Recapping a Dozen Don’t Miss Op-Eds

Leadership

1. The Art of Balancing Execution & Innovation: principals and systems heads need to help their community of learners balance process improvement strategies with new approaches to learning.
2. Done Reforming; Focusing on Getting Smart: five things that seem clear right now and why I’m focused on innovations in learning.

Assessment

3. Cost-Comparability Conundrum: America is caught in a psychometric trap focused on cheap common tests.
4. No Excuse for Sucky Items: Cisco runs the biggest classroom in the work and demonstrate on a daily basis that we don’t need to settle for thin multiple choice tests.
5. Assessment as a Portfolio of Personal Bests: David Coleman’s description  of what we should be shooting for.

Online Learning

6.Promoting Quality Online Learning. Review of a great paper by Rick Hess with a discussion of how merit badges could manage matriculation and fit into state accountability systems.
7. All students are digital learners: a short discussion and video about Digital Learning Now Element 1.
8. Students deserve access to quality digital content & online courses: a short discussion and video about Digital Learning NowElement 2.
9. How to Shift Kids Media Time to Learning: edutainment, flipped classroom, and a long day/year supported by a CBO partnership.
10. How to Start a Virtual School: six mix and match strategies.
11. Managing the Mobile Learner: Bryan Setser provides advice on BYOD (bring your own device) environments.

Learning Platforms

12. Are Textbooks Transitory: an exploration of the benefits of curation, organization, and narration.
13. Adaptive Learning: Key to Customization: smart recommendation engines will emerge from three innovation pathways: proprietary content libraries, search, and monitoring/mining.