Archive: 2012
Ed Policy
Answers For & Lessons From Critics of Competency-Based Learning
I'm trying to square two things that happened last week. The Nellie Mae Foundation issued a great report called Making Mastery Work: A Close Up View of Competency Education (MMW), a visit to 11 cool schools. The other event was a Facebook dialog with unschoolers that think competency-based schemes are more testing in a fancy package.
Personalized Learning
Holiday Reading: Top 10 Articles This November
Happy Thanksgiving Getting Smart readers! We appreciate your readership, support, contributors and input. It's your engagement that makes it all worth while to the Getting Smart Team. Here are 10 great reads from November to catch up on while you're enjoying an afternoon of family, friends, turkey and football.
Personalized Learning
5 Simple Ways to Inspire Innovation in 5 Days
Schools are changing, from the physical layout of classrooms, laboratories and libraries to the way educators and pupils share information. Students are entering with a heightened digital acumen and lowered attention span, while educators feel pressure to deliver positive test scores, increase collaboration, and drive engagement. Today’s changes in schools suggest that it’s more important than ever to make every space an active learning space– spaces that help students connect, get inspired, and achieve deeper learning and better results.
Ed Policy
Top 10 Questions to Ask Common Core Vendors
The implementation of Common Core State Standards is intended to create change in our nation's public education system ... not put change in the pockets of the American publishing industry.
Personalized Learning
Rapping Math Teachers at Westerville South Win $15,000 Video Contest
Compass Learning recently launched its Ideal Learning Environment Video Contest, asking students, teachers and others with an interest in education to submit videos that demonstrate their ideal learning environment.
Personalized Learning
Its Time States Fully Embrace Innovative Educational Options
You may have heard that everything is bigger in Texas. Most of the time, we take pride in that. However, the disturbingly large number of students in Texas on charter school wait lists is a source of disappointment, concern. These wait lists and other obstacles to alternative learning options are a cause for action.
EdTech
20+ Free Online Libraries
It’s a shame more people are not aware of the wide array of free online libraries. Databases, books, videos, audio recordings and e-books are available, just waiting to be viewed and used. This guide will help avid readers, serious researchers and casual surfers alike get the most out of free web libraries.
Personalized Learning
Calling All Resources: Fostering the Right Time to Write
Creating the ultimate writing atmosphere that inspires students to produce their very best level has always coincided with a constant search, a continual revamping, and an open platform for students’ suggestions. As a collective writing community, Studio 113 students and I seek the most powerful writers’ tools; they may range from Stephen King’s On Writing to the soothing writers’ website OmmWriter to a simple online dictionary. During this incessant quest, we remain open to any ideas that will help us produce a setting conducive to crafting excellent, heartfelt prose, rhetoric, and poetry. In essence, we seek to create originals, and fostering the right time to write requires a number of resources.
EdTech
edX & Gates Partner to Offer Blended MOOCs at MassBay Community Colleges
EdX, the world’s leading online-learning initiative founded by Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), today announced an innovative blended massive open online course (MOOC) offering at Bunker Hill and MassBay Community Colleges, the first community colleges to work with edX to bring a new teaching model to the classroom.
Personalized Learning
Yes to Blended, But Maine Should Authorize Virtual Schools
The Maine Cohort for Customized Learning is a group of nine districts leading the way in meeting the needs of every student. Several cohort schools were featured in a recent Nellie Mae report on innovative schools. Rather than advancing students based on time in a seat, these schools ask students to show what they know.