A New Blog Location

Recent additions to the themes of this blog have been moved to a new WordPress site.  The new blog “Beyond the Crystal Ball” will focus on preparing teachers and  students for the 21st Century, so the focus has been expanded beyond the original topics covered on this site.  To visit the new blog click on [...]

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Web 2.0 and Education

I just came across two blog posts  that deal in a thoughtful way with the impact of Web 2.0 technology on education and the world at large.
1.   “Not Natives & Immigrants but Visitors and Residents” by Dave White presents this dichotomy in an insightful and useful fashion in terms of planning for distance learning [...]

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Top New Educational Web Tools for 2008-09

It’s difficult to keep on top of all the new technology tools that may be useful for both educational and personal purposes, but fortunately there are some bloggers to assist us in weeding through the possibilities.
The first list was compiled by Jane Hart of the Center for Learning & Performance Technologies.    Her top ten tools [...]

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Second Life Educational Environments

Second Life is an open ended virtual world that is popular with educators interested in the potential of this technology. The environments in Second Life are created by the inhabitants. You can create an account and download the software for free. Below is a list of places you might enjoy visiting to [...]

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Virtual World Academic Resources

The following resources were collected in preparation for a meeting of members of the COPPER Carnegie leadership group (involving six colleges) that are a part of the Carnegie Academy’s CASTL initiative http://www.carnegiefoundation.org/general/index.asp?key=21 . Members will meet in a virtual world to explore the educational applications and potential of this technology. These resources may be of [...]

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Worlds of Wordcraft

At Vanderbilt University a first-year writing course entitled “Worlds of Wordcraft: Narrative Forms in the Digital Classroom” makes use of a variety of media to engage students in the learning process while enhancing their writing skills. Games and virtual worlds that are used in this course include Lord of the Rings Online, Dark Age [...]

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Predicting the Future

A friend just sent a link to a presentation by computer scientist and visionary Alan Kay on the topic of predicting the future. It’s a great piece with a lot to consider. There certainly are significant implications in Kay’s observations in terms of education and the use of some of the technologies that [...]

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