I’m an all-day note-taker—my day's or week’s itinerary, messages to give to someone else, story ideas, ramblings, etc. Unfortunately I’m also a bit of a messy ... well, unorganized person, I admit. And as you may guess, those two personality traits usually add up, for me, to lots of unorganized, folded pieces of paper in my pockets or around my house and office, and also a library of notebooks of compiled thoughts and ideas with real order. So needless to say, I’m anticipating Sony’s A4-sized (8.3-inches x 11.7-inches) digital paper slate to be rather beneficial in my life. Unveiled last week,...

I wrote a few weeks ago about the health unit I'm doing with my Grade 2 class, exploring technology and how we can use it safely in our lives. Well, our second lesson was delayed by a snow day, so I've only now gotten around to lesson two, and it was a doozy! In our previous class, we did some brainstorming about what sorts of technology the kids use at home. For homework, I had them keep a log for two days—a school day and a weekend day. In this week's lesson, the first thing we did was tabulate the results. The students averaged...

As my school's technology coordinator, part of my job is to explore the different ways our students use technology, and how that's working for us. Are there tools we are under-utilizing? Tools we are over-utilizing? Are there concerns parents have over how their kids are interacting with technology on a daily basis? I learned recently, not to my surprise, that the answer to the latter question was a resounding yes. Children are exposed to so much technology these days, and it is so compelling for them. How can we make sure they're using it responsibly? Most of my students have parents who...

I live in Springfield, Missouri. Republic isn’t exactly one of our suburbs, but it is the next town over, and just a few minutes away if I should want to visit. My brother used to live there, before moving to St. Louis. So I feel a little remiss in not having commented on the Republic school decision to remove two novels from their libraries in the wake of a Fundamentalist MSU professor objecting to their inclusion. Cory Doctorow posted about the whole thing earlier today on BoingBoing. Essentially, this professor objected to the books being available on the basis that he...

There's an interesting article from the New York Times that's making the rounds this week, about how a long-running, and hugely popular, publishing course at Columbia University now includes topics on digital publishing and ebooks. The summer session began with a focus on “The Digital Future.” Students were schooled in “Reinventing the Reading Experience: From Print to Digital” by Nicholas Callaway, the chairman of a company that produces book apps for children. Managers from Penguin Group USA explained how to master “e-marketing,” and a panel of digital experts talked about short-form electronic publishing — not quite a magazine article, not...

From an article by Mercy Pilkington in the Good E-Reader Blog: ... Governor Rick Scott of Florida, however, sees a new potential for the many e-reader devices on the market, which is the revolutionizing of public education. Much has been said recently about the use of tablet-specific e-textbooks for higher education, and app-specific enhanced e-books have already begun to transform the learning process in many colleges and universities. But as part of a plan to make sweeping reforms throughout his state, Scott will become the first governor to endeavor to make e-readers possible in all public schools, grades kindergarten through high school, through...

From an article in eSchool News by Jenna Zwang: New Jersey’s Edison Township School District will be the first in the state to implement an entirely iPad-based Algebra 1 curriculum. The program will pilot the Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (HMH) Fuse: Algebra 1 application with 60 students this fall, said Richard O’Malley, Edison Township School District’s superintendent. O’Malley has only been the district’s superintendent for about four months, but he said the addition of iPads in the classroom helps him get closer to his personal targets. “I really wanted to bring as much technology into the curriculum as possible; that’s one of my goals for the district,”...

From the press release: I Save a Tree® is offering $80,000,000.00 worth of free interactive books and Virtual Library software to all public schools in the United States. The Virtual Library 2.0 software and interactive books can be installed on a district server and all students and teachers within the district can access the interactive books. I Save a Tree® iBooks can be viewed on Windows and Macintosh computers and can also be viewed on smartphones that include Adobe® Flash®. I Save a Tree® has been publishing iBooks since 2001 and has published about 1,000 publications and hundreds of iBooks for some of the...