Building the XO Learning Tablet | www.morphoss.com

This is a great project that I'm keeping an eye on: a kiwi company that has built a management interface for Android tablets. The big features for educators are parental controls, app curation and deployment, all of which will help educators who want an alternative to iPads, but also want a way to manage multiple devices and stay sane.



"Freeing an idea by One Laptop Per Child, based around a graphical design by The Fuse Project, Morphoss has spent the last year developing & building the user interface and related software for the XO Learning Tablet.

The project to build the XO Learning Tablet was a complex and demanding one, requiring us to delve deeply within the Android OS in order to provide parental controls, support tracking of usage by multiple children. Outside of the direct user interface development we also built web-based administration software to help OLPC track the inclusion and classification of over 100 third-party educational applications. At the same time we also contributed code and translations back to the free software community for a number of projects which are used within the product.

We're proud to have been a part of this process and look forward to continuing to work with One Laptop Per Child as the tablet revolution evolves and develops.

Visit http://www.xotablet.com/ for more information."

To BYOD or not?

Gary Stager (for whom I normally have a lot of time) had a shocker when he wrote this piece entitled 'BYOD: Worst idea of the 21st century?'

Here's a good counter: 7 Myths About BYOD Debunked dispatches a number of Stager's points.

Who really benefits from putting high-tech gadgets in classrooms?

I think technology is one of the most potentially transformative tools in a teacher's arsenal, but it's always good to remember to have your eyes wide open when making decisions that affect our learners. This is a really thought-provoking piece from the L.A. Times. It reminds me of one of Seymour Papert's great lines:  "Of course “technology doesn’t work.” Technology doesn’t do anything. People do. "

How much genuine value is there in fancy educational electronics? Listen to what the experts say.
"The media you use make no difference at all to learning," says Richard E. Clark, director of the Center for Cognitive Technology at USC. "Not one dang bit. And the evidence has been around for more than 50 years."
Almost every generation has been subjected in its formative years to some "groundbreaking" pedagogical technology. In the '60s and '70s, "instructional TV was going to revolutionize everything," recalls Thomas C. Reeves, an instructional technology expert at the University of Georgia. "But the notion that a good teacher would be just as effective on videotape is not the case."