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3D content for education on the rise

Most of the 3D content now available for education targets math and science.
Most of the 3D content now available for education targets math and science.

At last year’s InfoComm, North America’s largest conference dedicated to audio-visual (AV) technologies, the big story was the emergence of 3D projectors for education. But while several companies demonstrated projectors that could display three-dimensional images with the help of special glasses, at the time there was not a lot of educational content available to justify an investment in 3D projectors for the classroom.

Fast forward to this year’s conference, held last month in Las Vegas, and that has changed.

At least a dozen companies now offer three-dimensional learning content, according to industry sources, and some of the major players in the educational video market are rumored to be developing 3D content as well.

One company displaying its 3D content at InfoComm 2010 was Tactus Technologies, best known for its V-Frog virtual dissection software. Tactus has released a new version of its software that lets students using stereoscopic 3D glasses explore virtual dissections of frogs, flatworms, jellyfish, and sponges in three dimensions—making the images come alive for students, and helping students visualize the special relationships between various parts of the anatomy.

The 3D version of V-Frog is included in a bundle of 3D science software from Tactus that also includes virtual tours of the cell, the atom, motions and forces, and earth-science fundamentals, said Young-Seok Kim, the company’s senior scientist.

Michael Williams, a sales manager for the professional division of XpanD Cinema, which makes active-shutter 3D glasses that work with DLP-Link technology from Texas Instruments (TI), listed 10 companies that now offer 3D learning content, including Tactus. Another of these content providers, JTM Concepts, has partnered with XpanD to bundle its content with XpanD’s 3D glasses and Sharp’s PG-D2500X projector, a 3D-ready DLP projector that offers 2,500 lumens of brightness and a filter-free design.

Included in this bundle are 10 interactive, 3D simulations covering topics such as flower anatomy, the solar system, shape measurement, crystal systems, atomic structure, and photosynthesis. The simulations are from a larger library of 3D content from JTM, called Classroom3.

As the materials from Tactus and JTM suggest, the 3D content now available for education is still mostly science and math-related, said Len Scrogan, director of instructional technology for Colorado’s Boulder Valley Independent School District.

But Scrogan, whose district was one of the first in the United States to install 3D-ready projectors last year, agreed the number of providers with 3D content for education is on the rise, and he said the subjects with the best potential for growth in this area are “social studies and health.”

JTM is in the process of designing 3D content for social studies, Williams said, and Amazing Interactives Ltd., a U.K. company, offers some 3D geography and history content as well, covering topics such as Egyptian medicine and military aircraft.

In a move that could further boost the availability of 3D content for education, Discovery Communications, along with Sony Corp. and IMAX Corp., have formed a joint venture to establish the first dedicated, 24-hours-a-day 3D television network, says Kelli Campbell, senior vice president of global product and content strategy for Discovery Education.

“The network will feature high-quality premium content from genres that are most appealing in 3D, including natural history, space, exploration, adventure, engineering, science, and technology, [as well as] motion pictures from Discovery, Sony Pictures Entertainment, IMAX, and other third-party providers,” Campbell said.

She added: “Discovery Education has always benefited from being a division of Discovery Communications, the world’s No. 1 nonfiction media company. … In the future, we will continue to work collaboratively with our partners across Discovery’s family of networks to bring educators the content they need in all formats.”

Sales of 3D projectors also are on the rise: According to TI, more than 300,000 3D-ready DLP projectors have been installed in classrooms, board rooms, and a variety of other environments worldwide. A number of companies demonstrated new 3D projectors at InfoComm, including BenQ, Christie Digital, and Sharp, which has doubled the number of 3D-ready projectors it now sells (to 10).

How effective 3D content can be in enhancing teaching and learning remains to be seen—but early results seem promising.

A pilot project in the Rock Island, Ill., school district last year showed dramatic improvements in students’ understanding of earth science. To see how well 3D content worked as a teaching tool, the district set up an experiment in which a high school teacher taught a ninth-grade lesson in earth science to four sixth-grade classes. Two of the classes were demographically representative of the district, and the other two consisted of low-income students. For each type of group, one class was taught using JTM’s 3D earth-science content, and the other served as a control group.

“In the first school, the control group test scores increased 9.7 percent [between pre- and post-lesson assessments]. But the group that received its lesson in 3D saw a 35 percent increase,” said JTM Director Tracey Masamoto. “And in the second school with low-income students, the score improvements were 9.7 percent for the control group and 23 percent for students who received the 3D lesson.”

“This was a dramatic difference—for both our teachers and students,” said Rock Island Superintendent Rick Loy. “The improvements were significant and frankly, amazing, compared [with] traditional textbook methods.”

Boulder Valley’s Scrogan said five of his schools are evaluating the use of 3D content in science and math classes. Teachers have noticed an increase in student engagement, he said—but “we don’t care as much about engagement. We care about learning results.” He added: “Our initial pre-post test performance appears promising, and we start a university study on effectiveness this fall.”

The first challenge in implementing 3D for education was, “Where is the content?” Scrogan said. “That’s coming in a very big way.”

The next challenge, he said, is: “What kind of content makes the most sense: movie segments, learning objects, micro-simulations, complex simulations, or content creation?” Those are decisions that individual schools will have to make.

A further challenge will be “establishing technical standards,” Scrogan said. “Most of the vendors have their own proprietary drivers, players, and protocols. This just won’t work. Schools won’t want to deal with this.” Another key challenge “involves design standards that minimize motion sickness; we are working on classroom guidelines in this area.”

Other emerging challenges in teaching and learning with 3D content include “greater simplicity and ease of use for teachers, overly-restrictive content protection schemes, and realistic licensing costs,” Scrogan concluded.

Project lets users explore the cosmos from a PC

Terapixel enables seamless panning and zooming over the entire night sky.
Terapixel enables seamless panning and zooming over the entire night sky.

In a project that aims to pull a new generation of students toward science and technology, Microsoft and NASA have teamed up to create what they say is the largest seamless, spherical map ever made of the night sky, as well as a true-color, high-resolution map of Mars that users can explore on their computers in 3D.

The mission, Microsoft and NASA say, is to inspire today’s students and spark interest in the STEM fields, and it appears to be working: In studying photos of Mars taken by a NASA spacecraft, a group of seventh graders in California earlier this year discovered a previously unknown cave, as well as lava tubes that NASA scientists hadn’t noticed.

“What we’re trying to do at NASA is make our data more accessible,” said Chris Kemp, chief technology officer for NASA, in an interview with eSchool News, “and we’re doing that by connecting students in the classroom and at home to a user-friendly platform.”

Called Terapixel, the night sky project is now available for viewing with Microsoft’s WorldWide Telescope, a free, web-based program that functions as a virtual telescope, bringing together imagery from ground and space-based telescopes to enable seamless, guided explorations of the universe. Created with Microsoft’s Visual Experience Engine, it enables seamless panning and zooming across the night sky, blending terabytes of images, data, and stories from multiple sources over the internet into an immersive experience.

The WorldWide Telescope program debuted in May 2008 and includes images from the Hubble Space Telescope, Sloan Digital Sky Survey, and many more sources. Users can browse through the galaxy at their leisure or take guided tours developed by astronomers, academics, and sometimes very smart middle schoolers.

“The U.S. really needs to get re-stimulated by science,” said Tony Hey, corporate vice president of Microsoft External Research, “and we’re trying to do that by providing full access, in a visually stunning and understandable way, to astronomers’ data and research.”

The night sky project, as well as the Mars 3D project, began 50 years ago as photos were taken of the night sky by ground-based survey telescopes. Over five decades, thousands of images were taken by NASA and stored with the Digitized Sky Survey. The challenge then became: How can scientists take these various images and make them into a single, unified image for exploring via computer?

According to Hey, that’s where Microsoft’s Project Trident came in.

Built on the Windows Workflow Foundation, Trident is a “scientific workflow workbench,” an open-source program that allows scientists to visualize and explore data; compose, run, and catalog experiments as workflows; and estimate the cost of the resources that such a workflow will require. Microsoft’s research department developed Trident as a tool for oceanographers to analyze and synthesize data coming from sensors on the ocean floor, but it became a logical choice to analyze and piece together data about the night sky, Hey said.

Using Trident and the DryadLINQ interface for Microsoft’s .NET platform, a programming environment for writing parallel data applications running on large computer clusters, scientists were able to combine thousands of images and systematically remove differences in exposure, brightness, noise floor, and color saturation—creating a “terapixel” image: a complete, spherical, seamless, panoramic rendering of the night skies that, if displayed at full size, would require 50,000 high-definition televisions to view.

Using these software tools reduced the time it took to run one iteration of the image from weeks to hours, making the creation of an image of this size and quality possible for the first time.

The entire process took only six months, said Hey, which is a breakthrough in this type of project. “Since it’s the first time we’ve done it, of course you learn a lot of things, and we’re looking forward to expanding this process,” he said.

The WorldWide Telescope’s Night Sky view is also available using Bing’s street view feature, allowing users to look up at the night sky from a particular area on the map. Inside Bing Maps, users first need to click on “Map Apps” and select WorldWide Telescope to enable the program.

The app is not just for identifying constellations and planets, as the menu allows users to load all data from sky surveys, the Hubble Telescope, and other astronomy data sources.

The 3D Mars project began in the same vein, with NASA having the data, but needing the technology for presentation.

Olympus Mons on WWT
Olympus Mons on WWT

“3D and the seamlessness are definitely de facto standards of the future,” said Kemp. “Thanks to Microsoft as part of our 2009 Space Act Agreement, the fully interactive images will allow viewers to virtually explore the red planet and make their own scientific discoveries.”

Kemp said new features include a true-color map of Mars, a 3D rendering of the surface of the planet, and exclusive interactive video tours with two noted NASA scientists, Drs. James Garvin and Carol Stoker.

According to Hey, WorldWide Telescope has had 1.4 million downloads in the last year, with the site receiving between 8,000 and 16,000 unique visitors per day.

The site can also be translated into simplified Chinese, German, and Spanish.

Hey explained that, although astronomy and science are currently the Telescope’s main focus, Microsoft soon hopes to use the same technology for the humanities.

“We’d like to soon be able to offer 3D, seamless representations of geography, earth sciences, and much more,” he said, with the help of Microsoft’s many partners in research fields and with universities.

Kemp concluded: “For NASA, it’s really about the collaboration. You wouldn’t believe how many times students and universities have identified or discovered what we haven’t. Just by giving people access to information, we can begin a truly mutually beneficial relationship.”

Oceanographer touts deep sea web surfing

Students can see what Ballard sees through the new Nautilus Live web site.
Students can see what Ballard sees through the new Nautilus Live web site.

Bob Ballard, the explorer best known for the discovery of the Titanic and other wrecks, has not only made deep-sea exploration more accessible for K-12 and college students, but he’ll feed them updates through two of their favorite web sites: Facebook and Twitter.

Ballard visited the Mystic Aquarium and Institute for Exploration in Connecticut June 23 to introduce his new Nautilus Live Theater, along with a new web site where people can watch his expeditions live.

“The idea is to have millions of people follow these expeditions,” said Peter Glankoff, the aquarium’s senior vice president of marketing and public affairs.

Visitors to the aquarium will be able to attend four daily presentations in which they will not only learn about Ballard’s latest expedition but will be able to watch it live on a huge high-definition screen as well.

They will also be able to talk to the scientists and engineers aboard the Okeanos Explorer and Nautilus, the two ships Ballard will be using in the Black and Aegean seas and the Pacific Ocean this summer to explore, among other things, ancient wrecks that could contain the mummified remains of 2,000-year-old sailors and a massive underwater volcano where marine life lives in boiling water.

At some point, aquarium visitors will also be able to help pilot remotely operated underwater vehicles the ships use to explore — even though they will be thousands of miles away.

The initiative has an even greater reach: Ballard has launched Nautilus Live, a web site that allows people to not only learn about the expeditions but watch them live and listen to the scientists in the control rooms as the discoveries are made.

With the help of 20 cameras aboard the ships and on the ROVs, those logging on will see and hear exactly what the scientists are seeing and hearing, 24 hours a day.

And just to make sure people don’t miss anything, Facebook and Twitter will send out alerts if it appears the teams are closing in on an important discovery. This will allow them to get to their computers and be there when it happens.

“We’ll never have a dull moment,” Ballard said Wednesday. “We’ll always be doing something. The idea is to constantly go with the action.”

Ballard detailed the Nautilus Live Theater’s evolution at the Texas Computer Education Association (TCEA) conference in Austin last year before a crowd of several thousand educators.

If a submarine reveals a major discovery–say, a lost city, such as the legendary Atlantis–experts in whatever scientific fields are relevant can be at their respective command centers within 20 minutes, remotely controlling the sub and its cameras to zoom in on particular features as they explore this latest breakthrough, Ballard said.

“I tell kids in middle school that their generation, thanks to telepresence technology, will explore more of the Earth than we’ve [ever] previously explored,” he said at TCEA.

The theater and web site are the culmination of a dream that began taking shape in 1982, when National Geographic magazine asked Ballard to describe the future of ocean exploration.

The magazine published a drawing in which remotely operated vehicles tethered to a surface ship would explore the ocean bottom and beam video to scientists and students from around the world.

This would allow them to participate in the discoveries in real time, even though they were thousands of miles away. And it would allow scientists to explore much more of the ocean than they could in tiny, manned submarines.

When he first relocated to the aquarium in the mid-1990s, Ballard said that someday he would like to be able to oversee his expedition from his home and have people be able to explore the Titanic from the comfort of their own living rooms.

The technology did not exist at the time, and Ballard and his team have spent the past three decades developing the systems needed to make it a reality. Over the past several years, he has tested them during his annual expeditions.

“Surprisingly, this has all worked. I’ll be damned,” Ballard jokes.

In December, Ballard began broadcasting from the ships to Boys and Girls Clubs, schools and other institutions via his Immersion Learning web site, using his new Inner Space Center at the University of Rhode Island as a command post.

Teachers from across the country who will be working aboard the ships as embedded reporters will be part of broadcasts back to more than 80 Boys and Girls Clubs and science centers.

The Inner Space Center is linked to scientists, archeologists and other experts across the country who are on call in case a discovery is made and their expertise is needed. They can then report to one of 12 institutions and participate in the expedition remotely.

“We now have the technology to show these expeditions live so you don’t have to wait until we come back to read about them,” Ballard said.

As it’s been with his JASON project and Immersion Learning, Ballard’s latest effort is also designed to interest students in science and engineering careers.

Ballard described it as taking advantage of a “wow” moment — when a student’s jaw drops when he or she sees something exciting.

“That’s when we can put a lot of information into them,” Ballard said.

Teaching in a socially networked classroom

Social networking expands learning and teaching opportunities for students and teachers.
Social networking expands learning and teaching opportunities for students and teachers.

Let’s face it: Social networking is here to stay. Whether it is Facebook or Twitter, or the next web application waiting to become a phenomenon, social networking is a part of our students’ lives. The only place where it isn’t usually present is in our classrooms. And yet, how many of us haven’t sensed our students itching to reconnect as soon as class is over? The moment they leave the classroom, the cell phones come out and the air is abuzz with various versions of, “Where are you?” or “What are you doing?”

Imagine if we could harness this drive to connect for the purpose of learning. Is it possible to use social networking to further learning?

While doing research for my book, The Socially Networked Classroom: Teaching in the New Media Age, I spoke with dozens of pioneering teachers across the country and even around the world about how they are figuring out ways create a new media classroom while keeping their students safe and focused on learning. Their responses covered a range of examples, from social networking in a low-tech environment to teaching at the most advanced levels of technological innovation.

The result is a real-world chronicle of their attempts to navigate the socially networked classroom and their struggles against the barriers that we all encounter—lack of technology, lack of support, lack of time, and, of course, standardized curriculum and testing. Their experiments weren’t always successful, but each attempt gave them insights that helped them further refine their methods.

Take, for example, Rachelle Ring, a sixth-grade teacher at West Branch Elementary in West Branch, Ohio. She took advantage of an intranet setup at her school to set up blogs for all her students. She monitors all student blog comments and admits that she has trouble keeping up.

“It’s difficult when I need to get around the room to answer questions or supervise students who may be off task,” she said.

However, Ring said she feels it is worth the trouble; she has noticed quite a jump in student engagement with writing as she has added blogging to her classroom. She plans to add online literature circles with another teacher in the building and have students collaborate and communicate about the literature they are reading through blogging rather than traditional classroom writing.

Elizabeth Helfant, a former chemistry teacher who is now the instructional technologist at the Upper School of the Mary Institute and Saint Louis Country Day School in Missouri, shepherds a variety of Web 2.0 projects in her school. She described how the science teachers in her school use wikis to assess lab reports.

“The wiki allows the teacher to see exactly who did what part and when it was done, and the wiki also offers students a discussion area to negotiate the lab results. Teachers can watch as the lab report is created and can also offer students feedback during the process using the discussion tab,” said Helfant.

She views the wiki as helping the teacher monitor work levels of various group members.

“Keeping track of student progress may also be aided by using Google Notebook with the ‘Clip to Notebook’ add-on,” said Helfant, allowing the teacher and librarian to monitor the research that the student is doing. “Everything that they collect electronically, text and images, can be highlighted, and when the students right click, they get an option to send it to their notebook.”

There is also a space for the teacher to make comments and potentially guide further research.

“It provides a means for assessing the skill that is being taught while it is being taught,” she said.

Even Facebook can be used for educational purposes, though most schools still filter access to the site as well as to similar social networking platforms. During my research for The Socially Networked Classroom, only one teacher I interviewed admitted to using Facebook unfiltered within the school day in a K-12 setting, but I’ve since heard of several more. The uses of Facebook are too powerful to ignore, even though—as the teacher I found said—his project “flew under the radar screen” of his school’s administrators.

Brett Moller is head of learning and educational technologies at a private school in Queensland, Australia. He was working as a media teacher at his previous school when he used Facebook in a project with another teacher who taught religion. The religion teacher expressed a desire to use media more in his classroom, so Moller showed him Facebook. For several years, Moller had his students post their final films on Facebook. Brett connected with a group of media professionals who gave his students positive feedback about their films, all of which was done through Facebook.

“I showed this teacher, and he got excited,” Moller explained. “The idea was to get students who were doing a unit on theoretical ethics and ethical issues to learn a small amount of the content well enough to teach it to the rest of the class in a creative and effective way.”

Each student was given a prompt related to an ethical issue, such as slavery in the cocoa industry, for example. Students were expected to research both sides of the ethical situation and then communicate their own ideas in blogs and podcasts.

“Facebook was used to connect the group members with the experts in the given fields, most of whom were professors in areas of ethics or philosophy,” Moller said.

As each group began to blog and produce podcasts about its issue, some local university professors played a crucial role. The professors, who were “keen about the project,” Moller said, began to generate some critical thinking on the site by posting some “devil’s advocate” arguments, trying to suggest, for example, that stopping slavery would mean the end of candy bars as we know them.

When I asked about security issues, Moller responded that the Facebook group was set up in a completely secure way, allowing only the students and the university professors to comment. Moller said he only had one parent complaint about the project, and when he showed her that it’s impossible for an outsider to log into the group, she was satisfied with the project’s safety. He did admit there were some challenges to this project.

“You still have to be a vigilant teacher,” he said. “At the beginning, kids were more interested in checking their own Facebook profiles.”

These are just a few examples of the possibilities and challenges of using social networking for learning. The teachers I’ve interviewed each take a different approach to the tools available to them, but they all believe passionately in what they do and in opening up a new world for themselves and their students.

William Kist is an associate professor at Kent State University, where he teaches literacy education courses at the graduate and undergraduate levels. His book, The Socially Networked Classroom, presents a snapshot of how teachers are currently using Web 2.0 to educate today’s students. Complete with real-world examples, lesson plans, sample assignments, and assessments, the book is available from Corwin.

New AV systems offer sharp images, ‘green’ projection

Eco-friendly projectors can last for up to 18 school years with daily use, according to projections.
Eco-friendly projectors can last for up to 18 school years with daily use, according to projections.

New design techniques that can heighten a projector’s contrast without sacrificing brightness, and eco-friendly projectors that eliminate the need for costly mercury lamps, are among the many recent developments in audio-visual (AV) technologies with implications for schools and colleges.

Here’s a look at these and other new trends in the AV market for education.

Educators trust projectors for medical imaging

Officials at the University of North Carolina School of Medicine’s Department of Radiation Oncology make critical treatment decisions based partly on images showing where cancer cells are, so having a crystal-clear projector image is critical for accurate diagnoses.

Julian Rosenman, a professor at the university’s Department of Radiation Oncology, said black-and-white CT scans with shades of gray dispersed throughout could dictate a patient’s treatment. That’s why the department bought two of Canon’s REALiS SX80 Mark II D Multimedia LCOS projectors, which are mounted on the ceiling for stability and offer dual projection images so students and doctors can compare and contrast scans side by side.

The Canon projectors also let Rosenman and his colleagues teleconference with medical professionals and students worldwide, because the projectors’ images can be shared with doctors at other campuses or hospitals.

“We do a lot of tumor boards and telemedicine meetings, in which doctors view medical images to make treatment decisions,” Rosenman said. “This is why the color accuracy of projected images is so important.”

The Canon REALiS SX80 Mark II D projectors feature 3,000 lumens of brightness and a pixel resolution of 1,400 x 1,050. They use a projection technology that Canon developed, called Liquid Crystal on Silicon (LCOS), to achieve ultra-sharp, high-contrast, lattice-free images without the “screen door” effect that can mute the color and detail of some LCD images.

Early LCOS projectors sacrificed compactness and brightness to achieve this degree of clarity, Canon says. But the company has developed a new optical system, called aspectual illumination system (AISYS), that solves this problem. AISYS splits beams of light into vertical and horizontal components, then uses each component to enhance brightness or contrast. The result is a system that combines the kind of sharp contrast and high degree of brightness needed to distinguish between many shades of gray.

The REALiS SX80 Mark II D features a mode that complies with Digital Imaging and Communications in Medicine (DICOM) devices, because it offers 21 levels of grayscale gradation for more accurate diagnoses. Having a DICOM feature built into the device, medical school officials say, means universities won’t have to buy costly additional equipment designed to supplement the image projectors.

UNC officials said the Canon projectors also have helped the medical school avoid image disturbances caused by other electronic devices in the area—a common problem among some projectors.

“Image stability is also very important when you are comparing medical data. I don’t know how Canon does it, but the [projectors] reject the jitter … caused by the other electrical equipment we’ve got going,” Roseman said. “With these REALiS projectors, you don’t see rolling bars or visible beat frequencies.

He added: “These are the smallest, quietest, and most stable projectors we’ve ever had. They also don’t throw off a lot of heat, which is important when you’ve got 20 people in the room.”

New ‘green’ projectors do away with mercury lamps

While the University of North Carolina relies on Canon’s accurate images, other schools and colleges are using Casio’s new lineup of Green Slim Projectors, eco-friendly projectors that eliminate the need for mercury lamps that typically must be replaced after 2,000 hours of use. Mercury can cause environmental damage if not disposed of properly.

The Green Slim DLP projectors use a patented hybrid “solid state” light source, which combines laser and LED technology to achieve high brightness, instead of a mercury lamp.

The green projectors—designed to last 20,000 hours, or about 18 school years—will save schools and colleges money while operating budgets stagnate during the current economic downturn. A typical projector lamp replacement costs $400, meaning schools could spend thousands of dollars in new lamps over the life of a projector. Traditional projector lamps are also known to dull over time.

Not all lamps burn out after a few thousand hours, however. Sony in April unveiled two new project models, the VPL-FX500L and the VPL-FX30, that exceed industry standards. The VPL-FX500L model, according to Sony’s web site, has a lamp life of 8,000 hours if the dual lamps are used equally.

Casio’s Green Slim Projectors, complete with 2X zoom lens and a USB outlet for users to plug their laptops in to give class presentations, are only 1.7 inches thick, making them among the market’s most portable projectors. They range in price from $800 for an XGA (1,024 x 768) projector with 2,000 lumens but no wireless connectivity to $1,100 for a WXGA (1,280 x 800) projector with 2,500 lumens and wireless capability.

Web site identifies most popular projectors in education

A recently survey conducted by ProjectorCentral.com, a web site that monitors projector trends, revealed the 10 most popular projectors among educators this year. Epson’s PowerLite S7 topped the list, while Hitachi’s CP-X2510 projector ranked second and Epson’s PowerLite 410W ranked third. Epson had four projectors in the survey’s top 10 results.

More than 1,100 ProjectorCentral.com visitors were included in the survey, with 407 voting for projectors that made the top 10 list, said David Dicklish, the web site’s publisher. Fifteen other projectors received votes, he said.

A common characteristic among the top finishers is that they seem to have hit the “sweet spot” in combining image quality and affordability.

The Epson PowerLite S7, for instance, features 2,300 lumens, a 2,000-to-1 contrast ratio, SVGA (800 x 600) resolution, built-in closed captioning, USB plug-and-play, and an energy-efficient lamp (for extended life up to 4,000 hours) for around $500. The Hitachi CP-X2510 costs around $700, features XGA resolution, and uses a 6,000-hour eco-mode lamp and a filter design that only requires maintenance every 5,000 hours.

“The CP-X2510 lacks a digital input and network capability and has a relatively large case size,” wrote ProjectorCentral in its review of the device. “But it nicely balances performance and value and is well worth consideration for office, classroom, or any presentation use where light weight or extreme portability are not of greatest concern.”

Dicklish said high-end projectors have become preferable to LED displays, which can cost several times the cost of a projector.

“You can assume that anybody who has content that they needed to see bigger and in more detail has gone to that kind of technology,” he said of projectors like the Canon REALiS model. “It has a lot of application.”

Elizabeth Dourely, an expert on projectors for education and a contributor to ProjectorCentral.com, said the Epson BrightLink 450Wi is “one of the most buzzworthy projectors” in education today. The 2,500-lumen device includes built-in software that eliminates the need for a separate interactive whiteboard. It can project images onto any whiteboard, wall, or smooth surface, and it comes with two digital infrared pens that let teachers and professors mark images and highlight specific areas.

“We would certainly consider this projector a game-changer,” said Claudine Wolas, project manager for Epson Electronics’ BrightLink 450Wi. “It’s not just the newest and latest in projectors, but in whiteboards as well.”

Educators said the BrightLink maintains stability even when a nearby air conditioning unit turns on. Many classroom projectors shake from close-range vibration, they said.

In its Classroom Projector Resource Center, ProjectorCentral also features “Problem-Solving Projectors Under $1,000.” These include the Sanyo PLC-XW300, which features XGA resolution and a Blackboard Mode (“Who needs a screen?” writes the web site); the NEC NP510W, a networkable projector with WXGA (wide XGA) resolution that is ideal for classrooms with one-to-one laptop programs, allowing any student to project an image from his or her own machine; and the BenQ W1000, a quiet projector with 2,000-plus lumens running under 30 decibels.

Sound systems incorporate iPods, amplify presentations

Projector companies are also addressing sound system issues in the classroom and lecture hall with devices that attach to projectors. Epson’s AP-60 Sound Enhancement System, for example, can be installed on ceiling-mounted projectors. The device amplifies sounds coming from the projector with four interconnected speakers and directs the sound toward the audience.

The AP-60 also comes with an infrared pendant microphone for educators and students speaking to a large classroom or lecture hall. The Epson device can connect to almost all projectors’ standard mounting equipment, making the enhancement system ideal for school officials looking for retrofit their classroom technology without spending a fortune on brand-new equipment.

As iPods have become ubiquitous among teenagers and young adults, an Illinois-based company called AmpliVox Sound Systems has found a way to incorporate the popular MP3 player into classroom use.

AmpliVox’s IPOD PA System, which is compatible with almost every iPod model and the iPhone, has a docking station for the Apple devices and is designed to amplify the iPod’s sound. The 30-watt machine is used at about 3,000 schools and college campuses nationwide and is made for audiences of up to 500 people, making it usable for even the largest college lecture halls and rooms of up to 2,500 square feet.

The IPOD PA System, which hit the market six months ago, also features a DVD/CD player, a USB outlet, a wireless microphone, and four-hour rechargeable batteries.

“The only way to describe the iPod phenomenon is ubiquitous,” said Don Ross, CEO of AmpliVox, adding that the IPOD PA System recharges iPods and iPhones when they are plugged into the machine’s docking area. “It’s really become a way … for students to incorporate technology in their homework and class presentations and a whole range of [other assignments] that they get from their teachers and professors. … We’re happy to help [students] find new ways to incorporate their iPods in their education.”

Will Skype eclipse fee-based videoconferencing?

Educators are forgoing professional video conferencing software for the free, easy-to-use Skype.
Educators are forgoing professional video conferencing software for the free, easy-to-use Skype.

With school budgets continuing to shrink, many educators are turning to free or inexpensive software such as Skype, along with the web cameras that now come standard on most laptop computers, to connect with other classes or colleagues online—forgoing traditional (and more expensive) video conferencing solutions.

Numerous educators said they have used Skype in one form or another for lesson planning or instruction, with most citing its cost (or lack thereof) and ease of use as the main reason for going with the software program.

Skype offers a range of free services, including the ability to make voice or video calls and send instant messages to other Skype users. Users also can pay for services such as making calls from a PC to a landline or cell phone.

Brianna Sylver, president of Sylver Consulting and adjunct professor at the Illinois Institute of Technology’s Institute of Design in Chicago, said her Cross Cultural Research class recently collaborated with a class in Sao Paulo, Brazil, in a manner that called for video conferencing.

After using Skype to collaborate with a teacher in Sao Paulo, the graduate-level class examined the differences between home security companies in the United States and in Brazil using both the slideshow and video capabilities Skype offers.

“The students would present to one another about things they were finding, like what things home security companies in Brazil would need to know if the company wanted to expand its services to the U.S.,” she said.

Sylver said the video function was helpful when her class of 20 students broke into small groups to interact with small groups of students in Sao Paulo.

“We used the webcam capabilities to create more intimate relationships between the students,” she said. “The students would also use [Skype] for collaboration outside of class, using the chat or webcam feature.”

Teachers at New Milford High School in New Jersey also use Skype to enhance their students’ learning experiences, said New Milford principal Eric Sheninger.

“In a sociology class, students spoke to their peers at Van Meter High School in Iowa about perceptions they had of each other and how the current economic crisis is impacting each community,” Sheninger said.

“Our Holocaust class has Skyped with a historian in Israel, where he has given historical insight into the creation and use of the term ‘genocide’ and the history behind labeling the genocide that took place during World War II. He also shared scholarly information on the use of these terms from his years of experience in education at Yad Vashem—Israel’s Holocaust memorial.”

While many educators use Skype as part of their instruction, some colleges and universities use the software as a way to connect with and answer the questions of potential students and their parents.

Bob Garcia, director of admissions at Alma College in Michigan, said he sees Skype being used more and more frequently in student recruitment.

“The main advantage to our use of Skype in communications with prospective students, especially those who are abroad, is that both parties are familiar and comfortable with the technology. It provides us with video, voice, and text options in a free and easy-to-use interface that we are all used to,” he said. “The combination of the economy and a shrinking high school cohort has produced a perfect storm for the need for more cost-effective ways to recruit out-of-state and abroad. Skype meets those needs.”

Not everyone agrees that Skype is a suitable alternative to more traditional video conferencing solutions.

Andre Kostousov, associate director of admissions and international counselor for Northeastern University in Massachusetts, said he has used professional video conferencing software in a previous position. Although Skype is convenient in that it can be installed on almost any computer, it has its drawbacks, Kostousov said.

“Professional video conferencing software produces a much higher quality feed and is much more stable. It allows you to have a clearer and larger picture,” he said.

That argument is echoed by makers of traditional video conferencing solutions, who say users get what they pay for.

Skype’s sometimes poor picture quality is something that Avistar Communications aims to counter with its video conferencing software, said Avistar’s chief marketing officer, Stephen Epstein.

“Because of the architecture, the quality of Skype’s video chats can be poor. The video often pixilates, and the audio is often unsynced. This significantly undermines the success of a video call,” he said. “Avistar’s software ensures that the quality of service is the best that it can be, given every user’s available technology resources, and dynamically adjusts accordingly—instead of degrading the user experience.”

The Avistar C3 platform provides high-definition, multiparty desktop video conferencing. Epstein said the Avistar C3 solutions are ideal for education settings. Desktop video conferencing enhances collaboration, boosts communication, and draws geographically distributed people together, he said.

“Benefits are both soft—faster decision making, enhanced productivity and efficiency—and hard—reducing travel costs and downtime from physical travel,” he said.

Sheninger said Skype is lacking in its video multi-conferencing ability, with another drawback being the need for users’ wireless networks at two simultaneous sites to function properly.

Epstein said Avistar addresses this challenge by including a bandwidth management tool to prevent the overload that can slow networks or crash other applications when using Skype. Avistar also has no limit to the number of participants on a video session, he said.

But even with the potential drawbacks to using Skype in the classroom, many educators said they plan to continue using the software.

Kathy Cassidy, who uses Skype in her first-grade class in the Prairie South School Division in Saskatchewan, Canada, said her use of the software has been completely successful.

“I had not done other video conferencing in my classroom before, and have not tried any other tools that are available. Skype has worked well for me, so I have had no reason to try other tools,” she said.

Links:

Skype

Avistar Communications


Note to readers:

Don’t forget to visit the Next Generation Collaboration resource center. The ability to work together on group projects is seen as an increasingly important skill for the 21st-century workplace, and a growing number of schools are rewriting their curriculum to include opportunities for such collaboration as a result. Go to:

Next Generation Collaboration

Augmented reality takes hold in classrooms

Augmented reality overlays digital images and information on real world settings.
Augmented reality overlays digital images and information on real-world settings.

A small but growing number of schools across the nation are turning classroom lessons into engaging experiences with augmented reality (AR), a technology that overlays digital information on top of real-world surroundings as viewed through a smart phone or other handheld, GPS-enabled device.

Proponents of the technology in education say augmented reality differs from virtual reality in that while virtual reality aims to replace a person’s perception of the world with an artificial world, augmented reality enhances a person’s perception of his or her surroundings.

The Augmented Reality Development Lab (ARDL), from virtual reality developer Digital Tech Frontier, lets users display relevant information at the appropriate time and location during an AR experience, which results in virtual 3-D objects appearing in the real world.

Students and teachers look through a viewing device or at a monitor to see virtual objects such as planets, volcanoes, the human heart, or dinosaurs embedded within their real-world environment—and they can interact with and manipulate those objects to receive associated information.

Debra Sloan, an educator with Forest Heights Middle School’s Eagle Environmental and Spatial Technology (EAST) program in Little Rock, Ark., uses the ARDL in the school’s project-based service learning class.

“AR raises the level of interaction for the students,” Sloan said. Students in the EAST program have created a virtual tour of the Clinton Library and are working to integrate AR technology into the tour. Also in the works are a map of the school for new students and a local hospital tour, both using AR.

The ARDL interface has pre-built education modules for science, math, art, and social studies, as well as a module builder for building new software. The software, which can be used in K-12 and higher education, lets students and teachers build programs, examples, and curricula using augmented reality. Students and teachers also can network together and share the modules they’ve created with other students and schools.

“ARDL is such a nice direction to go … in incorporating technology in the classroom, because it makes [learning] more interactive,” Sloan said. “The kids love it because they are active. … They love more than just sitting and watching things happen.”

Education technology advocates say AR can help students with spatial and temporal concepts, can facilitate interaction, appeals to kinesthetic learners, and offers engaging and self-paced interaction.

“The nice thing about augmented reality is that it can bring anything to life,” said Scott Jochim, creative director at Digital Tech Frontier. “All you need is a simple Google SketchUp model, or a more complex 3ds Max model if you so desire. Attach simple attributes, and presto—you and your students are engaged in an augmented reality educational experience.” (3ds Max is three-dimensional modeling, animation, and rendering software from Autodesk Inc.; SketchUp is a free 3D modeling program from Google Inc.)

Jochim said the ARDL was created in part to respond to the challenge that lecture-based learning does not affect students in the same way that technology-infused learning experiences can.

“This … is clearly going to revolutionize education,” he said.

Using Google SketchUp or Google’s 3D Warehouse—a collection of free 3D models that users are adding to daily—educators can locate 3D images of any item for classroom use and manipulation.

The ARDL retails for $2,100, which includes a 20-seat license. Jochim said additional fee-based curriculum tools will be available soon as well, but purchasing those will not be necessary to operate the ARDL; educators can continue using free resources in their lessons.

“It’s not just about throwing technology in these classrooms, it’s about empowering the teachers to understand the technology,” Jochim said. “Grasping the capability behind it gives teachers tools that are easy to use.”

In April, Qualcomm’s Wireless Reach Initiative, together with San Diego’s School in the Park program and the San Diego Museum of Art, launched a project that gives San Diego elementary school students the opportunity to learn about art with AR.

“In its simplest form, augmented reality is an effort to merge the physical and virtual worlds,” said Patrick O’Shea, director of the Handheld Augmented Reality Project (HARP) at Harvard University. O’Shea collaborated on the School in the Park program with San Diego officials.

HARP, an AR game designed to teach math and science literacy skills to middle school students, was developed with funding from the U.S. Department of Education by researchers at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, the University of Wisconsin at Madison, and the Teacher Education Program at MIT.

In HARP, students use Dell Axim handheld computers and GPS technology to correlate their real-world locations to their virtual locations in the game’s digital world.

As students move around their physical location, such as a school playground or sports field, a map on their handheld computer displays digital objects and virtual people who exist in the AR world that has been superimposed onto the physical world.

The School in the Park program lets students explore Asian art and folktales using AR experiences to enhance learning.

The program uses the Samsung Moment—a Google Android device—and its indoor component uses QR Code, a two-dimensional barcode, to trigger an AR event.

Outside, students use Layar, an AR reality browser that overlays data using the smart phone as a viewfinder—meaning that students see what is in front of them but can overlay virtual information on top of that physical world.

For instance, as a student approaches a sculpture or another work of art, information might pop up on the student’s smart phone that explains the history behind that piece.

“Of course, there’s a learning curve that goes along with any new technology, but the thing that’s really promising about this type of experience is how engaging it is for students,” O’Shea said. “Anything that engages students is a net benefit in the long run.”

And although the technology itself might seem intimidating, the real challenge is the availability of content.

“The barrier is not so much technology, but curriculum. There’s just not a lot of curriculum developed that can be widely used—it tends to be localized,” O’Shea said. For instance, students from Pennsylvania are unlikely to travel to San Diego to participate in this particular AR experience.

“There’s a policy issue involved as well: Schools tend to fear this technology, they fear cell phones, because they see the negative,” he said.

And while AR works well as an engaging tool, it doesn’t necessarily work as well for deep content learning, because students spent a large portion of time figuring out how to work the devices.

“A logical next step is to [have] multiple AR sites, so students can have more engaging experiences over time, eventually getting to the point where students are creating their own experiences,” he said. “That’s where I see this going.”

The School in the Park program lets teachers and students expand their learning opportunities, said Kitty Gabriel, of the San Diego City Heights Collaborative. Gabriel presented the AR project within the School in the Park program.

“We like to have authentic experiences in cultural learning opportunities that often our kids don’t have access to,” she said. Instead of simply reading about Siddhartha relief sculptures, she added, students must find them in the museum.

“Having handheld devices for our students is an opportunity that promises equitable access for students who otherwise wouldn’t be able to experience this,” Gabriel said.

Gabriel said the AR experiences that students gain in the program contribute to critical thinking and problem-solving skills—two in-demand 21st century skills.

Links:

Augmented Reality Development Lab

School in the Park

Qualcomm Wireless Reach Initiative

Handheld Augmented Reality Project

Free online curriculum expanding to middle grades

SAS Curriculum Pathways offers inquiry-based activities in English, math, science, social studies, and Spanish.
SAS Curriculum Pathways offers inquiry-based activities in English, math, science, social studies, and Spanish.

An online instructional resource for students in grades 8-12 that has been available to schools free of charge since December 2008 soon will include content for sixth and seventh graders as well.

SAS Curriculum Pathways, from North Carolina-based SAS Institute, a leading maker of business analytics software, provides web-based lessons and activities in the core subjects of English, math, social studies, science, and Spanish.

Lessons take an inquiry-based approach that is intended to develop students’ higher-order thinking skills. The educational software has won a CODiE Award from the Software and Information Industry Association for best K-12 instructional solution overall in 2008 and best instructional solution for English in 2009, and it’s a CODiE Award finalist this year in math.

SAS has invested roughly $75 million in the development of Curriculum Pathways over the last 11 years, said company spokesman Trent Smith. But “we decided even a minimal charge was a barrier to adoption—so we removed it,” he said.

“Shrinking budgets and pricing structures should not stand in the way of America’s students receiving education technology that will engage them and better prepare them for today’s work force,” said CEO Jim Goodnight in announcing the software giveaway a year and a half ago.

Bruce Friend, director of SAS Curriculum Pathways, said the online resource would include content reaching down to the sixth-grade level—aligned with educational standards—by the end of the year. The company also will focus on ramping up lessons in the STEM fields, he said.

Curriculum Pathways’ professionally developed lesson plans, simulations, and interactive activities utilize a “blended” learning model, Friend said.

“We’re not an online course, but we can help teachers [supplement] their lesson plans,” he said.

Jo Anne Hudson, a middle school math teacher in California’s Poway Unified School District, has used Curriculum Pathways at her school for the past three years and said the program offers effective learning tools.

“The lesson plans they provide are very well thought out and planned. They’re exactly like the plans I would make if I had the time to create them myself,” she said.

Hudson said she has seen some increase in her students’ test scores after using the lessons, but much of their improvement is seen in things that can’t be quantified.

“I’ve noticed that when students use the [interactive activities] in certain subjects, their unit scores and their state scores are better in those areas. Plus, it gives them more confidence going into any testing situation,” she said.

But Hudson noted that she’s altered the Curriculum Pathways materials that are mainly designed for use in high schools to meet the needs of her middle-school students.

“I’m a middle school teacher [who has] been using curriculum that’s mainly written for high schoolers, but they are piloting a middle school package that would fit what we do even better,” Hudson said.

Centennial Campus Magnet Middle School is one of the schools that piloted the middle school curriculum, although the school has used Curriculum Pathways since it began its one-to-one laptop program with eighth graders in 2007.

“It fits the curriculum. We’re still able to teach the standard course of study, [but Curriculum Pathways] has engaging lessons. When you’re using technology, the kids are going to be engaged,” said George Ward, lead teacher at Centennial.

SAS Curriculum Pathways is now used by 8,100 schools and more than 41,000 educators, Friend said.

Link:

SAS Curriculum Pathways

Teacher of the Year: Education ‘must be learner-centered’

President Obama honors the 2010 National Teacher of the Year, Sarah Brown Wessling.
President Obama honors the 2010 National Teacher of the Year, Sarah Brown Wessling.

Facebook and digital video are among the many technology-based tools that Sarah Brown Wessling uses to engage her students—but just as important as that, it was her passion for helping every child succeed and her belief that instruction should be “learner-centered” that led to her selection as the 2010 National Teacher of the Year.

Wessling, a high school English teacher from Iowa, was recognized by President Barack Obama as the nation’s top teacher in an April 29 ceremony in the White House Rose Garden.

“Whether teaching basic writing to at-risk freshmen, or literary theory to Advanced Placement seniors, Sarah writes: ‘I see a story in every learner, unique and yearning to be read.’ That’s why she creates individualized podcasts for each student with extensive feedback on their papers, prompting one parent to report that his own writing had improved just by listening to Sarah’s comments to his daughter,” the president said.

“Her students don’t just write five-paragraph essays, but they write songs, public service announcements, film story boards, even grant proposals for their own not-for-profit organizations,” he said, adding that one of Wessling’s students reported that learning in her classroom was never boring.

“I’m not sure I could have said that when I was in school,” said Obama.

Wessling teaches 10th- through 12th-graders at Johnston High School in Johnston, Iowa, where she’s worked for a decade.

The Council of Chief State School Officers selects the recipient of the annual honor and cited Wessling’s passion and innovative approaches, such as incorporating school technology in her classes.

“She is … passionate about learning in the 21st century, believing that teachers must ‘recognize the importance of teaching that marries content to skill,’ that problem solving and critical thinking are useless without the facts, but the reverse is also true,” the council said.

“She says, ‘Students construct knowledge when it is relevant to them, when they have a real authentic purpose, when they have an audience that gives them context.’ For her students and her fellow teachers, she never loses sight of her goal to create life-long learners and genuine thinkers accustomed to intellectual risk.”

In a blog entry posted on the White House web site, Wessling described her approach to teaching.

“If you were to come into my classroom, the first thing you would notice is that my desk is in the back corner, despite the building design to make it otherwise. This placement is but an outward sign of an implicit philosophy, that teaching must be learner-centered,” she wrote.

“The ‘desk in the back of the room’ displaces hierarchies, creates an environment where a teacher becomes a lead learner, and evolves into a web of interdependence where the classroom walls become boundless. When we embrace this open model of learning, the consumers of our curriculum will become designers of their own learning.”

Later in her blog entry, she wrote: “We need 21st-century teachers, not just adults teaching in the 21st century.”

Obama used the ceremony to speak about the importance of education to a strong democracy, and he also called on parents to do their part to support students at home.

He told Wessling and the teachers representing other states that at a time of state budget shortfalls, “I’m committed to doing every single thing that I can do to support your work.”

“You’re the key to our success in the global economy—preparing our kids to compete at a time when a nation’s most valuable currency is the knowledge and skills of its people,” Obama said to the gathered educators.

Wessling, who accepted a trophy in the form of a glass apple from the president, said later that she and her family had met with Obama in the Oval Office. She said her son was about ready to lose his first tooth and Obama wiggled it.

“Our dream for our students is the same dream we have for our own children—to be recognized for their strengths, to learn from their weaknesses, and to be seen as a person of infinite potential,” she wrote in her blog entry.

Links:

Video of White House ceremony

Wessling’s blog entry

Council of Chief State School Officers

Free tool lets students participate during class

Microsoft's free program allows for collaborative PowerPoint presentations.
Microsoft's free program allows for collaborative PowerPoint presentations.

Joining in the effort to keep students engaged in the classroom, Microsoft on April 30 announced a new addition to its PowerPoint software that allows students to participate in classroom presentations. The best news: It’s available free of charge.

The new tool, called Mouse Mischief, allows teachers to add multiple choice, yes/no, and drawing questions to their presentations. Students then use any computer mice (any device from the school will work) to answer these questions. The tool also allows for whole-class or individual student responses.

“We’ve observed classrooms around the world, and it’s a no-brainer that technology has the power to engage students—but not every classroom has the budget to afford new technology,” said Nasha Fitter, senior product manager for Microsoft in an interview with eSchool News.

“We’ve also observed that many teachers use and feel comfortable with PowerPoint. By making Mouse Mischief free and easy to use through any mouse, we’re cutting down costs while helping to make learning engaging for today’s students.”

After Mouse Mischief is installed (teachers can download the application at http://www.microsoft.com/multipoint/mouse-mischief/), the Mouse Mischief toolbar will appear as part of the PowerPoint ribbon when a new or old PowerPoint presentation is opened. The toolbar lets teachers add interactive elements, such as multiple-choice question slides, with a single click.

Once the students have selected their answers, the teacher can display the correct answer. The tool also calculates the percentage of students who answered the question correctly; if a teacher sees that, say, only 20 percent of students got the correct answer, perhaps the students need more time or a different way to learn the concept.

“Since no one can tell whose cursor is whose up on the presentation, this tool can really help shy students, too,” said Fitter.

More control, more resources

Because Mouse Mischief allows for the whole class to participate in answering questions, teachers might find it difficult to ask an individual student to answer a question with multiple cursors on the screen.

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However, according to Microsoft, one teacher already has figured out how to isolate individual student answers on screen.

“It’s called a parking lot,” explained Fitter. “What this means is that as part of the PowerPoint slide, a square that resembles a parking lot is added in. The teacher then asks all the students to place their cursors inside of the parking lot. When a specific student is called [on] to answer a question, [that student] can take [his or her] cursor out of the parking lot.”

Special teacher controls also allow instructors to disable students’ mouse cursors, navigate between slides, set timers, and more.

The idea of the parking lot, advice on how to use the application, and many other resources will be available to teachers using Mouse Mischief. Microsoft enlisted the help of an expert from Teach for America to create 25 PowerPoint question templates, which can be viewed and used by the teaching community during classes.

“We really wanted this to be a community of sharing,” said Fitter.

So far, there have been 1,200 downloads of the beta Mouse Mischief software by teachers, mostly from the U.S., but many from around the world as well. Two hundred schools participated in Mouse Mischief’s beta research phase before the launch to help make the tool as efficient and easy to use as possible, Microsoft said.

Links:

Microsoft Mouse Mischief

Microsoft Office

Microsoft, ePals team up on collaborative tools

ePals users will have access to online versions of popular Microsoft software within a secure learning environment.
ePals users will have access to online versions of popular Microsoft software within a secure learning environment.

In a move that could spur more widespread use of online tools for communicating and collaborating within K-12 education, software giant Microsoft Corp. has announced a strategic partnership with ePals, which provides a safe online platform for teachers and students to share information and work together on projects.

Under the terms of the alliance, ePals this fall will add Microsoft’s Live@edu eMail and calendaring software to the services it already provides for some 600,000 educators in 200 countries through its ePals Learning Space platform.

Sometime early next year, ePals users also will have access to the web-based versions of Microsoft Office programs such as Word, Excel, and PowerPoint within the ePals Learning Space, the two companies say.

The deal seems to make sense for both companies, and it could benefit schools as well.

ePals customers will be able to take advantage of popular productivity software and can access their Word documents and other files—all from within a single, shared, and secure education technology environment.

“Students and teachers have wanted their documents to reside seamlessly alongside them,” said ePals co-founder Tim DiScipio. He added that his company’s partnership with Microsoft is “a real solution to eliminate … web sprawl,” which occurs when internet users’ documents are hosted across multiple platforms and systems.

For Microsoft, the deal helps it address several key concerns—such as security—that have kept some educators from using “cloud-based” software, which is hosted on a company’s servers and delivered to users via the internet.

“ePals will help take us to the next level [in making] the cloud come alive in a learning scenario,” said Anthony Salcito, vice president of worldwide education for Microsoft.

The idea behind the partnership, Salcito said, is that “schools aren’t risking their safety and security, or compromising on the kind of software they’re using, when they’re using the cloud.”

Integrating Microsoft software into the ePals Learning Space will involve adding the kinds of policy-management tools to these applications that have made ePals so popular among educators, the two companies said. These tools let educators define features such as document workflow and permissions, giving them more control over the educational environment.

For instance, a teacher using the online version of Microsoft Word within the ePals Learning Space could set up a policy rule specifying that when a document is created, it should be routed automatically to another student for his or her peer review, then passed along to the teacher for grading. Or, the teacher could specify that he or she must review any documents before they can be eMailed or shared with another class across the globe.

Adding these kinds of policy-management capabilities to Microsoft’s ubiquitous productivity software could facilitate communication and collaboration in K-12 classrooms dramatically, DiScipio said.

He estimated that fewer than 10 percent of schools in the United States have given their students tools for communicating and collaborating online—but that could change if educators and students are able to store and share online resources more securely and efficiently.

And that, in turn, could help foster the kinds of 21st-century skills that today’s employers say they’re looking for when hiring. It also could help increase the amount of writing that students do in class.

DiScipio said he has heard from several ePals customers who say their students are writing much more often now that they’re using collaborative tools in their classes. “This is one of the truly amazing bi-products” of implementing a digital collaborative environment in education, he said.

The ePals Learning Space provides safe virtual workspaces for schools that include eMail, blogs, wikis, shared portfolios, media galleries, and language translation in 35 languages.

Live@edu is a free suite of online tools, based on the familiar Office applications many people use today, that give users access to information anytime, anywhere, from any desktop, laptop, major web browser, or mobile device. Live@edu is Microsoft’s answer to Google Apps for Education, and its partnership with ePals could give Microsoft a boost in its competition with Google for school users of web applications.

Integrating Live@edu into its platform will bring additional capabilities to ePals’ SchoolMail and other services, ePals says—such as a familiar Outlook interface on both mobile phones and computers, as well as dynamic distribution groups.

From an IT perspective, the solution will allow schools to set up sophisticated policy-based controls that regulate which students and teachers can eMail and share information with each other for security purposes, and what level of filtering and monitoring is desired for sent and received eMail.