Afraid that the almighty government will sneak into your driveway, attach a GPS device to your car, then track your every move? Perhaps you should be more afraid of what your child’s school has in mind? A Chicago-area elementary school will keep track of students’ bus rides using GPS. This a move to ease parents’ concerns about the perils of bus rides! Children have been riding in school… → Read More
This MacBook-spying story could be the creepiest story in quite some time. We already know the allegations: that the school district provided MacBooks to its students, but then took photos of the students without their knowledge or consent. Now we’re getting numbers. One student claims he was photographed more than 400 times, and now it has emerged that, over a period of two years, school district… → Read More
Three high-profile American universities, Cornell University, Princeton University, and George Washington University, have banned the iPad from their campuses. George Washington University and Princeton University call the device a “security risk,” while Cornell is concerned about students chewing through too much bandwidth. So much for the iPad being the darling of higher education. → Read More
It’s the start of yet another lazy Saturday, so let’s make things a little more interesting with a side dish of outrage. A 15-year-old student in Pennsylvania has accused his high school of spying on him using a school-supplied MacBook. The school had accused the boy “inappropriate behavior” that it found him engaged in via the built-in Webcam. Lawsuits are flying, as you might imagine. → Read More
A school district in Arizona has outfitted one of its school buses with a $200 mobile 3G Wi-Fi router and $60-per-month access. And guess what? Instead of punching each other and yelling all the way to school, the kids quietly tap, tap, tap away on their laptops. → Read More
A school district in North Carolina just placed an order for 131 iPod touches to be used to help kids with their readin’ and writin’. The money to buy the Apple devices came from a combination of grants and the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, also known as “the stimulus.” → Read More
Who hasn’t thought about suing their college for some reason or another? Trina Thompson is doing it. She’s a 27-year-old IT graduate from the Bronx who’s suing her alma mater, The Monroe College, for the $70,000 worth of tuition she spent there. Why? Because she doesn’t have a job and she doesn’t think the college has tried hard enough to help her find one. → Read More
Dell’s previously-rumored educational netbooks are here. The Latitude 2100 series has the guts of your typical netbook — 1.6GHz Atom CPU, 1GB RAM, 10.1-inch screen, etc. — but adds a tough and rugged rubberized exterior, slightly larger keyboard and trackpad, and a carrying handle. → Read More
Dear school administrators, What’s the best way to ensure that your computer network remains riddled with security vulnerabilities that leave you, your personnel and [someone think of the] schoolchildren in danger? Why, to demonize the student who discovered the vulnerability and alerted you to it, of course. Have him charged with a felony while you’re at it. A student in a Saratoga… → Read More
A report recently came out that says parents and teachers are not communicating. Parents blame their busy schedules for not being able to meet with teachers.The report also said that parents know more about their bank accounts then they do about their kid’s report card. The reason for this is simple. The information about your bank account is readily available online and via text messaging. → Read More
Brazil will be joining its cousin Portugal in deploying Intel’s Classmate PC in the classroom. Cnet has an adorable story of a Brazilian foundation, Fundação Bradesco, that has introduced the tiny laptops at a school in Campinas. What’s different about this particular program and other is that the students don’t get to keep the Classmates, as the surrounding neighborhood is… → Read More
This is an oldie but a goodie—just like CBS FM in New York—especially as school starts pretty soon for kids in the northeast. It’s step-by-step instructions on how to install games onto your TI-84 or TI-84 Plus Silver Edition calculator. The games aren’t too complicated, but they’ll help you get through physics or calculus class with some degree of sanity. → Read More
Dumb kids in Scotland are failing tests not because they’re dumb, or because they haven’t properly prepared, but because Wikipedia is evil and mean and “littered with inaccuracies.” Shucks, and I thought Wikipedia was to be trusted 100 percent of the time. Right, so the Scottish Parent Teacher Council, which just sounds like a fun group, hated on Wikipedia the other day… → Read More
Where have all the [UK] game designers gone? Not to a proper school, apparently. Yup, a new report out of the North East shows that there aren’t nearly enough accredited universities in Britain to properly feed the growing video games industry. Too many students are obtaining too many Mickey Mouse degrees from no-name universities, often without the hard math and science background required… → Read More
What do you do when you’re an engineering student and the frat kids won’t leave you alone? What if you want to be a long-distance party animal? You build a 1/2-scale Panzer tank that shoots cans of Red Bull, that’s what. → Read More
Oklahoma Christian University joins the list of colleges across the country to “give away” Apple products to incoming freshman. New students will receive a MacBook and their choice of an iPhone or iPod Touch. Of course we all know that the costs of such giveaways are built into the ever-rising tuition at schools everywhere but it’s a nice way for kids to get some new gadgets as… → Read More
[photopress:riseofweblowres.jpg,full,center] I wish I were kidding, but this half-page of notes (higher res version here) cost me around $500 yesterday. I’m taking a class called Rise of the Web taught by Jay Rosen, which is supposed to explore how the Internet is going to change the [journalism/media] world we live in. You know, things we deal with here at CrunchGear on a daily—nay… → Read More
A recent study that appears in the June issue of Archive of Pediatrics & Adolescent Medicine (come on, who doesn’t subscribe to that?) suggests that video gamery has little to no effect on youth (age 10-19) social and educational habits, such as they are. First off, 80 percent of all gamers are boys, so there’s no need to worry about girls. Of the young men, only 36 percent of them… → Read More
Truly shocking news: rather than user school-issued laptops for educational purposes, high school kids instead used them for instant messaging, Web browsing and porn immersion. Say it ain’t so. So school districts around the country, which were convinced that giving kids laptops would, I don’t know, make them smarter, are scuttling in-school laptop programs, making kids learn the old… → Read More
Back in the 1980s and early 1990s, you just weren’t cool if you didn’t possess a Trapper Keeper. The Trapper Keeper turned Mead into an iconic name that every kid in a school would instantly recognize. Now Mead is looking to break new ground again by introducing a binder with integrated speakers under it’s Five Star line of products. The binder comes with a built-in audio-jack to… → Read More
The Campus Computing Project has released its annual report. The results are surprisingly positive: Wireless networks now reach fully half (51.2 percent) of college classrooms compared to just over two-fifths (42.7 percent) in 2005 and a third (31.1 percent) in 2004, according to new data from the annual Campus Computing Survey. Additionally, more than two-thirds (68.8 percent) of campuses… → Read More
September is here and maybe you or someone in your household–you know, the kid upstairs with the headphones who listens to that demon hippity-hop music?–might be in the market for some back to school technology. Here’s a quick rundown of our favorite picks from the past few months. → Read More
Austin, TX
Seattle, WA
San Diego, CA
Menlo Park, CA
Boston, MA
Disrupt Europe: Berlin Hackathon
Berlin, Germany
