In addition to becoming one of the biggest exporters of technological know-how in the form of highly trained IT professionals, a company in India is riding its country’s momentum to improve education worldwide. Sanjeev Mansotra and his company CORE Education & Technologies Ltd. are bringing India’s approach to education to other parts of the world, including United States and the United Kingdom.

Among the services CORE provides are teacher training and tech infrastructure assessment for computer-based testing. Thanks to the power of the internet, CORE counts among its clients schools and districts not only in Western Europe and the US but also parts of the Middle East.

From their base in India, the company aids governments in almost every challenge that confronts lawmakers when it comes to education. CORE not only analyzes how best to allocate scarce academic and financial resources, but also tracks that everything ends up where it is supposed to go.

In the UK, the company’s biggest business is teacher training. “There is a big demand in UK for temporary teachers. We provide training to teachers and provide temporary teachers to schools in case of absenteeism,” Mansotra explains.
Anshul Sonak, President of the company, adds that “teacher absenteeism is looked at very seriously abroad. Supplying alternate teachers is a big business in the UK and we have a tie-up with Oxford University for the same.”

In 2012 the company expanded by acquiring K-12 Division of Princeton Review Inc, which will allow it to enter what promises to be a lucrative market of computerized student assessment. Although its assessment products are used in individual classrooms and schools, CORE’s customers are chiefly governments or institutions of higher education.

The company entered the Indian market in 2007 with a software project for the Jharkhand government that tracked every child’s enrollment, nearest school, basic data etc. This data was collected on ground by an agency and then made available to the government in the form of a report that could be accessed via CORE’s software platform. CORE also had its eyes on the government of India’s move to allocate a budget for Information and Communication Technology (ICT) education, which the firm already had experience in handling in the US and UK. “However, the component of services was lower in what the government was looking for in India and there was a higher demand for hardware, which is why we didn’t bid initially,” Mansotra says.

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A new study casts doubt on the assertion that raising computer ownership rates among low-income families could go some way towards closing the poor-rich academic achievement gap, TechCrunch reports. The findings are based on a randomized trial in California where researchers tracked outcomes after giving out free computers to students around the state.

Authors Robert W. Fairlie and Jonathan Robinson noted that having a computer at home did have an impact on ownership rates and usage time, but didn’t translate to actual improvement in student achievement. Computer ownership didn’t have an impact on any of the standard measures used to gauge achievement, including grades, standardized test scores, attendance, or credits earned.

Based on the (reasonable) fear that lack of computer access was hurting poor students, California gave out computers to 1,123 students in grades 6-10 attending 15 schools across the diverse central California area. Most importantly, the data-savvy administrators randomly selected half the students as participants, so that we wouldn’t have to worry about whether those who took up the offer were unusually motivated.

True to their worries, 49 percent of the children didn’t even know how to download a file from the Internet. Naturally, computer use went up, but so did their access to less-than-educational games. “We find that home computers increase total use of computers for schoolwork, but also increase total use of computers for games, social networking and other entertainment, which might offset each other,” surmise the researchers.

Gregory Ferenstein sees both good news and bad in the study results. The good news is that lack of a computer will not present as insurmountable an obstacle to student success as has been previously assumed. The bad news is that giving out free computers seemed like the most straight-forward solution to the achievement gap between poor students and their better-off peers and now it’s been proven to have no measurable impact at all.

Of course, having computers may have non-educational benefits. Basic computer literacy certainly helps in a knowledge economy. But the real problem is that many poor kids never even get a shot at information technology jobs, and the rich-poor gap is only getting worse. The SAT gap has grown40 percent and college completion has skyrocketed 50 percent since the 1980s.

Now what? Well, as Ferenstein explains, this means that those working to close the gap will have to go back to the drawing board and figure out ways to mitigate problems that are much messier than lack of computers: the students’ social and family environment.

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Kids use the computer for everything from socializing to gaming to math homework – that is, until they reach algebra. In 1988 the Rand Corporation reported that instructional software is great for simple math drills and teaching basic procedures, but it faltered beyond that point. Even with today’s advances in technology the market lacks effective software to help students become proficient in algebra and higher levels of math.

John Barnes from Information Week points out that this is a surprising since a quarter of a century ago the technology was developed that teaches strategy, which is a necessary component in order for students to learn how to effectively solve problems on their own.

A basic algebraic equation can have at least six different strategies that could be used to yield the correct solution. The basis of how proficient a student is at solving these problems is their ability to decide which strategy is best for each equation. This becomes more important as students reach higher levels of math.

Yet most educational software does not teach strategy even though the technology has been available for a long time.

Jane Healy, an educational psychologist,  found that childhood environments also lacked development in another critical area for math: executive function.

It was another, bigger piece of the same problem Rand had found. Executive function is the part of the mind that plans, follows, assesses and re-plans a pathway through a complicated process. It’s the difference between following a recipe and cooking from scratch, painting by the numbers and painting, or running a checklist and fixing a motor. It’s essential for all applied math above the most basic level, as well as for critical thinking and everyday reasoning.

It’s imperative that students develop executive function by choosing and using problem solving strategies. Unfortunately, most software is merely just lecture material with animation, graphics and a self check function.

However, there are some programs that have been developed that teach partial strategy and executive function. Barnes has broken them down into three categories:

 – Hinters: These offer a strategy hint with each problem. They at least make students aware that there are strategies, and that your choice of them matters…

– Executors: These go a step further by asking the student to input a problem from a textbook, handout or other program, and then choose a strategy from a list. The software then follows that strategy to write a perfect show-your-work homework answer…

– Steppers: These not only enable strategy selection but also let students verify each step sequentially, encouraging them to try on their own rather than just copy perfect homework…

While these programs are a step in the right direction, the market still lacks software that properly teaches strategy. The good news is the technology exists to create it. Now someone just needs to have the vision and the initiative to do so.

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Following along with Microsoft’s changes to its popular productivity suite Office, Adobe recently announced that it will stop selling its Creative Suite package, which includes popular tools like Acrobat and Photoshop. Instead the company will be rebranding these tools as online services and charging users monthly subscription fees for access.

Creative Suite 6 will continue to be sold for a limited time, but the company plans to sunset the product, announcing that no further updates or patches will be released. The announcement, which took many by surprise, showcases Adobe’s renewed commitment to transition to cloud-based computing.

The change is likely to have a substantial impact on education institutions that use Adobe products. The company plans to offer discounted plans aimed at the education market. Schools will be able to purchase access to Photoshop, Acrobat and InDesign for $19.99 a month per student. Over the course of the year, the price will total about $240.

The change is not without its upsides. According to Adobe, switching to the cloud will allow the company to deploy upgrades faster and more cheaply. Adobe also benefits from decreased rates of piracy – which, especially with Photoshop, was endemic – while users get newer features on a regular basis without shelling out money beyond the subscription fee.

Does our school have the bandwidth to run these cloud-based applications? The short answer: Maybe. In preparation for the Common Core State Standards, many K–12 schools have upgraded their IT infrastructures to support more data-intensive online assessments. If your school has completed this overhaul or some other upgrade, it might be ready to adopt more cloud-based services.

At a minimum, the nonprofit State Educational Technology Directors Association says school networks should be capable of processing 100 megabytes per second per 1,000 students. Though those recommendations increase with the number of cloud-based services in use. Within five years, the same report suggests that school networks support speeds of 1 gigabyte per second per 1,000 users.

A recent article on Forbes notes that cloud users will likely still have to download the software to their desktop machines, as most of the applications are too data-intensive to run straight from the cloud. Though that could change as the technology improves.

Although schools don’t have to make a decision to continue using Adobe tools once the company goes subscription-based, the clock is ticking. Educational institutions can continue to use stand-alone Adobe products, but according to Ed Tech Magazine, the fact that Adobe is likely to end support for them in the near future will put pressure on the schools to upgrade to the subscription service or switch altogether.

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Language teacher turned consultant Joe Dale is convinced that it’s not necessarily the traditional techie types who are on the front lines of a digital revolution in schools — he thinks it’s the language teachers.

It might not seem like as natural a fit for language teachers to embrace technology as it is for teachers of science, math and engineering-heavy subjects, but Dale has seen that developing tools like social media, video software and online conferencing translate well to the language classroom.

And the web, despite being full of video, graphics and glitz, is still primarily driven by words. Dale writes in The Guardian Professional’s Teacher Network that the “MFL Twitterati,” a collection of foreign language teachers, is a perfect example of a group of education professionals using technology to augment their practice:

The ‘MFLtwitterati‘ – a grassroots community of UK-based modern foreign language teachers on Twitter – has proved to be an invaluable testbed for ideas on using new technologies. Over time the group has developed a strong ethos of sharing innovative classroom practice, encouraging each other to experiment and feedback their findings for further discussion and reflection.

It’s hard to measure the precise impact of these online tools, says Dale, but the proliferation of forums and collaborative groups who constantly share up-to-date tools, apps and best practices is a testament to their value.

Language teachers have successfully used blogging, audio/video software and conferencing — from Google+ to Skype — to share expertise and to integrate unique language practice into curricula.

Not everyone is an early adopter, though. Traditionalists exist, and some language teachers are more reluctant to embrace new technologies than others.

The issue now is the widening gap between those who pro-actively use technology to promote creativity and collaboration, and those who only tick the ICT [education technology] box with the same old ‘drill and kill’ websites (that focus on excessive repetition of simple, isolated skills) and MS Office.

Being slow to hop on the ed tech train is a mistake, Dale argues, because it’s leaving the station whether teachers like it or not:

Technology is not going away and language teachers need to embrace its full potential to engage our 21st century learners.

Education technology and foreign languages aren’t a new marriage — as early as 1983 there was evidence that the discipline began to embrace tech. Vol. 1, No. 1 from June, 1983 of the journal for CALICO — Computer Assisted Language Instruction Consortium — reports the following:

One thing is manifest. Anything having to do with computers is a hot topic at foreign-language meetings these days. Computers were the subject of one of the Northeast Conference’s Winter Workshops in February of 1983, and the Pre-Conference Workshop on computers at the October 1982 meeting of the Massachusetts Foreign Language Association (MaFLA) was certainly not unique in being oversubscribed.

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According to Bobbi Kurshan, the executive director of academic innovation at the Penn Graduate School of Education since last fall, University of Pennsylvania system should take advantage of its unique position and work to foster more education technology start-ups under its auspices. Ed tech brought more than $1.1 billion in venture funding last year, and if Kurshan – who has significant private sector experience – has her way, some of that money will come to Pennsylvania in the form of new business.

A successful ed tech startup needs more than seed funding and business advice. It also needs support from education researchers as well as from teachers and schools that will use its product. Bringing all of them together is a difficult proposition, but not as difficult in a university system setting. The University of Pennsylvania is in an excellent position to provide access to all those benefits in one place.

Trying to bring those four constituencies closer together is one goal of the business-plan competition, begun in 2010. Ten early stage companies – including Autism Expressed of Philadelphia – will vie for a total of $145,000 in seven prizes in what is one of the richer competitions geared toward the ed-tech world.

The prize money has grown substantially since the Milken Family Foundation provided $25,000 for the best plan and $15,000 for the runner-up in in the first competition. This year, K12 Inc., a publicly traded online education company in Herndon, Va., will contribute $25,000 for the best business plan incorporating technology to address challenges in kindergarten through 12th grade online learning.

Each participant gets 10 minutes to pitch the judges, who will have 24 hours to decide who gets the prize money.

While the higher education system in Pennsylvania is looking to the future, the Philadelphia school district is still grappling with the way to keep schools open. Mayor Michael Nutter, along with the City Finance Director Rob Dubow are working to put together a budget proposal to fund the city’s schools which will total about $60 million in additional funding.

Nutter isn’t clear on how the money will be found, but has already said that he wants to keep city revenues flat.

Nutter has previously rejected raising property taxes to fund the schools and Dubow has now added that a wage tax hike is off the table. Nutter has previously indicated that he wants to lower rather than raise wage taxes.

The city introduced cuts prior to the recession which had to be suspended to cover a growing budget deficit.

So without touching the city’s two largest taxes (which are projected to provide about 69 percent of revenue next year), how will the city find $60 million?

In bits and pieces, it seems. A proposal that may have wide support is raising the “liquor by the drink” tax from 10 percent to 15 percent. A Nutter spokesman recently said the mayor supports such a hike, which would bring in an estimated $20 million in new revenue. Raising the tobacco sales tax is also said to be on the table. And, of course, the city could cut spending or forgo some of Nutter’s proposals for new expenditures, like $1 million to increase library hours and another $1 million to offset tuition hikes at the Community College of Philadelphia.

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RocketLabs, the company that was one of the finalists of the 2013 Echelon Philippines Satellite, wants to change the conversation about education in the country. Echelon Philippines Satellite is a local competition meant to find education technology startups to showcase at Echelon2013, Asia’s largest tech conference set to take place in early June in Singapore.

According to TechInAsia.com, education is a difficult topic in the Philippines. Schools and students in the country face issues from lack of funding to lack of access, and even a debate about the best pre-school programs for young children are likely to get contentious.

That’s where RocketLabs aims to step in. The company hopes to offer a platform that puts together virtual labs, academic materials and one-on-one instructionto solve at least one of the country’s biggest ed problems: the availability of up-to-date technical training.

Founded six months ago by Dann Angelo De Guzman and Paul Harris, with help from AngelList, RocketLabs’ main focus is on fields like IT infrastructure, software engineering, business intelligence, digital marketing, and business and engineering applications. At the moment, RocketLabs has up-to-date partnerships in courses with subject matter experts from Microsoft MVP, and is in negotiations with several well known companies to include courses on various key technologies. They also have a memorandum of understanding to focus on cutting edge technologies with several high-level training centers for Cisco technologies. Finally, the development team is planning on a pilot test run in the next few months, with several of their partner companies.

The problems that RocketLabs is trying to solve are immense. Not only is technology training difficult to obtain in the country, the infrastructure to provide it online – along with opportunities for hands-on learning – isn’t there. The company hopes to fill all of those gaps with tools that are flexible and can be deployed even in a lagging IT environment.

In a country where education often means students attending or watching lectures that don’t offer many opportunities for interactivity, the RocketLabs experience is different. Not only do students get training, they get to apply what they learn through hands-on exercises. This kind of approach has proven to work better to help students gain and retain knowledge, understanding and a more useful technology skill-set.

Though still in beta, the startup touted its business model as “flexible and unique”, and the team is confident that its industry-focused approach is polished. The startup promises that accessibility and ease of use will not be an issue, and that continuous learning is guaranteed. The product is set to be monetized, with paid courses, later this year.

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A shortage of technology workers continues to plague the UK, but a new approach that would bring together those in the market for tech talent and the country’s schools could work to close that skills gap. In addition to the IT GCSE curriculum overhaul supported by the coalition government, putting tech companies in touch with students directly could work to inspire more of them to pursue a career in the tech field after their leave school.

Young kids just do not dream about being programmers and engineers when they’re younger. They want to be firefighters and police officers, doctors and ballerinas, because people who employed in those fields are considered heroic and romantic. There’s probably not a lot of romance to be had in a STEM profession, but jobs in technology can be challenging, fascinating, lucrative and put students in a driver’s seat of the country’s economic future.

And who better to deliver that message to students as early as primary school than current IT professionals?

Tamar Newberger, vice president of marketing for virtualisation security company Catbird, said this type of intervention would benefit the entire tech industry.

“It’s just good business because we cannot staff these jobs and there are not enough good people pursuing technology careers,” she told IT Pro.

Richard Nott , the website director for the recruitment job site CSJobs.co.uk, seconds Newberger’s call for more tech firm involvement. As he explains, those who will be entering the profession in a decade are currently in grappling with rudimentary math in primary school. Driving their interest in pursuing a technology career in 10 years is a job that needs to be done by the technology sector today. Increasing the number of students interested in a STEM career will offer an economic boost in the arm not only to the companies hoping to eventually hire them, but also to the students and the country as a whole.

The introduction of a new GCSE ICT syllabus is a step in the right direction, said Adrian Cullen, technical consultant at IT security company Damballa.

This is because the current one fails to equip students with the kind of IT skills the industry is looking for.

“There are still some very bright children out who are interested in IT that go away and figure things out for themselves, but they’d do that anyway, the problem is the syllabus should support all the children and it clearly doesn’t,” he said.

The first crucial step is finding the right teachers. Only about 35% of ICT instructors have actual technology experience or specific training. A majority are just amateurs.

“We have got to have well-trained teachers and well-equipped schools,” said Dave Smith, school improvement advisor of ICT for Havering School Improvement Services.

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A growing number of parents feel that schools are not taking advantage of an exceptional opportunity when they decline to make use of mobile devices sported by a growing number of students in classes.

A new report published by Grunwald Associates and the Learning First Alliance finds that nearly one in four K-12 students uses some kind of mobile digital device at least occasionally, and many parents feel that the technology could be key to breaching the digital divide that threatens to separate low-income students from the higher-income peers when it comes to educational opportunities.

The report shows that there’s less of a link between family income and use of devices like smartphones than researchers expected. Although kids from low-income families were less likely to have access to or use such devices, nearly 20% of students who did not use them came from families where parents were users.

The cause of non-use in those cases is “some other reason that probably revolves around the attitudes of parents and, by extension, the students toward the smartphone,” said Peter Grunwald, the president and founder of Grunwald Associates, a research firm based in Bethesda, Md., known for its work on ed-tech related projects. “The ubiquity of mobile technology in everyday life I think comes through loud and clear in this study. Families own multiple devices, even families that are not well off.”

The number of available devices at home was found to be strongly linked with income. Homes where family income was under $25,000 owned on average 3.3 mobile digital gadgets while households with annual income of $150,000 or more had nearly twice as many.

In terms of support, a majority of responding parents saying they believed mobile devices could be positive educational tools for their children. “Majorities of parents believe that mobile devices and applications offer fun, engaging ways of learning, connecting and communicating,” the report states. “When it comes to mobile devices and education, most parents believe that these devices open up learning opportunities, benefit students’ learning and can engage students in the classroom. Many parents also believe that mobiles and apps teach academic skills and content.”

Parents appeared to be ahead of their school districts when it came to supporting to the use tools like smartphones, tablets and laptops in their schools. Although parents of students attending schools where such devices were used were more likely to embrace their use for educational purposes, support levels among parents were on average higher than among school district officials, teachers and other school employees.

Parents of students in grades K-2 were more likely to vouch for the effectiveness of mobile education than parents of students in grades 3-12. Although the study did not directly explore the reasons why parents of younger students showed that response, Grunwald said the discrepancy goes beyond parents of younger children simply being younger themselves, and thus more tech savvy.

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Aspire Public Schools, a non-profit charter operator, is looking to expand its unique “blended” approach to learning into more elementary school classrooms, The Journal reports. Currently, Aspire runs 34 charter schools around California and Tennessee and enrolls around 12,500 students.

Prior to the planned expansion, Aspire ran a blended learning pilot program in its ERES Academy school in Oakland. The program combined small classroom traditional learning with a computer-based approach. Students go between one environment and the other throughout their day.

The pilot will now be extended to two additional elementary schools – another one in Oakland and one in Los Angeles. In addition, a more limited implementation is also planned for two Aspire schools scheduled to be opened in Memphis.

According to Dian Schaffhauser, the article’s author, the change is supposed to give teachers more one-on-one learning opportunities with each student. To facilitate the transition, each teacher will get an assistant not only to take up some of the teaching burden while the transition to blended learning occurs, but to also troubleshoot any technology-related issues.

So far, Aspire teachers who have been exposed to the new model are impressed. Amy Youngman, who teaches at the original pilot ERES Academy, said that the approach is superior to any other she has previously tried – especially because it gives her more of an opportunity to focus on each student’s individual needs.

“Blended learning has changed the way I differentiate my instruction,” said ERES Teacher Amy Youngman. “It blew the normal learning model out of the water. My lessons are able to be much more targeted and address students’ needs.”
“Blended learning supports Aspire’s successful model of small-group and personalized instruction by enabling teachers to spend more one-on-one time with students to master specific concepts,” said Aspire CEO James Willcox. “We have already seen great success integrating technology in instruction and know that Aspire students and teachers will continue to benefit from our blended learning model.”

Schaffhauser writes that Aspire is planning a gradual adoption with some schools – like the Aspire Titan Academy in LA – setting up the first blended classrooms this January to K-3 graders. In the fall, Titan will expand the program to older students while at the same time launching the program for grades 3-5 at Aspire Millsmont Academy in Oakland.

In Memphis, the organization is launching two co-located schools in fall 2013 as part of the Achievement School District to serve elementary and middle school students up to grade 8. There, middle school students will be introduced to computer science instruction with the launch of “Code Aspire.” The goal: to help students develop problem-solving and technology skills. Eventually, the new program will be added to all 10 Memphis-based Aspire schools set to open over the next five years. The Achievement district was created to encompass the bottom five percent of schools in Tennessee with the goal of putting them into the top 25 percent in five years. The district assigns each school to a charter operator, such as Aspire.

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