Google announced today a new system of machine translation which, they say, dramatically increases its accuracy.

You can read about it at their blog. TechCrunch describes it as “looking at the sentence as a whole, while keeping in mind, so to speak, the smaller pieces like words and phrases” as opposed to previous efforts as translating by “phrase.”

This new system has been uploaded to Google Translate for Chinese-to-English, and I’m eager to have my Chinese English Language Learners try it out tomorrow to let me know what they think of it.

GMNT, the name of the new system, is in green on this chart, and you can see how much it is supposed to improve the translation accuracy. Based on these results, it seems safe to assume that several other languages will soon have GMNT applied to them in the app, too:

(image from Google Research blog)

I do have to say that based on my very imperfect Spanish, the evaluation of Google Translate’s present ability in Spanish/English translations seems pretty optimistic (a five, with a human translator at five-and-a-half), but I may very well be wrong.

I’m adding this post to The Best Sites For Learning About Google Translate & Other Forms Of Machine Translation.

Research has shown that reading paper is a somewhat better medium for students than reading on screens (see The Best Resources On Which Is Best – Reading Digitally Or Reading Paper?).

However, some companies are trying hard to change that by using tech solutions to make tech more easily comprehensible. If they are successful, it could change the equation.

I’ve previously written about a browser extension called Beeline that seems to have potential (see New Software Makes Text Easier To “Read”).

Now another company called Asym has unveiled their own browser extension which is much more subtle than Beeline but for which they make a lot of positive claims.

You can read more about it at Quartz’s article This article has been perfectly formatted for maximum reading comprehension, and you can see Asym’s example below. The top image is, as it says, shows text prior to Asym’s intervention and the second image shows it afterwards:

TED Talks has a special next week on PBS called Education Revolution that is featuring Sal Khan and others.

Here is how they are describing it:

TED Talks: Education Revolution, hosted by author, producer and comedian Baratunde Thurston and actor and singer Sara Ramirez, focuses on how education is changing to adapt to our new digital world. The program features talks from educator Sal Khan, who examines what the classroom might look like in the future and the impact of online teaching, Victor Rios, who takes a deep dive into the problems of the school-to-prison pipeline, and Principal Nadia Lopez, whose middle school is in the most dangerous borough in New York and where almost all her students live below the poverty line. TED Talks: Education Revolution also addresses the issue of over-parenting with some revolutionary ideas from Julie Lythcott-Haims, author of How to Raise an Adult, who believes chores and love are more important than a check-listed childhood. The program also features music from Meshell Ndegeocello and a performance piece from the legendary Anna Deavere Smith from her one-woman show, Notes from the Field: Doing Time in Education.

Today, they released Khan’s talk, which I’ve embedded at the end of this post (you can read the transcript here).

I’ll never understand why Khan and other tech advocates always have to hype their tech as the thing that is going transform education – can’t they be satisfied in producing a product that may just make it a little better for a lot of students?

You might also be interested in The Best Posts About The Khan Academy.

TED Talks did this kind of program with PBS in 2013 also (I’m not aware of them doing it during other years, but perhaps I just missed it?). Here are posts I wrote about that event:

You Can Now Watch Entire PBS TED Talks On Education Online

Complete Unedited Versions Of Last Night’s TED Talks On Education (Including Bill Gates & His $5 Billion Boondoggle)

Here’s the video of Khan’s talk:

The Pew Center just came out with a report on U.S. Latino online access (see Digital Divide Is Narrowing for Latinos: Report).

Access is way up through mobile devices, but there hasn’t been a change in access to broadband over the past five years:

I’ve certainly seen this in my classroom, and it presents a big challenge to students. There’s a whole lot you can do on a computer that you can’t do easily on a iphone, including writing an essay. Not to mention recent research showing that lack of experience with laptops and computers impacts student performance on state assessments (see Study: Do Tests On Computers Assess Academic or Technological Abilities?).

I’m adding this info to The Best Resources For Learning About Schools Providing Home Computers & Internet Access To Students.