Mar 06
Tablets are reinventing how students access and interact with educational material, and how teachers assess and monitor students’ performance at a time when many schools are understaffed and many classrooms overcrowded.
Mar 06
Mar 05
News Corp rebranded its educational unit as Amplify in July. Since then the Joel Klein-headed company has been working with AT&T to develop a tablet expressly designed for the K-12 educational market. After months of testing the Amplify Tablet, an unspecified 10-inch Android slate loaded with custom software, is ready for its official debut. Lots of things have changed since we first caught a glimpse of the project many months ago. For one, the UI has been completely redesigned to be clean, modern and simple. The new look is much more inline with Google’s Holo, with extensive use of action overflow buttons, the sharing menu and solid blocks of color-coded material. The default home page offers a grid of app icons, but it also displays student information and lists “notebooks” on the right hands side. Those notebooks deliver quick access to different subjects for students, but they also give teachers direct links to materials for their classes, categorized not just by subject, but also by period. Klein and company don’t stop at simple organizational tools and reference materials, however.
Gallery: Amplify Tablet
Mar 05
Apple’s education-only 21.5-inch iMac gets bump in specs, now sells for $1,099
Posted in: Today's Chili 
We’ve already seen Cupertino’s 21.5-inch iMac up for sale on the company’s refurb store, and now it looks like the smaller model of the new all-in-ones is ready to be taken at a cost tailored for educational institutions. Unlike with previous education-only deals, however, Apple’s pricing its newly redesigned iMac starting at $1,099 instead of $999 — and that includes Intel’s 3.3GHz, dual-core i3 CPU alongside HD Graphics 4000, a 500GB hard drive and 4GB of RAM. While the aforementioned specs are different than the ones found in the pricier entry-level variant for every-day consumers, it’s worth mentioning Apple does offer the ability to upgrade some of the iMac’s internals, such as memory and built-in storage. Those with the proper credentials can start ordering now from Apple, with, as MacRumors points out, orders being expected to ship within 5-7 business days.
Via: MacRumors
Source: Apple
Mar 05
Since Apple computers tend to lean more towards the expensive side, it is understandable that most schools might prefer to go with a PC instead. However it looks like Apple is still interested in appealing to educational institutions and has since quietly updated their educational iMac model. This is a 21.5″ iMac and it is priced at $1,099, a good $200 cheaper than the regular iMac which is available for consumers. Granted this is slightly more expensive than its previous model introduced 18 months ago at $999, it does feature some updated specs that hopefully will be good enough to get the job done in schools. So what can education institutions expect from this updated model? Well for starters they can look forward to an Intel Core i3 processor clocked at 3.3GHz, a 1920×1080 Full HD display, 4GB of RAM, 500GB of HDD and an Intel HD Graphics 4000 GPU. It’s a very basic model so don’t expect too much, but it looks like it should be more than capable of dealing with the needs of schools/colleges.
By Ubergizmo. Related articles: 2013 Retina MacBook Pro Has Fan Speed Issues, Baldur’s Gate: Enhanced Edition Arriving On Mac 22nd February,
Mar 04
SparkFun’s 2013 National Education Tour plans to bring DIY electronics to all 50 states
Posted in: Today's Chili 
SparkFun is looking to further its educational push this summer, announcing its 2013 National Education Tour. The intiative, set to kick off in June, will bring the hacker supplier to schools in all 50 states, teaching six to eight hour courses aimed at getting students started in the world of DIY. The courses will focus on topics like the PicoBoard Scratch sensor, SparkFun Inventor Kit and e-textiles, teaching kids programming and hardware concepts. SparkFun will be footing a portion of the bills, to the tune of $1,000 per location and leaving hardware behind so education doesn’t have to stop when the company’s RV pulls away. SparkFun is also looking toward libraries as resources for its educational initiative, with programs aimed at educating librarians in the ways of Arduinos and the like. More information on the program can be found after the break.
Mar 02
The drab streets of Shijiazhuang are looking a lot livelier these days thanks to 23-year-old Wang Yue, an art student at Dalian Polytechnic University. With just a little paint and a whole lot of talent, Wang has conjured up a charming world of wildlife and still life peering out from the hollows, cracks and scars of street-side trees.
Feb 28
Apple Has Sold Over 8M iPads Direct To Education Worldwide, With More Than 1B iTunes U Downloads
Posted in: Today's Chili
Apple announced a new milestone for its iTunes U online digital education outlet, which has just crossed the 1 billion download mark. Alongside the announcement, Apple has also informed us exclusively that the company has so far sold more than 8 million iPads directly into educational institution worldwide. iTunes U became a standalone app, complete with its own course marketplace and catalog in June 2012.
At the time, iTunes U had served up over 700 million downloads. The additional 300 million downloads mean that the pace of engagement for iTunes U is growing rapidly. iTunes U was introduced in May 2007, meaning that it took the educational product a full five years to rack up just a little over twice that amount. The rapid growth over the last nine months has likely been the result of a combination of factors, including the introduction of the standalone app and an increase in the adoption of iPads in educational settings.
AllThingsD reported earlier that to date, Apple has sold more than 4.5 million iPads to U.S.-based educational institutions, a figure which Apple confirmed to us as correct. Thanks to some clever calculation on the part of 9to5Mac’s Jordan Kahn based on publicly available information, it looks like the vast majority of that number was sold recently, over the past year in fact. Apple CEO Tim Cook has repeatedly stressed how important the education market is in the context of the iPad, and the fact that it’s doing so well with institutional sales both at home and abroad backs that up.
Apple also shared some details about school participation in iTunes U today, noting that more than 1,200 universities and colleges, and over 1,200 K-12 schools host over 2,500 public courses on iTunes U, along with thousands more private courses available only to enrolled students. Some big institutions are embracing iTunes U with particular vigor, Apple notes, including Standford and The Open University, both of which have racked up over 60 million content downloads alone. Some of the more popular individual courses have around 250,000 students enrolled, Apple noted.
Greg noted in a recent article that online education is fast replacing physical colleges, with startups like Coursera reaping many of the benefits. Apple has the advantage of being a very early player in this space, and the ubiquity of its iPad tablet is clearly helping the company add a lot more momentum to its efforts to help institutions embrace online learning.
Feb 28
Apple’s iTunes U has seen over one billion downloads of free educational content, the company has announced today, with some schools seeing courses with quarter-million registrations and 60m individual downloads. Revealed a little over a year ago, iTunes U offers free educational material and related content from universities, colleges, schools, K-12 districts, and private courses to the iPad.
According to Apple, more than 1,200 universities and colleges are involved, along with 1,200 K-12 schools and districts, and over 2,500 public and private courses are sharing materials through iTunes U. Some of the courses have been incredibly popular: an Ohio State University general chemistry course saw over 100,000 enrolments, for instance, though the system has also allowed more esoteric courses to flourish.
More than 60-percent of the iTunes U app downloads are happening outside of the US, it’s revealed, and there are now over 75,000 educational apps in the App Store, and more than 10,000 Multi-Touch books created with iBooks Author. That free tool, revealed alongside iTunes U last year, allows for the simple creation of interactive textbooks and other content, though they can only be shared in their complete form through Apple’s own stores.
The push to provide more iTunes U content hasn’t been an entirely altruistic one for Apple, which has seen renewed interest in schools and colleges providing iPads for their students. Mansfield Independent School District in Texas, for instance, bought over 10,000 of the tablets, for high school students and faculty.
There’s more on iTunes U in our hands-on, and you can find a preview of the iPad content available here.
Apple’s iTunes U smashes one billion downloads milestone is written by Chris Davies & originally posted on SlashGear.
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Feb 22
Exercising your brain is a great way to enhance your well-being, particularly as you age. With the Color Yourself Smart book series you can exercise your gray matter while engaging your inner child as you color in the pictures that relate to your subject of study. By tying the movement of coloring with the learning process it can also trigger kinesthetic learning which can help people retain more information.
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