Check out this link – TwoMillionMinutes. The site offers information about an upcoming documentary contrasting the K-12 educational experience in China, India, and the USA. Judging from the trailer, the intent is to illustrate through the lives of 6 young people just how far behind US education is in preparing students for the reality of global competition.
The opinion of experts expressed in the trailer are very similar to our own personal observations following our visit to China.
Google for Educators was a new find for me. I have no idea how long this site has been around. The About page was not working so I am guessing the site is relatively new.
Google For Educators is intended as a portal for K-12 educators. The site suggests educational applications for Google Tools (e.g., use Google Docs for process writing activities, Google maps to indicate where famous historical pictures were taken) and a discussion area in which teachers can reply to Google suggestions and offer other comments.
The site had nearly 2000 “members” when I visited. Google has the draw and resources to create the critical mass likely to make this a successful participatory site.
This is a little geeky, but the topic has been in the tech news a lot lately. Google is offering a new opportunity to social site developers by making its new OpenSocial APIs available. This link also offers a video that explains more about the new Google resources.
Some see this is as counter move to the growing popularity of existing social environments (Facebook).
It may not be apparent from the topics I discuss here, but I am a psychologist. I work in a university psychology department and I often teach Introduction to Psychology. One thing living simultaneously in different academic worlds has taught me is how little cross-talk there actually is. Part of this is an attitude problem. It is too bad, because ways of thinking differ even when applied to the same topics and sometimes it is a different perspective that we need..
Today, I received my copy of Monitor on Psychology – the general publication that I receive as a member of the American Psychological Association. I seldom read this publication, but I note that the cover art indicates the special focus of this issue is “Children and the Internet”. I do think there is a form of attitude that professionals have about who knows what about what and I see some of this in myself. My reaction was pretty much – “this is cute, the psychologists are going to explain what kids do on the Internet to the rest of us”.
Most of the material was what I expected. But, hey, psychologists need to know about these issues too. It is nice is that the Monitor is available online. While people focused on technology integration will not find a lot new in these articles, I did see a couple of references to work I have not read and it is interesting to see how psychologists explore issues with less of an educational emphasis (social networking among adolescents, Internet pornography). For the example, the DeAngelis article considered research relating parenting styles to adolescent use of MySpace. This more nuanced examination of out of school factors is not necessarily something I would encounter in the education literature.
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