http://www.interfacemagazine.co.nz/articles.cfmNew Zealand INTERFACE magazine has been launched to help support the use of information and communication technology by teachers. It's the 'technology magazine for teachers' and provides coverage of the issues relating to their use of ICT, including news and opinion, 'how to' guides and lesson plans. en-us 2012-02-02T07:10:42+13:00 "Engaging all stakeholders can boost your chances of success when it comes to academics—as well as fundraising. But in tough economic times, many schools must learn to do more with less. Re-evaluating your communications and improving your school or district’s web presence might be one way to cut costs, while at the same time giving community members the information they need to stay on top of important school initiatives. With the generous support of Schoolwires, we’ve... http://www.interfacemagazine.co.nz/articles.cfm?c_id=&id=1397 General News 2012-02-02T06:57:53+13:00 According to Project Tomorrow CEO Julie Evans, "Today's students have their own 'student vision' for how they want to use technology for learning. That vision," she said, "is really a statement of how students want to learn in general." Speaking at FETC National Conference in Orlando, FL last week, Evans covered data from the 2010 and 2011 editions of the Speak Up Survey, with a specific focus on the use of digital media for learning. The Speak Up surveys include input from hundreds of... http://www.interfacemagazine.co.nz/articles.cfm?c_id=&id=1395 General News 2012-02-02T06:56:01+13:00 Utah classrooms may soon be making the switch to open-source online textbooks that can be cheaper and easier to update. The Utah State Office of Education announced this month it will develop and support the open textbooks for language arts, science and math. The agency is urging schools and districts to adopt the books this fall. Officials say open textbooks are written by experts, vetted by their peers, and posted online for free downloading and use by anyone. They also can be... http://www.interfacemagazine.co.nz/articles.cfm?c_id=&id=1394 General News 2012-01-31T07:18:50+13:00 Hardware is only a tiny part of the problem we need to solve to get educational resources into kids’ hands (both literally and figuratively) at scale. My ZDNet colleague, Jason Perlow, and I often bat around ideas of hardware and software combinations that could be truly useful (or better yet, totally disruptive) in education. I spend a lot of time thinking about ed tech, he spends a lot of time thinking about hardware and highly scalable information systems, and the combination of... http://www.interfacemagazine.co.nz/articles.cfm?c_id=&id=1393 General News 2012-01-31T07:15:57+13:00   New technologies like iPads and cloud computing are driving changes in the way students learn and the way teachers educate. But change is about much more than the device, according to Rushton Hurley, executive director of Next Vista for Learning. "Change is both frightening and liberating," said Hurley, who delivered a session Wednesday at the FETC 2012 National Conference called "iPads, Android Tablets, Chromebooks, and What's to Come." It's frightening because it requires us to... http://www.interfacemagazine.co.nz/articles.cfm?c_id=&id=1392 General News 2012-01-26T21:23:20+13:00 This year's graduating class will be the first not to know a world without the Web. According to Google Chromebooks Group Product Manager Rajen Sheth, this has serious implications for how we educate. In his keynote session at FETC 2012 National Conference in Orlando Wednesday, Sheth, opened the conversation with a question: "How many of you," he asked, "remember the world before the Web?" Nearly every hand in the room went up. "It's interesting," said Sheth, "Not long ago it... http://www.interfacemagazine.co.nz/articles.cfm?c_id=&id=1391 General News 2012-01-26T07:28:27+13:00 Boffins employed by the US Department of Environmental Health and Microsoft (among others) say that users of tablet computing devices – an area almost completely dominated at the moment by Apple's iPad, selling in unbelievable numbers – run a more serious risk of "neck and shoulder discomfort" compared to people using normal desktop kit. The news comes in a just-published study into the posture of slab-fondlers carrying out typical tasks using slablet devices. Some 15... http://www.interfacemagazine.co.nz/articles.cfm?c_id=&id=1390 General News 2012-01-24T16:47:14+13:00     With the announcement of iBooks Author last week, the world of self-publishing seemed to open up a little wider, especially for authors looking for an easy way to format and distribute their own content. At the same time, people raised concerns about the content restrictions of the iBooks Author tool. According to the contract in iBooks Author, books that writers charge for through the iBooks 2 store are subject to fees, which isn’t new — iTunes does the same... http://www.interfacemagazine.co.nz/articles.cfm?c_id=&id=1389 General News 2012-01-23T08:39:10+13:00 After a yearlong pilot program in California initiated by publisher Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, the math scores of students using iPads jumped 20 percent compared with classrooms that used traditional paper textbooks. Algebra I was instituted at Amelia Earhart Middle School in the Riverside Unified School District as the world's first iPad-driven algebra curriculum. According to the HMH official press release, 78 percent of students in the pilot program scored "proficient" or "advanced" on... http://www.interfacemagazine.co.nz/articles.cfm?c_id=&id=1388 General News 2012-01-23T08:36:36+13:00 Aligned with the Common Core standards, these free resources include an interactive textbook, demonstrations, widgets, and videos Numerous studies have highlighted the importance of U.S. students’ math achievement, and now math teachers have a new resource, aligned with the Common Core standards and available free of charge, that might help them teach abstract math lessons. Launched on Jan. 18, Wolfram Alpha’s Wolfram Education Portal is a free website, currently in beta... http://www.interfacemagazine.co.nz/articles.cfm?c_id=&id=1387 General News 2012-01-20T17:09:49+13:00 Apple wants students to stop lugging around backpacks full of heavy textbooks and to switch to the iPad instead. On Thursday the company introduced three free pieces of software revolving around education. It released iBooks 2, a new version of its electronic bookstore, where students can now download textbooks; iBooks Author, a Macintosh program for creating textbooks and other books; and iTunes U, an app for instructors to create digital curriculums and share course materials with... http://www.interfacemagazine.co.nz/articles.cfm?c_id=&id=1386 General News 2012-01-20T09:12:44+13:00 Thirty years ago, a young and floppy-haired Steve Jobs made a rare lobbying effort in Washington to get more Apple computers into classrooms. The effort paid off: Apple got tax breaks for donating computers to schools, a charitable effort that won over educators and made the Apple II and the Mac the first computers used by millions of children. Now, in the era of smartphones and tablets, the company is renewing its drive to capture the lucrative education market by revolutionizing the... http://www.interfacemagazine.co.nz/articles.cfm?c_id=&id=1385 General News 2012-01-20T09:07:55+13:00 Kiwi parents should be worried by a study naming Australia as the world's worst place for cyber-bullying on social networking sites, say experts. A survey of 24 countries by Ipsos Social Research Institute found almost 9 in 10 Australian parents said their child or another they knew in their community had experienced harassment on sites like Facebook. The figure was much higher than the global average of six in 10. In New Zealand, parents had similar cause for concern because the level of... http://www.interfacemagazine.co.nz/articles.cfm?c_id=&id=1384 General News 2012-01-18T22:01:31+13:00 The state House has passed a bill to define "digital citizenship" for public school employees and students. The bill by Democratic Rep. Linda Belcher of Shepherdsville that was approved Tuesday would require that each school board implement an acceptable use policy for school employees who use technology. It would also require school districts to include in their student behavior codes rules regulating behavior relating to use of the Internet. Rep. Jim DeCesare of Rockfield, a Republican,... http://www.interfacemagazine.co.nz/articles.cfm?c_id=&id=1383 General News 2012-01-18T21:59:25+13:00 Students in the Wakatipu desperately need technology resources, emails sent by St Joseph's Primary School board reveal. An email trail released under the Official Information Act shows board chair Gigi Hollyer wrote to then education minister Anne Tolley about the proposed new enrolment zone for the Remarkables Primary School. One concern among principals was the "inequality of access" Year 7 and 8 students had to technology, she said. St Joseph's was a small, integrated school and... http://www.interfacemagazine.co.nz/articles.cfm?c_id=&id=1382 General News 2012-01-18T11:17:37+13:00 When Dr. John McClure, a pathologist in Edina, Minn., was pondering his wish list several years ago, he added something a little out of the ordinary: learn to play the bagpipes. But his goal seemed like a long shot after a friend who had been teaching him moved away. Multimedia Now he is getting lessons from a top-tier teacher — Jori Chisholm, whose résumé includes a first-place award at the 2010 Cowal Highland Gathering in Dunoon, Scotland. Mr. Chisholm lives in... http://www.interfacemagazine.co.nz/articles.cfm?c_id=&id=1381 General News 2012-01-17T15:03:04+13:00 Taking a board marker, Mr Smith added little twos to the top of each letter, then a bar, and down, with a tick. Then it clicked, this little equation spelt out genius, the whole world resonated with a new sense of order. What else could maths do? Running to her teacher after the lesson Sara asked if there was anything else she could learn. "No, the numbers stay here, if they catch you using them outside school they'll send you to prison". The story sounds rather Kafkaesque, but the reality for... http://www.interfacemagazine.co.nz/articles.cfm?c_id=&id=1380 General News 2012-01-17T15:02:02+13:00 In my last post, I argued that software will take over many of the tasks doctors do today. And what of education? We find a very similar story of what the popular – and incredibly funny! – TED speaker Sir Ken Robinson calls “a crisis of human resources” (Click here for the RSA talk from the same speaker which has been animated in a highly educational fashion). At the TED 2010 conference, he stated that “we make poor use of our talents.” Indeed, in the same... http://www.interfacemagazine.co.nz/articles.cfm?c_id=&id=1379 General News 2012-01-12T11:16:53+13:00 When her laptop stopped working recently, 15-year-old Hannah took it apart and diagnosed the problem, before ordering and fitting replacement parts. She is visibly proud of her achievement, something she says she wouldn't have been able to do had she not studied computing at school. "In the past, I just used computers," she says. "Now I'm interested in how they work." Hannah is a pupil at Townley grammar school in Bexleyheath, Kent, one of just 150 in the country currently offering computer... http://www.interfacemagazine.co.nz/articles.cfm?c_id=&id=1378 General News 2012-01-12T11:15:10+13:00 That faithful companion of school kids, the yellow No. 2 pencil, has taken another step toward oblivion, courtesy of the Nebraska Board of Education. Board members voted 8-0 Tuesday to administer the Nebraska's state reading, math and science tests entirely via computer next school year. "The movement of the world is not toward paper and pencil," board member Bob Evnen said. State officials said the change will save the state money and may produce better scores. They acknowledged, however,... http://www.interfacemagazine.co.nz/articles.cfm?c_id=&id=1377 General News