Blurts

Edutopia offered a recent piece of the potential of dictation in learning to write and writing. This is an interesting to think about and interesting to consider when the tech works effectively how our own writing techniques might change. I say “not there yet” based on my wife’s experience exploring the present potential of dictation. She and a colleague were having elementary students dictate on an ipad thinking the ease of input would increase the amount students would offer. Too many problems. One major issue was the public setting and getting dictation to work when others are also speaking in the background. She never really got to the point she thought the study tested the hypothesis – still too many issues with the tech.

International testing data are often used by those urging educational reform in the United States. Here is a recent analysis that addresses issues at a deeper level taking factors such as SES into account. Very complex:

For example:

Because in every country, students at the bottom of the social class distribution perform worse than students higher in that distribution, U.S. average performance appears to be relatively low partly because we have so many more test takers from the bottom of the social class distribution.

BUT

Disadvantaged and lower-middle-class U.S. students perform better (and in most cases, substantially better) than comparable students in similar post-industrial countries in reading. In math, disadvantaged and lower-middle-class U.S. students perform about the same as comparable students in similar post-industrial countries.

You may have received a notice in the last couple of weeks that your MobileMe account was going to be downsized to 5 GB. Today is the day. I forget I have any Apple in the Cloud unless I think about it. I don’t really use the Apple mail system for much (the spam from politicians in thanks for the donations I have made come to this account). I really do not pay attention to my photostream and would rather store the photos I want elsewhere. I use Google Calendar. The one thing I find valuable is the opportunity to back up my iPads to the cloud instead of to a computer. I wish it was not such a struggle to prioritize this task.

I actually think iCloud is an improvement over MobileMe, but it seems too little to late. Free might have been a better approach. What reason would anyone have to move content from existing services to iCloud?