Blog for June

Quote of the Month

Daniel Caton
Executive Vice President
McGraw-Hill Learning
Solutions Centers

AAP + AEP = ONE ANNUAL CONFERENCE

As companies enter into various partnerships, why not trade associations as well? The Association of American Publishers (AAP) and the Association of Educational Publishers (AEP) will hold a joint annual conference beginning in 2012, scheduled for 6/3—6/5 in Washington, D.C. Each group will continue to operate as separate entities aside from their joint annual meeting.

AEP’S 2011 ANNUAL CONFERENCE

This year’s AEP annual conference was the last of its kind (see above), but one of its best. Attendance was at an all-time high; the energy and enthusiasm generated by the presentations was palpable; and the topics covered were cutting-edge and even inspiring at times. Here are my take-aways from the conference:

• Technology in education is not only here, it is both the near and distant future. IPads, other tablets, iPhones, etc. will become the main delivery system of instruction within the next 5—10 years. Bandwidth is a problem that still needs to be addressed. Caveat: Content is still king, so the products with the best content will win the day.

• The big-three publishing giants—McGraw-Hill, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, and Pearson—are expanding heavily into the international market. There appears to be a great demand for American curriculum products.

• Both core and supplemental publishers are scrambling to push out Common Core State Standards programs in both English/language arts and math.

• Open-education/open-source materials are on the not-too-distant horizon. See references to this growing trend in some of the other items in this month’s blog.

• AEP and Creative Commons (a not-for-profit organization) have formed a partnership to “improve search results on the World Wide Web through creation of a metadata framework specifically for learning resources.” The work is being underwritten with grants from the Hewlitt and Gates Foundations. Here’s the interesting part—the links will include both commercial and OPEN SOURCE resources.

ISTE  CONFERENCE

Another exciting industry event this month was the ISTE (International Society for Technology in Education) conference held in Philadelphia, June 25–29. A sign of the times was evident in McGraw-Hill’s completely paperless booth, where the company launched a series of K–12 products designed for digital solutions addressing four principal themes in educational technology: bookless learning and mobile devices, serious gaming, interactive whiteboard instruction, and assessment solutions.

The big buzz at the conference was all about social networking and the increasing role it is playing in education.

And while its influence cannot be denied or ignored, popular social-networking sites like Facebook, which are not designed specifically for educational use, are giving parents and school leaders pause. There is concern about security, advertising, information sharing, and social interaction in such environments. However, there are social-networking sites that are geared specifically for the classroom. Check them out: www.echalk.com, www.edmodo.com, www.epals.com, www.gaggle.com, jam4art.org, www.livemocha.com, and skidekids.com.

“FREE” PUBLIC SCHOOL EDUCATION

Public schools across the country, struggling with cuts in state funding, rising personnel costs, and lower tax revenues, are shifting some costs to students and parents by imposing fees for everything from Spanish language courses to safety goggles for science lab experiments to sports-related expenses. And some parents are willing to pay so that their children will not miss opportunities in academic development and supplemental and extracurricular activities. Where are you when we need you, Horace Mann?

GOOGLE MARCHING ONWARD

Google Books’ mission statement is as follows: “Google Books is an effort to make all of the knowledge contained within the world’s books searchable online.” Toward that daunting end, the company will be scanning 250,000 books from the British Library. The books, pamphlets, and periodicals are all out of copyright and were published between 1700 and 1870. The digitized books will be available FREE online through Google Books and the British Library. Readers will be able to view, copy, and share the texts for non-commercial use.

And in other Google news (listen up Microsoft), Google has been gaining traction in the school market with its Apps for Education suite of productivity tools, including Gmail, docs and calendars, which Google says are being used by 10 million students, and with its Chromebooks for Education, which rents computers for students at a cost of $20 per student per month. The devices run on Google’s Chrome OS for which there is no local installation and student files are stored in the cloud. And the best part—Chrome is OPEN SOURCE, meaning it is FREE to users and developers.

FINAL THOUGHTS

Most of my research this month yielded item after item of  evidence of technology’s entry into education. It is exciting, and even thrilling, to ponder the possibilities. No other time in history has witnessed so much information and learning opportunities available so widely—across backgrounds, across the country, and across the world. And many of these resources are FREE. But as more and more open-source materials become available, I hope that we will remember Dan Caton’s astute comment about the difference between open-source materials that are “free like a beer” or “free like a puppy.” (This quote gets my vote for “Quote of the Year.”)