Under the Children’s Internet Protection Act (CIPA), any US school that receives federal funding is required to have an internet-safety policy. As school-issued tablets and Chromebook laptops become more commonplace, schools must install technological guardrails to keep their students safe. For some, this simply means blocking inappropriate websites. Others, however, have turned to software companies like Gaggle, Securly, and GoGuardian to surface potentially worrisome communications to school administrators
In an age of mass school-shootings and increased student suicides, SMPs Safety Management Platforms can play a vital role in preventing harm before it happens. Each of these companies has casestudies where an intercepted message helped save lives.
Over 50% of teachers say their schools are one-to-one (the industry term for assigning every student a device of their own), according to a 2017 survey from Freckle Education
But even in an age of student suicides and school shootings, when do security precautions start to infringe on students’ freedoms?
When the Gaggle algorithm surfaces a word or phrase that may be of concern—like a mention of drugs or signs of cyberbullying—the “incident” gets sent to human reviewers before being passed on to the school. Using AI, the software is able to process thousands of student tweets, posts, and status updates to look for signs of harm.
SMPs help normalize surveillance from a young age. In the wake of the Cambridge Analytica scandal at Facebook and other recent data breaches from companies like Equifax, we have the opportunity to teach kids the importance of protecting their online data
in an age of increased school violence, bullying, and depression, schools have an obligation to protect their students. But the protection of kids’ personal information is also a matter of their safety
Cross-Institution & Cross-Sector Collaboration Long-Term Trend: Driving Ed Tech adoption in higher education for five or more years
Although a variety of collaborations between higher education and industry have emerged, more-explicit frameworks and guidelines are needed to define how these partnerships should proceed to have the greatest impact.
Proliferation of Open Educational Resources Mid-Term Trend: Driving Ed Tech adoption in higher education for the next three to five years
The United States lags on the policy front. In September 2017, the Affordable College Textbook Act was once again introduced in both the US House of Representatives and the Senate “to expand the use of open textbooks
It is unlikely that ACTA will pass, however, as it has been unsuccessfully introduced to two previous Congresses.
The Rise of New Forms of Interdisciplinary Studies
Faculty members, administrators, and instructional designers are creating innovative pathways to college completion through interdisciplinary experiences, nanodegrees, and other alternative credentials, such as digital badges. Researchers, along with academic technologists and developers, are breaking new ground with data structures, visualizations, geospatial applications, and innovative uses of opensource tools.
Growing Focus on Measuring Learning
As societal and economic factors redefine the skills needed in today’s workforce, colleges and universities must rethink how to define, measure, and demonstrate subject mastery and soft skills such as creativity and collaboration. The proliferation of data-mining software and developments in online education, mobile learning, and learning management systems are coalescing toward learning environments that leverage analytics and visualization software to portray learning data in a multidimensional and portable manner
Redesigning Learning Spaces
upgrading wireless bandwidth and installing large displays that allow for more natural collaboration on digital projects. Some are exploring how mixed-reality technologies can blend 3D holographic content into physical spaces for simulations, such as experiencing Mars by controlling rover vehicles, or how they can enable multifaceted interaction with objects, such as exploring the human body in anatomy labs through detailed visuals. As higher education continues to move away from traditional, lecture-based lessons toward more hands-on activities, classrooms are starting to resemble real-world work and social environments
Authentic Learning Experiences
An increasing number of institutions have begun bridging the gap between academic knowledge and concrete applications by establishing relationships with the broader community; through active partnerships with local organizations
Improving Digital Literacy Solvable Challenge: Those that we understand and know how to solve
Digital literacy transcends gaining discrete technological skills to generating a deeper understanding of the digital environment, enabling intuitive and discerning adaptation to new contexts and cocreation of content.107 Institutions are charged with developing students’ digital citizenship, promoting the responsible and appropriate use of technology, including online communication etiquette and digital rights and responsibilities in blended and online learning settings. This expanded concept of digital competence is influencing curriculum design, professional development, and student-facing services and resources. Due to the multitude of elements of digital literacy, higher education leaders must obtain institution-wide buy-in and provide support for all stakeholders in developing these competencies.
Despite its growing importance, it remains a complex topic that can be challenging to pin down. Vanderbilt University established an ad hoc group of faculty, administrators, and staff that created a working definition of digital literacy on campus and produced a white paper recommending how to implement digital literacy to advance the university’s mission: https://vanderbilt.edu/ed-tech/committees/digital-literacy-committee.php
Adapting Organizational Designs to the Future of Work
Technology, shifting information demands, and evolving faculty roles are forcing institutions to rethink the traditional functional hierarchy. Institutions must adopt more flexible, teambased, matrixed structures to remain innovative and responsive to campus and stakeholder needs.
Attempts to avoid bureaucracy also align with a streamlined workforce and cost elimination. Emphasis has been placed on designing better business models through a stronger focus on return on investment. This involves taking a strategic approach that connects financial practice (such as analyzing cost metrics and resource allocation) with institutional change models and goals.124
Faculty roles have been and continue to be impacted by organizational change, as well as by broader economic movements. Reflective of today’s “gig economy,” twothirds of faculty members are now non-tenure, with half working part-time, often in teaching roles at several institutions. This stands as a stark contrast to 1969, when almost 80 percent of faculty were tenured or tenuretrack; today’s figures are nearly inverted. Their wages are applying pressure to traditional organizational structures.Rethinking tenure programs represents another change to organizational designs that aligns with the future of work.
Organizational structures are continuing to evolve on the administrative side as well. With an emphasis on supporting student success, many institutions are rethinking their student services, which include financial aid, academic advising, and work-study programs. Much of this change is happening within the context of digital transformation, an umbrella term that denotes the transformation of an organization’s core business to better meet customer needs by leveraging technology and data.
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added Nov 13, 2018
6 growing trends taking over academic libraries
BY MERIS STANSBURY
March 24th, 2017
Horizon Report details short-and long-term technologies, trends that will impact academic libraries worldwide in the next 5 years.
Research Data Management: The growing availability of research reports through online library databases is making it easier for students, faculty, and researchers to access and build upon existing ideas and work. “Archiving the observations that lead to new ideas has become a critical part of disseminating reports,” says the report.
Valuing the User Experience: Librarians are now favoring more user-centric approaches, leveraging data on patron touchpoints to identify needs and develop high-quality engaging experiences.
(Mid-Term, 3-5 years):
Patrons as Creators: Students, faculty, and researchers across disciplines are learning by making and creating rather than by simply consuming content. Creativity, as illustrated by the growth of user-generated videos, maker communities, and crowdfunded projects in the past few years, is increasingly the means for active, hands-on learning. People now look to libraries to assist them and provide tools for skill-building and making.
Rethinking Library Spaces: At a time when discovery can happen anywhere, students are relying less on libraries as the sole source for accessing information and more for finding a place to be productive. As a result, institutional leaders are starting to reflect on how the design of library spaces can better facilitate the face-to-face interactions.
(Long-Term, 5 or more years):
Cross-Institution Collaboration: Within the current climate of shrinking budgets and increased focus on digital collections, collaborations enable libraries to improve access to scholarly materials and engage in mission-driven cooperative projects.
Evolving Nature of the Scholarly Record: Once limited to print-based journals and monographic series, scholarly communications now reside in networked environments and can be accessed through an expansive array of publishing platforms. “As different kinds of scholarly communication are becoming more prevalent on the web, librarians are expected to discern the legitimacy of these innovative approaches and their impact in the greater research community through emerging altmetrics tools,” notes the report.
Improving digital literacy: According to the report, digital literacy transcends gaining isolated technological skills to “generate a deeper understanding of the digital environment, enabling intuitive adaptation to new contexts, co-creation of content with others, and an awareness of both the freedom and risks that digital interactions entail. Libraries are positioned to lead efforts to develop students’ digital citizenship, ensuring mastery of responsible and appropriate technology use, including online identity, communication etiquette, and rights and responsibilities.”
It is estimated that 13% to 20% of children living in the United States has experienced a mental health disorder in the last year. According to the National Alliance of Mental Illness, one in five adolescents between 13 and 18 years old has or will have a serious mental illness, and suicide is the third leading cause of death for youth aged 10 to 24.
A nationwide shortage of school psychologists and counselors disproportionately affects these students as well, as they often attend more crowded, under-resourced schools, though they have the greatest need.
Some districts and universities are working to train staff to identify and, in some cases, assist students with mental illness on campus. Teachers21, a nonprofit subsidiary of William James College, a graduate college of psychology in Newton, Massachusetts, is working with classroom, school and district leaders and other school staff to build mental health treatment into their pedagogy. Trauma-informed teaching has become a popular concept, feeding into the idea of restorative justice
Most of these efforts — and a focus on social-emotional learning in general — are concentrated in elementary schools, and by the time a student reaches middle school, the emphasis begins to fizzle out. And by the time a student gets onto a college campus, efforts are all but non-existent, said Williams James President Nicholas Covino, who is a practicing psychologist.
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Report calls for national strategy to help schools prevent suicide, substance abuse
The Trust for America’s Health and the Well Being Trust created a joint policy paper that calls for a national strategy to improve childhood resilience and school responses to crises involving suicide, drugs and alcohol, District Administration reports.
The issue is relevant to schools, where students spend about half their year, because suicide is now the third leading cause of death in children ages 10 to 14, and more than 1 million middle school and high school age students have a substance abuse disorder, the authors note.
The policy paper details four main areas of concern that need to be addressed on the school level: the need to partner with community-based organizations, such as Communities that Care; the need to improve school climate through such programs as Positive Behavioral Interventions and Supports (PBIS); the need for proactive screening for mental health risk factors and potential substance abuse; and increased staffing of mental health workers and training of teachers.
Snapchat and Instagram filters are influencing how young people think about beauty.
Alarmingly, more people are requesting plastic surgery to look better in selfies, according to the American Academy of Facial Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery.
And in one disturbing emerging phenomenon, dubbed “Snapchat dysmorphia,” some patients are getting plastic surgery to look more like their filtered selfies.
According to Boston University researchers, digital filters are likely contributing to a rise in body dysmorphia, where people are overly anxious about their appearance.
Selfish selfie-takers cause Trevi fountain fisticuffs
Eight-person fight ensues after tourists battle for best spot in front of Roman monument
Two tourists’ quest for a perfect selfie has caused a brawl at Rome’s Trevi fountain.
Last year, Rome pledged to crack down on bad behaviour involving the city’s fountains, imposing fines of up to €240 (£215) for people caught snacking or camping on the fountains’ pedestals, dipping their feet in the water or going for a swim.
Residents are particularly irked by tourists who try to recreate the scene from Federico Fellini’s film La Dolce Vita, in which the late Swedish actor Anita Ekberg wades into the fountain.
Instagram has done some tweaking of their algorithm which is making competition for visibility on the platform much tougher. According to our Facebook connections, this is a deliberate move to help reduce the spammy and less relevant behavior of certain Instagram accounts.
a great study that analyzed the content performance of Instagram posts when the hashtags are placed in the post compared to when hashtags are placed in the comments.
Including hashtags in the post resulted in 9.84% more Likes and 29.4% more Reach. Placing the hashtags in the comments resulted in 19.3% more comments for some strange reason.
Placing hashtags in the Instagram post resulted in 18% better content performance metrics. While this might seem like a slim margin, you must consider the extra time and steps it would take to go back and remember to add hashtags into your posts’ comments.
In his book, “Experience on Demand,” Jeremy Bailenson, the founding director of Stanford University’s Virtual Human Interaction Lab, writes, “No medium, of course can fully capture the subjective experience of another person, but by richly evoking a real-seeming, first-person experience, virtual reality does seem to promise to offer new, empathy-enhancing qualities.” Bailenson contrasts experiencing virtual reality with reading news accounts and watching documentaries. Those latter activities, he writes, require “a lot of imaginative work,” whereas virtual reality can “convey the feeling” of, say, a refugee camp’s environment, and the “smallness of the living quarters, the size of the camp.”
Caldwell—who used Google Expeditions to deliver a virtual reality experience set in the Holocaust—says that when his students first put on the goggles, they viewed them as a novelty. But within a minute or two, the students became quiet, absorbed in what they were seeing; they realized the “reality of the horror of what was in front of them.” Questions ensued.
Ron Berger, the Chief Academic Officer of EL Education, points to another factor schools should consider. He thinks virtual reality can be a powerful way to introduce kids to situations that require empathy or adopting different perspectives. However, he thinks no one tool or experience will bring results unless it is “nested in a broader framework of a vision and goals and relationships.”
Berger says virtual reality experiences have to be accompanied by work beforehand and follow-up afterwards. Kids, he says, need to be reflective and think critically.
immersion experiences like virtual reality should be “embedded in positive” adult and peer relationships. He adds that ideally, there’s also a resulting action where kids do something productive with the information they’ve learned, to help their own growth and to help others. He mentions an example where students interviewed local immigrants and refugees, then wrote the stories they heard. They published the stories in a book, and the profits went to legal fees for local refugees.
saving virtual reality for “very special experiences,” keeping it “relatively short” and not getting students dizzy or disoriented. A report Bailenson co-authored for Common Sense Media highlights the research that has—and has not—explored the effects of virtual reality on children. It states that the “potentially negative outcomes of VR include impacts on children’s sensory systems and vision, aggression, and unhealthy amounts of escapism and distraction from the physical world.”
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The Brain Science Is In: Students’ Emotional Needs Matter
What the neuro-, cognitive, and behavioral research says about social-emotional learning
Teachers, like parents, have always understood that children’s learning and growth do not occur in a vacuum, but instead at the messy intersection of academic, social, and emotional development.
• Malleability: Genes are not destiny. Our developing brains are largely shaped by our environments and relationships—a process that continues into adulthood.
• Context: Family, relationships, and lived experiences shape the physiological structure of our brains over time. Healthy amounts of challenge and adversity promote growth, but toxic stress takes a toll on the connections between the hemispheres of our brain.
• Continuum: While we’ve become familiar with the exponential development of the brain for young children, it continues throughout life. The explosion of brain growth into adolescence and early adulthood, in particular, requires putting serious work into much more intentional approaches to supporting that development than is common today.
Here’s how to evaluate the potential for mobile solutions
Before they set foot in their first class, incoming college students face a maze of requirements and resources that will be critical to their success. So-called “student supports” abound. Yet forty percent of first-year studentsdon’t return the following year, and a growing number report information overload as they navigate campus life amid newfound independence.
The nine in 10 undergraduates who own smartphones are probably familiar with the xkcd about it. College-aged Americans check their devices more than 150 times per day. So it should be no surprise that a growing body of research suggests that mobile solutions can play a critical role in enhancing the student experience.
1. Is the mobile app native?
We’ve all had the frustrating experience of using a smartphone to navigate a page that was designed for a computer. But when designing native mobile apps, developers start with the small screen, which leads to simpler, cleaner platforms that get rid of the clutter of the desktop browsing experience.
As smartphones overtake laptops and desktops as the most popular way for young people to get online, native design is critical for universities to embrace.
2. Is there a simple content management system?
It’s also critical to explore whether mobile apps integrate with an institution’s existing LMS, CMS, and academic platforms. The most effective apps will allow you to draw upon and translate existing content and resources directly into the mobile experience. My note: this is why it is worth experimenting with alternatives to LMS, such as Facebook Groups: they allow ready-to-use SIMPLE mobile interface.
3. Does it allow you to take targeted action?
At-risk or disengaged students often require more targeted communication and engagement which, if used effectively, can prevent them falling into those categories in the first place.
Unlike web-based tools, mobile apps should not only communicate information, but also generate insights and reports, highlighting key information into how students use the platform.
4. Does it offer communication and social networking opportunities?
Teenagers who grew up with chatbots and Snapchat expect instant communication to be part of any online interaction. Instead of making students toggle between the student affairs office and conversations with advisors, mobile platforms that offer in-app messaging can streamline the experience and keep users engaged.
Also, you can design the image to highlight your offer while the actual video demonstrates the value of your products.
Even better, producing a Facebook live stream with a branded image doesn’t take a ton of your time and it can position your company as tech-savvy and cool.
branding your live videos.
#1: Create the Branded Image Overlay
#2: Set Up the Switcher Go App for Live Video
The Switcher Go iOS app is a free tool that’s packed with features and allows you to overlay an image in the lower third of your live video. You can connect the app to Facebook Live and YouTube Live. (Although you can use the Switcher Studio video tools, you only need Switcher Go to add an image to a live video.)
My note: this article is geared toward Apple mobile tools. If you are Android user and/or use both tools, and/or are running your Live feed from laptop/desktop, OBS (Open Broadcast Sofware) – https://obsproject.com/ might be good option.
#3: Prepare Your Facebook Live Post in Switcher Go
#4: Stream Your Live Video With a Branded Image
#5: Boost the Live Video Post to Your Target Audience on Facebook