in-training, as well as others who plan to work in the schools, such as  future school psychologists, school nurses, and school resource officers.

Below is a description of the system from the TeachLivE website, along with some videos and related links. 

(Be sure to watch the video of MILES, near the end of this post. MILES is a similar application designed to support the training of social workers and therapists, and features that could be used to enhance the TeachLiveE system.)

"TLE TeachLivE™ is a mixed-reality classroom with simulated students that provides teachers the opportunity to develop their pedagogical practice in a safe environment that doesn’t place real students at risk. This lab is currently the only one in the country using a mixed reality environment to prepare or retrain pre-service and in-service teachers. The use of TLE TeachLivE™ Lab has also been instrumental in developing transition skills for students with significant disabilities, providing immediate feedback through bug-in-ear technology to pre-service teachers, developing discreet trial skills in pre-service and in-service teachers, and preparing teachers in the use of STEM-related instructional strategies." -TeachLivE 

Virtual Reality Classroom Trains Teacher

"There is a child with ADHD, there is a child who is going to take out their cell phone, and do something with his cell phone right there for our pre-service teacher, if our preservice teacher is not paying attention to that child.  So what they've tried to do is actually program different types of children into each simulated avatar." -Dr. David Rock, Dean, School of Education, University of Mississippi. 




RELATED
A good overview of the use of virtual worlds and environments for learning.At 7:44, Stephen Bronack, of Learn NC, provides an overview of TeachLivE at TEDX Greenville. TeachLivE is in place at Clemson University in S.C.
 


MILES: Motivation Interviewing Learning Environment and Simulation (MILES) was created by researchers at the USC Institute of Creative Technologies and uses the power of a game engine to create the main character.  MILES is used at the USC School of Social Work to help future therapist develop their therapist/client interactive skills to provide treatment for service members, veterans, or family members of people impacted by the military, and is used by group of students in social work graduate courses in a way that tracks learning progress and informs classroom discussion.

TeachLivE Website
TeachLivE program at UCF attracts interest from Sesame Street Creators
Amanda Palmiera, Central Florida Future, 7/21/13
My World Has Been Rocked: Educator reviews 'TeachLive', a virtual teaching environment
Brian Greenberg, edSurge 6/24/13
UM Uses Student Avatars for Teacher Training
Andrew Mark Abernathy, Ole Miss News 3/18/13
SLU using avatars, virtual classrooms as teaching tools
The Times-Picayune, 4/9/13

TeachLivE publications:
Elford, M., Carter, R., & Aronin, S. (2013). Virtual reality check: Teachers use bug-in-ear coaching to practice feedback techniques with student avatars. JSD, 34(1), 40–43.

Hayes, A. T., Straub, C. L., Dieker, L. A., Hughes, C. E., & Hynes, M. C. (2013). Ludic Learning: Exploration of TLE TeachLivETM and Effective Teacher Training. Int. J. Gaming Comput. Mediat. Simul., 5(2), 20-33. doi: 10.4018/jgcms.2013040102

Andreasen, J. B. & Haciomeroglu, E. S. (2009). Teacher training in virtual environments. Paper presented at the annual meeting of the North American Chapter of the International Group for the Psychology of Mathematics Education, Atlanta, GA. 

USC Develops Virtual Tool to Train Child Interviewers
Evy Jacobson, USC Gould School Of Law, 5/14/13
Emergent Leader Immersive Training Environment
USC Institute for Creative Technologies

SOMEWHAT RELATED
Blend My Learning 
NewSchools Venture Fund

Let's Get Visual: Visual Communication with Smartphones, Getty's Open Content, Art Everywhere and Visual Perception Research

Let's Get Visual....

It difficult to imagine a world without Instagram, Flickr, YouTube, Pinterest or Facebook photo-sharing.  According to a press release from ABI Research in 2012, over one billion cameras were shipped in smartphones and tablets.  Never before has it been this easy to shoot and share pictures and video clips in-the-moment.   Why talk on the phone for twenty minutes with one person when you can share a (visual) moment with your entire extended family and network of friends, colleagues, and acquaintances with just one touch?

We are communicating in ways that were not possible a decade ago.

Qmee, a online search rewards company, put together an infographic to show what transpires on-line in just 60 seconds. 72 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube. 20 million photos are viewed on flickr. 104,000 photos are shared on snapchat, and 3,600 photos are uploaded every second to Instagram.

Credit: Qmee

According to a 2012 study published by the Pew Internet & American Life project, 46% of adult Internet users took pictures or videos and posted them on line. 41% reported that they found photos or videos online, and then re-posted them to share with others.  If you have a Facebook account, you know that there are people who delight in taking digital content sharing to the next level. Websites such as the Programmable Web's Mashup Dashboard and Know Your Meme are examples of this trend. 

Getty Museum's Open Content Program

The Getty Museum recently launched the Open Content Program with a release of about 4,600 high-resolution images of all public domain artworks in the museum's collection, free for anyone to use, modify, or publish.  The Getty plans to release more images in the future. The images can be accessed via the Getty Search Gateway. 

Here is the motivation behind the release of Getty's digital content:

"Why open content?  Why now?  The Getty was founded on the conviction that understanding art makes the world a better place, and sharing our digital resources is the natural extension of that belief.  This move is also an educational imperative.  Artists, students, teachers, writers, and countless others rely on artwork images to learn, tell stories, exchange ideas, and feed their own creativity.  In its discussion of open content, the most recent Horizon Report, Museum Edition stated "it is now the mark-and social responsibility-of world class institutions to develop and share fee cultural and educational resources."" 


It will be interesting to see how this trend unfolds.  We are now past the clip-art era.

Art Everywhere

"Its all about flooding our streets with art this summer, and turning the UK into the world's largest art gallery" -Richard Reed

Art Everywhere was launched in the UK on August 12th and ends on August 25th of this year (2013).  The art is on display in public spaces on thousands of billboards and digital screens across the UK,  as well as on buses and cabs.  The art was chosen by the public, and the project was funded by the project's sponsors and donations.  

Photos of the artwork chosen for the Art Everywhere exhibition, along with related information about each selection, can be viewed on the Art Everywhere website. Richard Reed, who spearheaded Art Everywhere, provides an overview in the video below:

All of the Art Everywhere posters can come to life with when viewed through a smartphone. Using the free Blippar app, the viewer can scan the poster with the smartphone's camera to access more information about the artwork.  Viewers are encouraged to enter the Art Everywhere photo competition by taking pictures of the outdoor exhibition to win a camera, daily prizes.

Art Everywhere's partners include the Reed Page Foundation, the ArtFund, Tate, Posterscope, Vizeum, 101/   EasyArt, Blippar, Arts Media People, Clear Channel, CBS Outdoor, JCDecaux, Ocean, and Primesight

Neuroscience Research: Visual Perception Process

"The brain is plastic for life" .-Michael Merzenich*

There have been concerns that the internet and new technologies might have a significant impact, good or bad, on the human brain and child development, as discussed by a panel held at the University of Colorado Annual Conference on World Affairs.  

The good news is that neuroscientists have new technologies to explore how the brain works. We have evidence to support that our brains have more plasticity as we age than previously thought. Since the technology use in brain research is so new, it might be a while before we will know what exactly happens when our brains are "on the internet".

Theories of how the brain functions are changing as new discoveries are made. One example of this is the work of Dr. Randy Bruno, a neuroscientist at Columbia University's Kalvi Institute for Brain Science.  He has discovered that in rats, signals about sensory information are processed simultaneously in two parts of the cortex, as separate circuits.  The upper layers of the cortex might be integrating sensation with context or experience, as described in the following video:

Dr. Bruno's research aims to understand how experience causes structural changes in the brain. His research shows that neuronal connections between the thalamus and the cortex are very plastic and responsive. Although he studies brain functioning in rats, the cortical systems are similar to other mammals, including humans.

"The key is to be actively engaged in a task and that there be meaningful elaboration on the information taken in at higher levels in order to maintain associations between different pieces of information. Such active engagement, as opposed to passive acquisition of what we experience with our senses, may enhance changes in the brain." - Randy Bruno*

From what I can see, it might be good for us to accessing the web via smartphones to engage in social visual communication activities.  If we are excited by a visually-based experience, and share it with others, or if we take in visual information and use it to create a mashup, and send it out for others to enjoy, our brains are actively engaged. If the neuroscientists are right, we aren't really wasting our time online.  

We are growing dendrites!

RELATED

The Fantastic Plastic Brain*
The Kavli Foundation, 7/12

Study Advances New Theory of How the Brain Is Wired
Claudia Wallace, Columbia University Research, 6/27/13

The Internet and the Human Brain Panel (Video-1 hour, 14 minutes)
University of Colorado Annual Conference on World Affairs

Instagram at the Museum: Communicating the Museum Experience through Social Photo Sharing Alexandra Weilenmann, Thomas Hillman, Beata Junselius, CHI 2013, ACM

Open Content, An Idea Whose Time Has Come
James Cuno, The Getty Iris, 8/12/13

Getty Search Gateway

Horizon Report 2012 Museum Edition





Blippar Brings World's Largest Art Exhibition 'Art Everywhere' to Life
Blippar News Release, 8/8/13

Art Everywhere turns UK's streets into world's largest art show
Caroline Davies, The Guardian, 8/8/13

The Rise of Visual Socialization
The Halo Group Effect, 2013

The Unstoppable Trend of Visual Communications
David Amerland, HP InputOutput, 2/11/12

The Rise of Visual Social Media
Ekaterina Walter, Fast Company, 8/28/12

Research Modules: Next Generation Mobile Devices, ABI Research

Mashup Dashboard, Programmable Web

Know Your Meme

Prancercise video memes 

This Brain Discovery May Overturn a Century-Old Theory
Ben Thomas, Scientific American Blog, 8/8/13

Little Digits Counting and Early Math App, by Cowly Owl - Chris O'Shea

Fun with Early Math:  App by Chris O'Shea - Cowly Owl

Chris O'Shea is an artist and designer who uses technology in creative, playful ways. Over the past year or so, he's devoted some of his attention to designing engaging iPad apps and digital toys.  Below is a video of his Little Digits app in action:


Little Digits from Cowly Owl on Vimeo.

Here is the information from the Vimeo site:

"Little Digits is a fun educational app that teaches children about numbers by putting a new spin on finger counting. Using the iPad multi-touch screen, Little Digits displays number characters by detecting how many fingers you put down.  Children can learn to associate the number on the screen with the number of fingers they place down, whilst enjoying the unique characters and animations of the Little Digits world...They are also games that introduce small addition and subtraction calculations, where you can work out the answer using the same multi-touch finger detection."

RELATED
Cowly Owl
Chris O'Shea's Website
My iPad Pinterest Board

Tips for Apps and the Web: Designing for Teens, Part I

Jakob Nielsen, of the Nielsen Norman Group, recently wrote an interesting post about designing website for teens. He provides good information for anyone considering this age group.  The study includes tips for designing for smaller screens such as laptops with track pads, touch-screen tablets, and smart phones.

Teenage Usability:  Designing Teen-Targeted Websites

Jakob Nielsen, Alertbox, 2/4/13

The research shared in Nielsen's post is important. The results of research conducted 8 years ago are compared with current findings.  Nielsen discusses some of the myths about teens and technology. As Nielsen points out, teens might appear to be tech-savvy in some ways, but they possess brains that are in the midst of cognitive development,  just one factor to consider when designing web experiences for this age group.

Nielsen Norman Group's related product, "Teenagers (Ages 13-17) on the Web" provides additional information on this topic. It includes 110 design guidelines informed by research conducted with teens.  Busy web developers might find the fee of $149.00 for this report appropriate.   

The information in this report would also be useful to design/development teams who aim to provide web-based educational content for this age group.

Pew Internet & American Life

Another good resource for designers/developers targeting applications or websites for teens is the Pew Research Center website.  The Pew Internet & American Life Project continues to investigate a wide range of topics related to the use of technology among people of all walks of life.  What I like about the Pew Research Center is that their reports are free, and include summaries as well as samples of interview questions.

Researchers from the Pew Internet and American Life Project share their knowledge in a variety of forms.  Data is available for download in SPSS and comma-delimited format, crosstab files and questionnaires.

The website also provides access to number of presentations, such as the one below:

Teens 2012: Truth, Trends, and Myths About Teen Online Behavior from Pew Research Center's Internet & American Life Project

RELATED/SOMEWHAT RELATED

Nielson-Norman Group Research Reports

Children 3-12 on the Web

Teenagers (Ages 13-17) on the Web

College Students (Ages 18-24) on the Web

Pew Research Center Resources
Featured Research: Teens
Pew Research Center Trend Data (Teens)
In-store Mobile Commerce During the 2012 Holiday Shopping Season

Teens and Education Resources 
The following websites also provide resources for other age groups and related topics.
Edudemic
Edudemic Ed-Tech Tools 
Edutopia
Edutopia: 6-8 Grade Level Resources
Edutopia: 9-12 Grade Level Resources
Mind/Shift

Part II will focus on teens and considerations for educational technology.

Interactive Tablets and Learning: One Laptop Per Child now One Tablet Per Child in Ethiopia

One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) is a philanthropic organization that focuses on learning technologies, distributing thousands of low-cost laptops to children in developing countries.  In most cases, children have been provided access to OLPC laptops within teachers within traditional school settings.  But what about children who live in remote areas, where there are no schools, teachers, or even access to electricity?  They now have the opportunity to learn, even without teachers, through a small experiment conceived by Nicholas Negroponte, of OLCP and other researchers.  In this experiement, each child was provided with a Motorola Xoom tablet.  No teachers were around, because the children lived in a remote village that had no teachers. 

The following video provides a brief overview of what happened over the course of a few weeks and months after the children received the tablets:

To learn more, I encourage you to follow the link to a video of Nicholas Negroponte's presentation at the October 2012 EmTech conference, held in Cambridge, Massachusetts.  He discusses learning and how it can be supported through technology, anywhere.

EmTech Video: Nicholas Negroponte: Teaching Children to Learn

"Nicholas Negroponte, founder, One Laptop Per Child, on his latest experiment with the democratization of education - can children teach themselves to read?"

In his presentation, Negroponte discusses the differences between knowing and understanding, and the importance for teachers (or learning applications) to understand the learner.  He goes on to discuss the OLPC research project Ethiopia where children living in remote villages with no teachers, no exposure to print, illiterate communities, and no access to technology, learned to use tablets without instruction or guidance.  The village was provided with a solar panel and one village member was taught how to use it to supply power for the tablets.

Each tablet provided to the children had over 100 applications.  Within four minutes, one child open the box, turned on the on-off button. Within 5 days, each child was using an average of 47 applications.  Within five months, a child hacked the Android tablet to turn on the camera capability.  According to Negroponte, the children were each using different applications, but collaborated with one another.



Maryann Wolf, Director of  the Center for Reading and Language Research at Tufts University, has collaborated with with the "OTPC" project. Other collaborators include Cynthia Breazeal and team at the MIT Media Lab, and Sugata Mitra at Newcastle University, according to Chris Ball, lead software engineer at OLPC.

The tablets include software that tracks data from all of the interactions from the children.  What a goldmine for education and cognitive/developmental psychology researchers According to Negraponte, the data is free for analysis.   (I will update this post with additional information about how the data can be accessed as soon as I can find the link.)

Although the OTPC concept is a noble idea, it does not appear to address the fact the children and their families who live in remote villages do not have access to literacy support in their own language.  


RELATED

OLPC Literacy Project

Given Tablets but No Teachers, Ethiopian Children Teach Themselves:  A bold experiment by the One Laptop Per Child organization has shown "encouraging" results.
David Tabolt,  MIT Technology Review, 10/29/12


OLPC Project Puts Tablets in the Hands of Formerly Illiterate Children with Amazing Results John Biggs, TechCrunch, 11/1/12

Motorola Xoom hacked by Ethiopian kids who can't read; with no instructions whatsoever.
Joe Hindy, 11/4/12
 


DIG DEEPER: SOMEWHAT RELATED
Hourcade, J.P., Beitler, D., Cormenzana, F. and Flores, P. (2009). Early OLPC Experiences in a Rural Uruguayan School. In A. Druin (Ed.), Mobile Technology for Children: Designing for Interaction and Learning. Boston: Morgan Kaufmann.

Growing Up With Nell:  A Narrative Interface for Literacy (pdf)
IDC 2012, June 12–15, 2012, Bremen, Germany
Authors: C. Scott Ananian, Chris J. Ball, Michael Stone
One Laptop Per Child Foundation, 222 Third Street, Cambridge, MA 02142

ABSTRACT
"Nell is a tablet-oriented education platform for children in the developing world.  A novel modular narrative system guides learning, even for children far from educational infrastructure, and provides personalized instruction which grows with the child.  Nell's design builds on experience with the Sugar Learning Platform, used by over two million children around the world"

Quote from above article:
"To further promote collaboration, Nell is free and opensource and implemented in standard web technologies (JavaScript, HTML5, and WebGL) with offline caching. Resources are named by URL, even when disconnected from the internet, which simplifies the distribution of updates to story modules and the Nell system. URL-based identifiers also allow third parties to manage their own namespaces when extending Nell."

TinkRBook
A. Chang and C. Breazeal. TinkRBook: Shared reading interfaces for storytelling. (pdf) In Proc. of the 10th Int’l Conf. on Interaction Design and Children (IDC ’11), pages 145–148. ACM, June 2011.
NOTE:  The above article provides good references about early language and literacy development.



Wilox, Bruce Beyond Facade: Pattern Matching for Natural Language Applications (pdf)
Telltale Games, Feb. 2011
Note:  This paper reviews the history of Natural Language Processing (NLP) as applied to games, and includes information about AIML (Artificial Intelligence Markup Language), Facade, and ChatScript.  The author explains how string matching is no longer simply a matching of words. It now focuses matching patterns of meaning.

ChatScript 
ChatScript Website

Note:  One of my assignments for a class in AI for Games, back in 2006, was to create a mini-game that involved the use of AIML.  I realized that a "smart" chat feature would be useful to incorporate in an educational game. In my opinion, it has the potential to support scaffolding of learning, based on the learner's responses, positive as well as errors.

Video: Overview of Multimedia Learning Principles, Importance of Visual Learning, Richard Mayer

Richard Mayer has devoted his career to the study of multimedia learning. He is a professor in the Department of Psychological & Brain Sciences at UC Santa Barbara, and the author of Multimedia Learning, 2nd Edition. Although the book was published in 2009, years ago, it is a must-read for anyone interested in this topic.

With the popularity of interactive whiteboards and tablets/iPads in education, it is important for educators, designers and developers to become familiar with the basic principles of multimedia learning. It is also important subject for researchers.

Got Interactive (Multimedia) Textbooks Inside Your iPad or Tablet? Lots of Resources!

If you live in the US, and haven't yet heard, the U.S. government is encouraging K-12 schools to adopt interactive digital textbooks within the next five years.  Are we ready?  I don't think so.  There is a battle of the tablets going on as I type this post.  

Traditional, "old-school" textbook publishers appear to be key players in this game, but I am not sure if they have the know-how to create interactive content that is fresh, "touchable", engaging, and meaningful to young people.  A boring textbook, tweaked tweaked for a bit of interactivity and multimedia content will not suffice.

Feel free to take your time and visit the links I've shared so far. I'm still reflecting on what I've learned so far and will share more of my thoughts in future related posts.

Leaders Discuss Transition to Digital Textbooks
The LEAD commission 

Nation's Digital Learning Report Card (Interactive map)
Digital Learning Now!

US FCC: Digital Textbook Playbook (website)

Digital Textbook Playbook (pdf)
The Digital Textbook Collaborative, 2/1/12


Slide Presentation: Charting our Transition to "Interactive Digital Textbooks"  (pdf)
FCC LEAD Commission (Leading Education by Advancing Digital)
Video: Remarks by (FCC) Chairman Genachowski and Digital Education Leaders on National Adoption of Digital Textbooks

Key players: 
Dan Caton, McGraw-Hill
Will Ethridge, Pearson
Jose Ferreira, Knewton
Bill Goodwyn, Discovery Education
Joel Klein, News Corp
Matt MacInnis, Inkling
Osman Rashid, Kno
Dan Rosenweig, Chegg 
Linda Zecher, Houghton Mifflin 
Harcourt


Arne Duncan Calls for Textbooks To Become Obsolete in Favor of Digital  
Josh Lederman, Huff Post Education 10/2/12


Kno Interactive Textbooks App Now Available for Google Nexus Tablet and Google Play 
Business Wire, 10/29/12  Kno

Teaching with tablets: Will our children be using electronic textbooks to learn?  
Jamie Carter, 10/19/12

In digital textbook transition, device availability is just the beginning
Ki Mae Heusser, Gigaom, 10/22/12

Amazon challenges Apple in education with Whispercast
Ki Mae Heussner, Gigaom, 10/17/12

To empower students, let's bring interactive learning tools into the classroom  
Troy Williams (President of Macmillan New Ventures) Venture Beat, 10/30/12

Press Release: McGraw-Hill Ryerson Launches New High School iBooks Textbooks Digital Book Wire, 10/25/12

South Korea Classrooms to go fully Digital by 2015
Ben Gruber, Reuters, 10/5/12


South Africa: Launch of OS-Agnostic Digital Textbook Publishing Platform 
All Africa, 10/23/12

Whitepaper: From Paper to Pixel: Digital Textbooks and Florida Schools (pdf) 
Marcia Mardis, Nancy Everhart, Daniella Smith, Janice Newsum, Sheila Baker, Florida State University PALM Center, 2010

Whitepaper:  The Digital World of Young Children: Imact on Emergent Literacy (pdf))  Jay Blanchard, Terry More, Arizona State University, 2010 (Includes demographics about digital media survey data in selected developing and least developed nations.)

Apple Pushes Interactive Textbooks on iPads  
NPR Staff and Wires, 1/19/12
"Forrester Research said e-books accounted for only 2.8 percent of the $8 billion U.S. textbook market in 2010."

Engage: Apples New Tools for Interactive Books on iPad  
Tim Carmody, Wired, 1/19/12

Inkling Reinvents Textbooks as Interactive, Multimedia Learning Tools on the Tablet  David Weir, 7x7 SF, 7/1/11
Inkling

iBooks Author (free app)  -Apple

What's New in iBooks Author 2.0 -Apple

Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Press Release: Student Math Scores Jump 20 Percent with HMH Algebra Curriculum for Apple iPAd; App Transforms Classroom Education1/20/12HMH Fuse Pilot Program (Website)

SOMEWHAT RELATED
Digital Book World (Website)
MediaShift: Your Guide to the Digital Media Revolution (PBS website)
The Transition to Digital Journalism  Paul Grabowicz, Knight Digital Media Center, Berkeley, 10/26/12
How to make BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) work for your schools Laura Dvaney, eSchool News, 10/29/12
BLOG: Mind/Shift: How we will learn (KQED)
iBooks Author

Thinking about a Kurio 7 Tablet for your kid? Here is a start!

I haven't had a chance to play with the Kurio, a 7 inch Android tablet designed for children and their families, so I haven't formulated an opinion about the device, or the applications that it runs.  I thought I'd share the promotional video and related information/links:


Kurio Tablet from CIDE on Vimeo.

Parents can view a number of "how-to" videos to get the tablet up and running. Developers can apply to be part of the Kurio store. From what I can see, the Kurio is in need of some creative, child-friendly apps.

Below is a hands-on demo:




RELATED
Kurio at Toys'R'Us
Toon Goggles Partners with Techno Source on New Kurio7 Android Tablet for Families
PR Web 7/9/12
Kurio's Features

Toys 'R' Us has its own tablet, the Tabeo: