Serendipity35

Via the Huffington Post: "Obama Administration's Challenge To Schools: Embrace Digital Textbooks Within 5 Years"

Education Secretary Arne Duncan and Federal Communications Commission chairman Julius Genachowski issued a challenge this week to schools and companies to get digital textbooks in students' hands within five years.

You may be interested to look at the "Digital Textbook Playbook" issued along with the announcement   http://www.fcc.gov/encyclopedia/digital-textbook-playbook

...The Obama administration's push comes two weeks after Apple Inc. announced it would start to sell electronic versions of a few standard high-school books for use on its iPad tablet.
Digital books are viewed as a way to provide interactive learning, potentially save money and get updated material faster to students.

Digital learning environments have been embraced in Florida, Idaho, Utah, and California, as well as in individual schools and districts such as Joplin, Mo., where laptops replaced textbooks destroyed in a tornado. But many schools lack the broadband capacity or the computers or tablets to adopt the technology, and finding the money to go completely digital is difficult for many schools in tough economic times. And, in some places, adopting new textbooks is an arduous process.

At a time when technology has transformed how people interact and even led to social uprisings in the Middle East, education has too often lagged, Duncan said.

 "Do we want kids walking around with 50-pound backpacks and every book in those backpacks costing 50, 60, 70 dollars and many of them being out of date? Or, do we want students walking around with a mobile device that has much more content than was even imaginable a couple years ago and can be constantly updated? I think it's a very simple choice," Duncan said in an interview.

Tied to Wednesday's announcement at a digital town hall was the government's release of a 67-page "playbook" to schools that promotes the use of digital textbooks and offers guidance. The administration hopes that dollars spent on traditional textbooks can instead go toward making digital learning more feasible.

Going digital improves the learning process, and it's being rolled out at a faster pace in other countries, such as South Korea, Genachowski said in an interview. Genachowski said he's hopeful it can be cost effective in the long run, especially as the price of digital tablets drops.

"When a student reads a textbook and gets to something they don't know, they are stuck," Genachowski said. "Working with the same material on a digital textbook, when they get to something they don't know, the device can let them explore: It can show them what a word means, how to solve a math problem that they couldn't figure out how to solve."

I posted last about Google Plus possibilities and my final thought was that when Plus connects to all the other Google Apps, there might be more push to use it in schools. Today I read that Google has launched Google+ for Google Apps. (Google+ accounts could only be activated with a Gmail address before.)

The article says that already a few dozen Google Apps for Education universities have enabled Google+ for their students, faculty, and staff.

As I thought, using Google+ hangouts to meet classes in multiple locations via virtual meetings is a feature that should be attractive. It's not that this couldn't already be done using existing services, but most of those are for a fee.

Along with Apps integration, Google also added 3 new features: what's hot, ripples, and creative kit, for Google+. What's hot, accessible at the end of new posts in a user's stream or in their list of circles, allows users to see posts about topics trending on the network. Ripples gives users the ability to see how posts spread publicly throughout the network. Creative kit is a tool for editing images uploaded to Google+.

I keep hearing that Google Plus will change things. It will give Facebook a run for its money. It will change education. And maybe it will, but I don't see that happening yet.

At a recent NJEDge EATF meeting, a colleague talked about using Google+’s Hangout feature. The group is investigating synchronous collaboration and communication tools. There are a plethora of option$ - Adobe Connect, Skype, Collaborate, WebEx et al. But that FREE flag flying over Google services is very attractive to educators.

I found a post on wikihow.comabout using G+ for teaching.

Google Plus's Hangouts is a tool that takes the traveling strain out of the teaching process. Teachers can use that time to conduct more virtual classrooms at a greater number of places. This enables institutions to teach more students with a lower number of teachers, thereby saving costs and placing institutions in a position to reward teachers in better ways. The biggest advantage is that the Google Hangouts allows a teacher to teach to ten classrooms at a time. In case there are more, each of the receiving classrooms can relay it to ten more classrooms in turn.


So, you might use the subgroup concept within G+ known as Circles to create a class/group online. That is something we are used to from learning management systems.

I would like to see Google Apps have a G+ level.

The article suggests that you integrate your You Tube and Picasa accounts with your Google+ account so that you can transmit videos and photos and use Power Point presentations,or any file from your screen by clicking the option "share your screen."

And that is what makes Google Plus attractive - the possibilities that arise from connecting it to all the other free Google goodness.

It's not quite there yet. And there certainly aren't enough people (in education especially) using it to really make an impact. Let's hope it doesn't become another Buzz...

Maybe you have been exploring Google+ this summer and thinking about whether or not it has any applications for your classes.

Google+ is built to take you away from either Facebook or Twitter (or both), and it could do it, in time.

The live video chat feature is something that could be used for collaboration and you could create "Hangouts" for conferencing with students and "Circles" for classes or groups within a class.

If your school already uses Google Apps, there will be more and more ways to connect all these pieces.

Steven W. Anderson who does the blog at http://web20classroom.blogspot.com  has put together a LivBinder collection of links to resources on Understanding And Using Google+ In The Classroom And Beyond. (If you have never encountered LiveBinder, that's something you may want to explore also.)

If Google+ does eliminate the need for other services it might start with you NOT writing a blog post, emailing it or tweeting a link to it but simply using G+ to write it and then deciding how to share it. Make it "Public" and it's a blog post to the G+ world, direct it at a Circle (or Circles) and it's like a tweet.

Aim it at your class Circle and it's a post with a discussion below it. Direct it to one friend and it's email.

If you aren't using any social media tools already you may want to a) jump in now with G+ and have all the tools  b) continue to stay anti-social.  If you are already using the other tools for classes, I would think you'd want to start experimenting with G+ and compare the experience.