Articles about Education

If Linux is good enough for the International Space Station, why not your school computers? The developers over at openSUSE must think so, today releasing Li-f-e (Linux for Education) 12.3-1.

I confess to not being familiar enough with Linux (go ahead, beat me with a stick -- or with words in comments). But a reader complained this week about BetaNews' rather absent coverage of the open-source operating system. He's absolutely right about that. Reporters here tend to write about what they use, and we don't have a Linux lover currently on staff. Please pardon my light treatment of the news, in place of someone more qualified.

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In April of this year the British Library along with libraries in Scotland, Wales and Dublin gained powers to archive the whole of the UK Web for future generations of researchers. To mark the introduction of these regulations the library today announced a list of 100 sites it says will be essential reading for future generations.

Lucy Burgess, Head of Content Strategy for the British Library says that the project aims to collect about a petabyte of data over the next decade. "We want to paint a diverse picture of what life in the UK today is like, for our great grandchildren and for future generations of researchers so they can understand how we lived, how we worked and how we felt. We’re talking about our culture and our digital heritage here and that’s what we exist to preserve".

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Many American schools may be gaga for iPads, but elsewhere Google Apps and Chromebooks' affordability are winning educators. Today, the search and information giant reveals that Malaysia will roll out Apps to "10 million students, teachers and parents", Felix Lin, director of product management, explains. "As part of this initiative they are also deploying Chromebooks to primary and secondary schools nationwide".

In the Malaysian Ministry of Education report, I don't see this number but reference to 10,000 schools and separate ones identifying "2.9 million students enrolled in primary school" and "2.3 million students enrolled in lower and upper secondary school". The current, official student tally from the Ministry's website is 5.23 million students. Including teachers and parents likely explains the larger number.

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We all know software vendors have vested interests that sway some of the decisions they make. When I heard that Microsoft was the real driving force behind a sly K-12 school privacy bill making the rounds in Massachusetts, I immediately smelled something rotten. While the public purpose behind the bill aims squarely at protecting student privacy, it's not hard to connect the dots back to Redmond, Wash.

Even though it's easy to see why Microsoft would prop up such a bill (to ease Google Apps' rise in the K-12 educational market), I question the long-term business sense of such dirty grandstanding. Microsoft's Office 365 for Education is already free for students and staff of any qualifying school district (just like Google Apps), and the suite is pretty darn good competition for Google on technical and functional merit alone. So what's the sense in playing dirty just to sign on a few more seats here or there based on misinformation?

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Just in time for mid-term exams, or for the few students who actually work during Spring Break, Microsoft offers a suite -- ah, sweet -- deal on Office 365. Not coincidentally, the offer carries many, if not most, in higher ed through the end of the school year.

Microsoft's Jeff Meisner explains: "Starting today, college students in the U.S. can get three months of Office 365 University and 20 GB of SkyDrive storage for free".

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If you surveyed the different directions K-12 school districts take in the United States, you'd find nothing less than a hodgepodge of technologies. The mess that was known as "Novell Hell" universally bows down to a diverse array of technologies including Active Directory, campus-wide Wi-Fi, iPads, Chromebooks, and a little bit of everything else in between. While it's reassuring that most districts I'm in discussions with are moving to cloud-based Google Apps or Office 365 for their email, the end-user device side of things is murkier.

I'm not going to call myself an expert in K-12 technology and policy, but seeing that I spent the last four years supporting and training users' technology needs at my former high school district, I've got good experience understanding the issues affecting teachers and students alike. After attending educational tech conferences year after year, the common consensus stands: everyone in education knows where they want to be, but the paths some of them take to get there are muddled with too much idealism and not enough realism.

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Eighteenth in a series. The US Windows Store slipped past the 30,000 applications mark this week and is now listing a total of 30,299 free and paid apps to Windows 8 users. While that is certainly a milestone, week-over-week growth of applications has slowed down once again considerably this week.

Only 585 new apps were listed in the store this week, almost a 50-percent drop from last week's 1,049 new applications. Of those, 384 are listed as free in the store, while the remaining 201 are paid applications.

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That's the question we're asking in the newsroom, and the consensus is "No", and that most certainly is my initial reaction. But on further examination, I'm at "depends", meaning for some schools but not for many others. Here size of school district matters, because Lenovo commits considerable extra IT-oriented resources to this newest ThinkPad that should appeal to people managing larger-scale deployments. But smaller schools, such as charter, private or small town, should consider spending less on another model.

Today the two companies announced the new computer, ThinkPad X131e Chromebook, which goes on sale February 26. Quick specs: 11.6-inch display with 1366 x 768 resolution; Intel Celeron processor; 16GB sold-state drive; webcam; Ethernet; dual-bad Wi-Fi N; 2 USB 3.0 ports; single (separate) ports for USB 2.0, HDMI and VGA; and Chrome OS. Lenovo doesn't state which processor or provide dimensions but does give weight as 1.8 kilograms (3.9 pounds). Price is $429, or $459 with recommended IT maintenance service.

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Google on Monday announced it will offer the Samsung Series 5 Chromebook to educators for a special price of just $99 until December 21 through a partnership with public education nonprofit Donors Choose.

Full-time public educators can go to the DonorsChoose site, fill out a three-question questionnaire and project request for up to 30 Chromebooks, and then begin collecting donations to receive the computer hardware, management, and support. Typically, each Chromebook costs $249.

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Thousands of high schools have jumped on the tablet bandwagon and adopted one-to-one iPad programs. This year, over 600 districts in the US are piloting iPad programs and more are considering it. Apple CEO Tim Cook recently said that they've shipped over 1 million iPads into the education space.

These numbers are remarkable and in general are a positive trend when it comes to adoption of technology in education. That being said, there is cause for concern. The majority of iPad deployments thus far have been messy and poorly executed. A recent study conducted on the efficacy of iPads in four California school districts found that students who used iPads performed no better than the control group.

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Microsoft is taking its subscription-based productivity suite Office 365 into the realm of higher education in the first quarter of 2013 with a new package called Office 365 University.

At just $1.67 per month, college students can get Office 365 for their entire four years of undergrad for just about $80. The subscription includes the usual Office Home and Student Gang: Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and OneNote, plus Outlook, Access, and Publisher which aren't available in the $119.99 desktop version (but are only available to Windows PC users.)

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The cat's out of the bag, and we can all stop guessing as to what the Surface RT will cost. Microsoft confirms many things, namely that Steve Ballmer was spot-on with his estimates on Surface pricing roughly a month ago. The Surface RT is going toe-to-toe with the iPad down to the very last penny. That's a good thing.

One thing I'm curious about is how Surface will change the way K-12 looks at computing devices for the next generation of students. I've already penned my thoughts on why I believe the Surface could very well outshine the iPad in education. A big part of this winning equation has to do with the ecosystem that surrounds a given technology.

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If you can't figure out why CEO Steve Ballmer talks about reinventing Microsoft as a "devices and services company", Jay Chou, IDC senior research analyst, has an answer. "PCs are going through a severe slump". That's being polite in mixed company, when the F-word is so much more appropriate. Third-quarter PC shipments accentuate an already dreadful trend. Analysts expected slowing shipments as the market prepares for Windows 8, but nothing quite like this. The seasonal back-to-school lift collapsed, with even Mac shipments slowing.

Global PC shipments fell 8.6 percent year over year, according to IDC, surpassing the minus 3.8 percent forecast. Gartner's estimate is a more generous 8.3 percent decline. The United States, a region recently in love with tablets, is in free fall, with shipments down 13.8 percent by Gartner's reckoning and 12.4 percent according to IDC. For the better part of a year, analysts excused declining PC shipments as market anticipation for Windows 8. But the slowdown during back-to-school buying season foreshadows weakness ahead.

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Microsoft needs to harness and capitalize on some of the pent up anticipation that is surrounding roughly the next 5 months of its product lineup. Let's face it: the holiday season is going to be a blissful one, with Windows 8 coming out in late October for consumers and the Surface rumored to be out on the same day.

Optimism for Windows 8 grows, dulling early worries about its future. A recent poll run by BetaNews found that 45-percent of respondents are set to get Windows 8 as soon as it's released. And a forward-thinking interview with the CEO of Laplink, Thomas Koll, firmly solidifies his belief that Windows 8 is far from the next-of-kin to Windows Vista.

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CodeAcademy, the free site for learning how to code, has just added the Python programming language to its tutorial platform.

CodeAcademy made a big impression on the Web back in August of 2011 when its cofounders, two graduates of the y-combinator startup training camp, Zach Sims and Ryan Bubinski, announced the service on the ycombinator Hacker News forum. Since then, the site has seen extensive growth, and it currently offers a few hundred exercises in HTML, CSS, JavaScript and jQuery.

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