EdTech 10: EdTech Equinox

This week brought us the official arrival of Spring. In honor of the Vernal Equinox – with its equal amounts of day and night, we thought we’d deliver this week’s Top 10  – with equal parts education and technology. Enjoy!

Digital Developments

1. Digital Learning Now! released their 2012 Digital Learning Report Card, measuring state policies based on their alignment to the 10 Elements of High-Quality Digital Learning. EdWeek covered the release and Tom showed his support on his EdWeek blog.

 2. The Brookings Institution hosted a panel discussion Education Technology: The Next Generation to support the release of Education Technology Success Stories. Check ‘em out.
 3. We were excited to learn about a new incubator programme “across the pond” (hence the “programme”) that hopes to create the same kind of edtech support ecosystem in the UK that exists here in the US. The Edtech incubator is a new national edtech accelerator programme, led by The Education Foundation, in partnership with the Tech City Investment Organisation.
 4. In Content News: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (HMH) announced it chose the Kno platform  to deliver its K-12 core curriculum content to schools in the U.S.  Kno was just one of the 16 companies listed in this week’s Edudemic story: 16 companies working on etextbooks of the future.

Blended Schools & Tools

5. Carnegie Corporation launched a $15M grant program for new high schools that combine principles of youth development with new technology.  The Opportunity by Design: New High School Models for Student Success paper explains the rationale and details 10 design principles–a must read for anyone involved in secondary education.

 6. With $2M of encouragement from The Mind Trust’s Charter School Incubator, Rocketship announced plans to launch an eight-school network in Indianapolis and KIPP will expand from one middle school to a five-school network.

Listen Up!

7. Ken Kay and Bob Lentz came together on EdWeek this week to reflect on what they see as two diverging paths on the road to Common Core implementation – presenting the case that educators should move beyond the CCSS as another “compliance exercise” and encouraging everyone in the system to see the CCSS instead “as a unique transformational opportunity for our nation’s teaching and learning systems.”  We couldn’t agree more.

Keeping Tabs on Tablets

8. The folks at Amplify released a video showing teachers and students putting their new Amplify tablet to work to personalize and customize teaching and learning. Pretty cool, huh?

STEM Gems

9.  Ten teams of middle & high school students were announced as winners of the Verizon Innovative App Challenge. The competition was created by the Verizon Foundation in partnership with the Technology Student Association to help boost student engagement and  STEM interest and asked students to design app concepts that provided real-world solutions for issues in their communities or schools.  The Massachusetts Institute of Technology Media Lab will work with students of the winning teams to refine their projects.

Higher, Faster, Further, Deeper Learning

10. Federal endorsement of competency-based learning in higher education came this week in the form of a letter from the U.S. Department of Education that encourages colleges to seek federal approval for degree programs that do not rely on credit hours to measure learning. (We hope Presidents, Provosts and Deans immediately scheduled faculty meetings.)

Disclosures: Digital Learning Now! is a Getting Smart Advocacy Partner.
 

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