Tag: education

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U.S. Dept. of Ed. Reaffirms OER Support, Highlights Competency-Based Assessment | EDUCAUSE

http://www.educause.edu/blog/jcummings/USDeptofEdReaffirmsOERSupportH/241218

Last week, Under Secretary of Education Martha Kanter led an education policy briefing at U.S. Department of Education headquarters that put a spotlight on the department’s support for open educational resources (OER). Joined by two of her senior policy advisors long associated with the OER movement, Hal Plotkin (journalist and former president of the Foothill-De Anza Community College District board) and Joel Thierstein (former executive director of the OER organization, Connexions), as well as by the director of the department’s Office of Educational Technology, Karen Cator, Kanter spoke at length about the importance the department places on the continued development of OER.

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Public School Teachers Create Own Textbooks Online, Save District $175,000

MINNEAPOLIS – The new textbooks in Michael Engelhaupt’s statistics class at Blaine High School are kind of cheap and won’t last long, but he doesn’t mind. After all, he wrote them.
Instead of mass-produced textbooks, the more than 3,100 sophomores in the state’s largest district are learning from an online curriculum developed by their teachers over the summer with free software distributed over the web.

– via The Republic, “Anoka-Hennepin teachers write their own online textbook, save district $175,000”

After being used this school year and tweaked next summer, the resources will be made freely available on the Internet. Teachers recognized that creating own material would allow for easy local customization.

It is the ease of local customization that is going to be the key for Open Education Resources. Once it is fully understood that like any educational resource, OER needs to be tweaked for local uses, then the true value of OER will be realized. The savings in OER comes not only from the adoption of freely available materials, but also in the ease with which the resources can be adopted to local uses.

The same should apply for OER in legal education. Materials for a course in Torts are not intended to replace a professor teaching Torts but rather to provide a freely available foundation that the professor can use to create a unique course of their own.

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Paper Tablet App Lets Livescribe Echo Smartpen Write On Your PC

You can now draw virtual lines on your computer screen at the same time as you scribble them on paper.

A new smartpen app called Paper Tablet gives the Livescribe Echo smartpen some of the functionality of a dedicated graphics tablet, letting you write on the computer screen in real time and add manuscript text to files already on your computer.

“The essence of our business is the capture, access and sharing of written and spoken information,” Livescribe CEO Jim Marggraff told Gadget Lab. “We happen to have this tool in the form of a pen, but it’s really about capture, access and sharing.”

via Smartpen App Makes Paper as Mighty as the Mouse | Gadget Lab | Wired.com.

In addition to creating freehand notes, the app allows for marking up MSFT Office docs and saving them (in Windows, Mac functionality is limited). The Echo can also record up to 800 hours of classroom audio, making it a great way to record lectures while taking notes. The notes can be exported to PDF, the audio to MP3, making the device quite versatile. Wired recently wrote a lengthy review indicating the pen works especially well for journalists and students.

It would be interesting to see how useful it would be in the law school classroom.

The Livescribe 4 GB Echo Smartpen and the Livescribe 8 GB Echo Smartpen are available from Amazon and other retailers.

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Kaplan Expands in Atlanta

Education and career services company, Kaplan Inc., signed a lease Wednesday for a nearly 100,000-square-foot building in Alpharetta, which the company said would accommodate its growing back office functions and bring 75 new jobs to the northern metro area.

New York City-based Kaplan has occupied a 34,000-square-foot facility at 3750 Brookside Parkway in Atlanta since 2005. Its 344 current employees and will move to Alpharetta in September.

via Kaplan to move operations to Alpharetta – Atlanta Business Chronicle: .