Curriculum

Digital Notebook: E-Books for Tots, STEM Apps, and Software Questions

By Ian Quillen — May 31, 2012 1 min read
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Here’s a couple thought-provoking recent headlines from the world of educational technology:

MindShift this week takes a look at a recent study from the Joan Ganz Cooney Center on the differences in how children ages 3-6 absorb information from e-books and their print counterparts.

Among its major findings were that students who read e-books with their parents were less likely to remember specific visual details than those who read print books, but that both sets of children showed an equal ability to comprehend the storyline.

• Over at OnlineUniversities.com, you can find recommendations for 50 iPad apps that are helpful for students’ comprehension of science, technology, engineering, and math, also known as the STEM subjects.

Among the contributors you might recognize: the Khan Academy, Encyclopaedia Britannica, NASA, and The LEGO Group.

• And a story in the Charleston Gazette out of the West Virginia Capital examines the states spending habits on an adaptive math software program that was found to show no significant signs of effectiveness, according to a review by the What Works Clearinghouse.

About 15,000 students in 20 of the state’s districts are using Carnegie Learning Cognitive Tutor, to the tune of millions of dollars spent on the program, according to the story.

A version of this news article first appeared in the Digital Education blog.