Learn Technologies

Ah, college, a time in which studying is on the backburner for all too many aspiring grads. Fortunately, technological advancements have helped to make even studying less painful, fitting nicely inside the parameters of the ever busy social schedule. How can you make for a more balanced educational experience as you or your child heads off to school? These must-have purchases make great graduation presents, sure to ease the time crunch freshman year.Laptop w/ wireless Nearly all college campuses offer wireless internet service while physically on the grounds. If not, or if the place of residence in question is off campus, wireless internet is a necessity for students no matter the major. Relying on desktop computers or even worse, computer labs, subjects a student to an inflexible environment that’s simply out of his or her control. Considering the surrounding temptations not to get work done, it’s best to enable an internet connection whenever possible. Not to mention, many classes will regularly update syllabi or post assignments online, things a student will need to be aware of and have access to at any given moment.Smartphone Yes, this does present the danger of a lot of time wasted, however, setting your school email account to send messages directly to your mobile device mitigates the danger of forgotten deadlines, overall a worthy trade off. Due to a large number of seemingly erroneous listserves school mailboxes tend to get cluttered when left unchecked, a much more manageable problem when your inbox is just one touch away. Read the rest of this entry »

Social networking is big these days and it doesn’t look like its going to get any smaller in the near future. For parents and teachers, it presents a challenge and a question: Does social networking have a place in modern classrooms? To answer fairly, we need to look more closely at what social networking is and how kids use it.

Social networking is, at heart, a marketing tool. It uses software technology from both the military, designed for surveillance, and from industry, designed to sell products. But the reasons that kids (and adults) use this Read the rest of this entry »

Homework is an important activity in learning and one of the most trying things for any parent of a school age child is keeping tabs on the homework they’ve been assigned to do. Kids can be unorganized and often forget to write down their assignments in their notebook, leaving the parent with no recourse but to assume there’s been none assigned.

Schools across the country have tried many different means to get students to keep up with their homework assignments. From simple agenda/organizer-type journals to more advanced methods such as classroom websites and emails, nothing Read the rest of this entry »

While technology is certainly making it easier to catch up on the latest news or gossip, it is also crucial in today’s educational setting. Much of learning is done with memorization, reading, quizzes and tests. How exciting for students to be able to actually see and understand their answers! Teachers can interact with students on projectors with educational games or show the process to how the students can formulate the answers to their questions.During an educational game on a projector, students are learning crucial skills, like communication and creative thinking, all while having fun. A projector in today’s classroom helps teachers break down information in a way that is personalized to each class. Most educational books in the classroom are the same ones students have been taught from for years. Teaching via a projector is a fresh and exciting way to get the students involved.Many school systems are concerned about budgets and the economy, making a projector a feasible alternative to pricey new materials year after year. A projector is a durable, efficient resource that can be used in a variety of ways to teach just about any subject to today’s students. Every classroom and student can benefit from having a projector at their disposal.

As the global marketplace becomes increasingly smaller, more and more graduates are likely to find that speaking alternative languages in extremely advantageous in their line of work and actually securing a job. Though colleges and high schools nationwide certainly offer language programs, many expanding these offerings, more and more students are turning to Rosetta Stone for assistance or as their primary learning source. Rosetta Stone is a software learning tool commonly associated with adults who choose to learn foreign languages later in life, though as a student resource its potential is also potent. Taking a new approach to the common language learning method, the objective of the computer based program is to teach languages in the organic way they are naturally learned by first hand speakers. The end goal is an intuitive understanding that circumvents the need for drills and translation. The procedure is referred to as the “Dynamic Immersion Method,” a blend of images, text and sounds presented at an increasing level of difficulty following an individual’s progression. The software is divided into levels 1, 2 and 3, with English (American), Spanish (Latin American), Spanish (Spain), Italian, German and French also offering a more advanced levels 4 and 5. The software can be purchased on an individual level basis or bundled together at a discount price. The complete language offering is as follows:Arabic (Modern Standard)Chinese (Mandarin) Danish level 1 onlyDutch English (American) English (British) Filipino (Tagalog) French (Parisian) German Greek Hebrew Hindi Indonesian level 1 only Read the rest of this entry »

SAT vocabulary words? There’s an app for that. The smart phone market is capable of doing far more than distracting students in the back of class rooms. With the right strategic direction, such tools can provide a valuable assist to learning endeavors, serving as far more than a mere social data base. Renkara Media Group released the Vocabulary Power Plus application yesterday, now available for download, helping high school juniors and seniors to prepare on the go during the stressful time of college preparatory test taking. Download of the application itself is free of charge, while books available to purchased within the application will costs 3.99, a bargain next to standard paper-filled study guides.Vocabulary Power Plus combines materials taught in 35,000 classrooms nationwide, helping to create a current, all inclusive database of the most likely SAT words, definitions and concepts to appear on the upcoming SAT examination. The free portion of the application includes four full lessons, while the for-purchase section is comprised of 6 books worth of content. With over 6,600 individual quiz questions covering more than 1,4000 vocabulary words, a new wealth of information is suddenly placed at the very fingertips of test takers. Read the rest of this entry »

You may have grown up using dusty chalk boards or traditional dry erase boards, but those days are fading fast. The new sensation in tech-friendly schools around the United States is the Smart Board. At first glance, this device has the appearance of a regular white board, but it is hardly the same. Touch screen technology allows students to interact with the material with the touch of a finger. A projector is connected to a computer and the output is displayed on the Smart Board. Another major difference between a Smart Board and a white board is the writing utensil that is used. Unlike the squeaky dry erase markers used in the latter, Smart Boards come with digital pens, which can be used to write or draw images on the screen using digital ink that can be erased with the touch of an eraser. One of the disadvantages of this system has been that the board could only recognize the markings of one pen at a time. However, new improvements are changing this and facilitating dual-pen use. Read the rest of this entry »

While accountability is not a word that quickly comes to mind concerning teenagers and the internet, in the realm of education it has certainly helped to provide just that. Looking beyond the well-documented downside of internet in the classroom (i.e. too much time social networking, Wikipedia-supported research papers and limitless distractions), when used correctly, the internet can enhance productivity, provide unbending deadlines and deliver instant feedback regarding a student’s educational efficiency and accuracy. One such example of this is the teacher friendly website WebAssign, providing a source of online homework, assessments and grading. Read the rest of this entry »

Perhaps one of the most intriguing benefits of educational technology is the ability to bring information and experiences from the outside world back into the classroom with new levels of ease and accessibility. Never has this been more apparent with the Digital STARLAB, a portable on-site planetarium available for purchase by schools and science centers across the country. Instead of having to put together yearly field trips for various grades to travel across town or long distances to visit the planetarium, students need only walk down the hall to wherever the Digital STARLAB is housed. Read the rest of this entry »

With YouTube spring boarding into everyday mainstream consciousness, its educational equivalent, SchoolTube, is gaining popularity across the country. SchoolTube, although no business affiliation with its video sharing inspiration and namesake, offers essentially the same platform as YouTube, save for the original’s inherently public nature. While YouTube is for anybody and everybody, allowing almost all videos that don’t infringe upon people’s personal rights or copyright laws, SchoolTube is designed specifically for students, parents, teachers and administrators. First launched in 2006, the website is now the leader in moderated video sharing, proudly sticking to its three pronged appeal of being “safe, fun and free.” Read the rest of this entry »