There are interesting things happening at the Big Ideas Fest, which started on Sunday, out in sunny Half Moon Bay, CA. Martha Kanter from the Department of Education shared this YouTube clip at the kick off:
One of things highlighted at the Fest were Siftables – “cookie-sized computers with motion sensing, neighbor detection, graphical display, and wireless communication.” Very cool – here’s a TED talk on them:
I got to the Siftables stuff from the MindShift site powered by KQED; there’s much other good stuff there. For example the post about Dr. Sugata Mitra and his belief that we need to give kids the benefit of the doubt when it comes to handling what’s perceived as adult-only information. Allow children to self-learn and let parents and educators be guides rather than sources of info. Certainly, there’s no going back, with the internet genie out of the bottle.
Lastly, I had not heard of this place before but like many of the reports there – the National Education Policy Center at the University of Colorado. Happy reading!