Many members of our community of educators have told us that digital learning is crucial in their programs and classrooms. That’s why we’re thrilled to partner with companies and organizations focused on creating and curating quality digital content to bring interactive reading, math games, critical thinking, writing practice and more to under-served children.

Here are a few of our favorite digital education tools:

1. Reading Rainbow Skybrary
Do you remember reading books with LeVar Burton while watching Reading Rainbow® on TV? The Skybrary® platform picks up where the beloved children’s television series left off, bringing its mission of comprehension and intellectual engagement into the Digital Age. By infusing digital books with purposeful interactivity, engaging narration by master storytellers, and paired with delightful videos hosted by LeVar Burton, Skybrary® captures the magic of the original show while helping children find relevance and understand context in their reading.

Skybrary® is a carefully curated, ever expanding interactive library of digital books and video explorations designed to engage young readers and foster a lifelong love of learning.

Members of the First Book community of educators can purchase two classroom subscriptions to Skybrary School for the price of one. Click here to find out more.

2. Words with Friends EDU

Our partners, Zynga, developed Words With Friends EDU to bring the fun of Words With Friends into the classroom. The Words With Friends EDU platform provides a safe environment for students learn new words as they play with their classmates.  As they play, teachers and parents can track students’ progress using custom teacher dashboards.

Discover this free learning tool here.

3. Homer
With hundreds of hours of reading lessons, a vast library of stories and songs, and endless virtual field trips, Homer gives your program a boost of confidence and creativity! The Homer Learn-to-Read program was developed by teachers and literacy experts, built on Harvard and Stanford studies, and backed by Gold Standard research. Use of the platform has shown to increase reading scores by 74%!

Click here to learn more about Homer Learn-to-Read Program.

4. Open Ebooks

Developed through the White House ConnectED initiative to reach children from from low-income families, Open Ebooks is a free app that grants access to a digital library of thousands of popular and award-winning children’s and YA eBooks.

Allowing kids of all ages and their caregivers to instantly download up to 10 eBooks at a time to their mobile digital devices, Open eBooks makes it possible for educators and librarians to actively teach digital literacy, encourage family engagement, and share the love of reading through millions of mobile devices already in the hands of young people and their families.

You must be registered with First Book to use this app. If you are not yet registered with First Book, click here.

To learn more and request access codes to download Open Ebooks, click here.

5. Speakaboos

Speakaboos is a digital storybook platform that motivates children to read, explore, and discover stories they love based on their interests. With a catalog of over 200 interactive stories that feature a mix of read-along word highlighting, narration, and animation to enhance vocabulary, reading comprehension, and fluency, Speakaboos cultivates literacy and language learning skills for children from preschool to third grade.

Thanks to our partnership with the creators of this innovative digital tool, a one-year subscription of Speakaboos is available members of the First Book community of educators for free.

To learn more about Speakaboos and start your free subscription, click here.

For further information about these digital learning tools and to explore more digital learning resources, visit the First Book Marketplace.

The post 5 Digital Education Tools for Educators Serving Kids in Need appeared first on First Book Blog.

Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) burst into the public consciousness in 2012 after feverish press reports about elite US universities offering free courses, through the Internet, to hundreds of thousands of people worldwide. A Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) course on Circuits and Electronics that had attracted 155,000 registrations was a typical example. Pundits proclaimed a revolution in higher education and numerous universities, fearful of being left behind, joined a rush to offer MOOCs.

The post MOOCs and higher education: evolution or revolution? appeared first on OUPblog.

This month, it was reported that scientists at Harvard University have successfully made insulin-secreting beta cells from human pluripotent stem cells. This is an important milestone towards a “stem cell therapy” for diabetes, which will have huge effects on human medicine.

Diabetes is a group of diseases in which the blood glucose is too high. In type 1 diabetes, the patients have an autoimmune disease that causes destruction of their insulin-producing cells (the beta cells of the pancreas). Insulin is the hormone that enables glucose to enter the cells of the tissues and in its absence the glucose remains in the blood and cannot be used. In type 2 diabetes the beta cells are usually somewhat defective and cannot adapt to the increased demand often associated with age and/or obesity. Despite the availability of insulin for treating diabetes since the 1920s, the disease is still a huge problem. If the level of blood glucose is not perfectly controlled it will cause damage to blood vessels and this eventually leads to various unpleasant complications including heart failure, stroke, kidney failure, blindness, and gangrene of limbs. Apart from the considerable suffering of the affected patients, the costs of dealing with diabetes is a huge financial burden for all health services. The prevalence of type 2 diabetes in particular is rising in most parts of the world and the number of patients is now counted in the hundreds of millions.

To get perfect control of blood glucose, insulin injections will never be quite good enough. The beta cells of the pancreas are specialised to secrete exactly the correct amount of insulin depending on the level of glucose they detect in the blood. At present the only sources of beta cells for transplantation are the pancreases taken from deceased organ donors. However this has enabled a clinical procedure to the introduced called “islet transplantation”. Here, the pancreatic islets (which contain the beta cells) are isolated from one or more donor pancreases and are infused into the liver of the diabetic patient. The liver has a similar blood supply to the pancreas and the procedure to infuse the cells is surgically very simple. The experience of islet transplants has shown that the technique can cure diabetes, at least in the short term. But there are three problems. Firstly the grafts tend to lose activity over a few years and eventually the patients are back on injected insulin. Secondly the grafts require permanent immunosuppression with drugs to avoid rejection by the host, and this can lead to problems. Thirdly, and most importantly, the supply of donor pancreases is very limited and only a tiny fraction of what is really needed.

This background may explain why the production of human beta cells has been a principal objective of stem cell research for many years. If unlimited numbers of beta cells could be produced from somewhere then at least the problem of supply would be solved and transplants could be made available for many more people. Although there are other potential sources, most effort has gone into making beta cells from human pluripotent stem cells (hPSC). These resemble cells of the early embryo: they can be grown without limit in culture, and they can differentiate into most of the cell types found in the body. hPSC comprise embryonic stem cells, made by culturing cells directly from early human embryos; and also “induced pluripotent stem cells” (iPSC), made by introducing selected genes into other cell types to reprogram them to an embryonic state. The procedures for making hPSC into beta cells have been designed based on the knowledge obtained by developmental biologists about how the pancreas and the beta cells arise during normal development of the embryo. This has shown that there are several stages of cell commitment, each controlled by different extracellular signal substances. Mimicking this series of events in culture should, theoretically, yield beta cells in the dish. In reality some art as well as science is required to create useful differentiation protocols. Many labs have been involved in this work but until now the best protocols could only generate immature beta cells, which have a low insulin content and do not secrete insulin when exposed to glucose. The new study has developed a protocol yielding fully functional mature beta cells which have the same insulin content as normal beta cells and which secrete insulin in response to glucose in the same way. These are the critical properties that have so far eluded researchers in this area and are essential for the cells to be useful for transplantation. Also, unlike most previous procedures, the new Harvard method grows the cells as clumps in suspension, which means that it is capable of producing the large number of cells required for human transplants.

These cells can cure diabetes in diabetic mice, but when will they be tried in humans? This will depend on the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) of the USA. The FDA has so far been very cautious about stem cell therapies because they do not want to see cells implanted that will grow without control and become cancerous. One thing they will insist on is extremely good evidence that there are absolutely none of the original pluripotent cells left in the transplant, as they would probably develop into tumours. This highlights the fact that the treatment is not really “stem cell therapy” at all, it is actually “differentiated cell therapy” where the transplanted cells are made from stem cells instead of coming from organ donors. The FDA will also much prefer a delivery method which will enable the cells to be removed, something which is not the case with current islet transplants. One much discussed possibility is “encapsulation” whereby the cells are enclosed in a semipermeable membrane that can let nutrients in and insulin out but will not allow cells to escape. This might also enable the use of immunosuppressive drugs to be avoided, as encapsulation is also intended to provide a barrier against the immune cells of the host.

Stem cell therapy has been hyped for years but with the exception of the long established bone marrow transplant it has not yet delivered. An effective implant which is easy to insert and easy to replace would certainly revolutionize the treatment of diabetes, and given the importance of diabetes worldwide, this in itself can be expected to revolutionize healthcare.

Featured image credit: A colony of embryonic stem cell. Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons

The post Stem cell therapy for diabetes appeared first on OUPblog.

        

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Good advice worth

I had totally
forgotten how random, weird,
and dirty these were.

Yes, I AM a sucker
for medical-school memoirs --

Debunks "lizard brain"
idea, but not as clever
as he thinks he is.

I saw this post circulating around facebook and, of course, the word “library” caught my eye. The Boston Globe has a longer explanation about what all the kerfuffle is about, but still uses words like “hacking.” The Demand Progress blog, the organization that Aaron directs, has this statement and some additional blog posts. The New York Times seems to have the most comprehensive explanation of what happened when and has the text of the indictment.

What we do know is that the US Government has indicted Aaron Swartz [who you may know around the internet for any number of things] for, apparently and allegedly, downloading 4mil articles from JSTOR without (I think?) the proper credentials. Aaron turned himself in. At issue are many points of JSTORs terms of service and what sort of access is given to guests of the university. As Aaron is a net activist, I’m certain this is some level of intentional move on his part, I’m quite curious to see where it goes.

Update: JSTORs official statement, Wired article with more details

Those of you who follow my antics know I was at an all-day meeting for the Digital Public Library of America project on Tuesday. While I have vague ideas what I was doing there, I have to say that I was still surprised at how few other representatives of rural and/or digitally divided folks were there. You can see the invite list here. I felt lucky that many of my viewpoints were ably represented by Josie Parker from Ann Arbor Public Library, Tony Marx from New York Public Library and Molly Raphael incoming president of ALA. Also in attendance were some of my favorite free culture folks: Brewster Kahle from the Internet Archive, Chris Freeland from the Biodiversity Heritage Library and my friend Richard Nash who runs Cursor Books. I also got to sit right next to Steve Potash from OverDrive right when everyone wanted a piece of him. That said, you can read the list and I’m sure you only vaguely care who I had dinner with. The meeting took place using Chatham House Rules meaning that in the interests of people being able to speak freely, nothing people said would be directly attributed to them.

So, let’s talk about what actually got me out of bed early on a Tuesday morning and has had me all hoppitamoppita since then. I’m going to use the “more inside” thingdoo on WordPress for possibly the first time ever. This idea is so big and exciting it’s had me just … well it’s like the Christmas present you never open, which is always somehow exactly what you want. I’m not sure what this will turn into and I’m sure it won’t be exactly what I want, but I’m excited that there is a friendly accessible group of do-gooders [with some funding, and some history being able to actually do things] who wants to Get Started. I like the Berkman Center folks and the projects they do. Their ideas mesh with mine, about using whatever privilege and powers they have to try to make more stuff accessible to more people and solve problems using technology. It’s also nice to see people who use wikis and blogging in an actual systematic and institutionalized way. The DPLA wiki is pretty robust and yes I’ve even made a few edits.

First off, you can read the notes from the meeting here and I suggest also checking out what other media and blog people have said about this so far, both before and after the meeting. The basic nutshell issue is: none of the big institutions we have seem to be advancing the idea of making consolidated digital content available to Americans in usable and accessible ways. While we can all point to individual libraries doing this in interesting and often effective ways, there is no useful way to assemble the cultural content of our country in such a way that an average person could say “This is our stuff” and point to a thing. Of course librarians since the world began have attacked chaos wherever they’ve found it, but this project seems to me to be something different. This is, as they call it, a “big tent” approach to the idea of what a digital library might be or could be.

Of course I think a lot of people will point to the Library of Congress, the work being done by WhiteHouse.gov, the amazing miracle that is Google or other similar projects and say “Well how is it different from that?” and I think this is what this sort of meeting was supposed to get at. Different people came and did short presentations about different aspects of the problem, the topic was discussed, and each section was summed up in small bullet points. John Palfrey, whose book Born Digital has been on my “to read” pile for an embarassingly long time, was the gracious and kind host and 2 Comments on The Digital Public Library of America and you, and me, last added: 3/5/2011