Ed News Ticker for December 1st 2011
BenchPrep™ Introduces OpenPrep To Enhance Online and Mobile Learning Courses
BenchPrep, a startup that creates web and mobile applications for standardized test prep launched a new feature called OpenPrep. OpenPrep automatically adds opensourced content from Wikipedia, YouTube and of course the Khan Academy to the BenchPrep courses.
“Our goal is to help students tap into this open knowledge base in an intuitive, convenient and engaging way while maintaining the academic structure of a course.” Frank Pinto, Creative Director at BenchPrep
Source: PRWeb
Winners of the first Binary Battle Apps for Science Contest
Mendeley and PLoS announced the winners of the first Binary Battle (EDUKWEST reported). The Grand Prize goes to openSNP.
With openSNP, you can share your personal genome from 23andMe or deCODEme to find the latest relevant research and let scientists discover new genetic associations.
The runner ups are PaperCritic, a post-publication peer review platform and rOpenSci, a provider of R-based tools to facilitate Open Science.
Source: Mendeley
SkillShare now gives users skill set badges with its new redesign
SkillShare, a community marketplace for offline classes (EDUKWEST reported), redesigned its website and added badges for the different skillsets a user of the platform has.
Source: TheNextWeb
Study Finds Rosetta Stone TOTALe Effective for Elementary-School-Age Children
A study conducted by a team of independent, university-level linguistics researchers came to the result that
Rosetta Stone TOTALe positively impacted students’ receptive language abilities in a number of areas. The learners studying Chinese and those studying Spanish made significant improvements from pre-tests to post-tests with a variety of linguistic structures and vocabulary items. The learners were tested on their oral proficiency and listening proficiency, as well as their vocabulary and syntax.
Source: Business Wire
Global Fund for Education Gathers Momentum
Gordon Brown, former British prime minister recently raised the question why not to raise a fund to promote education based on the success of the one aimed at fighting deadly diseases which raised billions of dollars.
“Improving education needs to be a priority for governments and such a fund would signal that indeed it is”
Source: IPS News
