Posts by Guest Author
Why Education Should Be Free
For most, the single greatest barrier to accessing higher education is cost. In the last decade, tuition has skyrocketed across the United States. Crippling student loan debt in America has now surpassed a staggering $1 trillion. Many students find the return on investment just isn’t there and they’re walking away from college without graduating, disenfranchised and deeply in debt. The international community is even less likely to attend college, with less than five percent of the world’s population ever achieving post-secondary education of any kind.
Connecting Smart Cities
For several months now, Tom Vander Ark has been issuing rich installments in his Smart Cities series, building a detailed map of where innovations in learning are happening. Here, we profile an organization connecting Smart Cities—the Cities for Education Entrepreneurship Trust (CEE-Trust)—and its work helping city-based organizations support the emergence of high-quality blended learning.
Making the Campus Cloud Matter to Your Users
IT professionals have been spending more and more time designing an information architecture for their schools. What goes in the cloud? What must stay on campus to make it effective for users?
Finding the Right Level: Adaptivity in Learning Games
One of the things that keeps game players engaged is the presentation of exactly the right level of challenge at exactly the right time. Keeping the game play at a level that is challenging but not overwhelming appears to be key to engaging players.
Three Reasons For High Schoolers to Use Peer-Reviewed Journals in Research
If you’ve taught students to improve their researching and writing skills - or even graded your share of research papers - you’ve probably noticed that students have the whole process down to a system: Google a few articles or grab them from the library, look for keywords related to their topics, then write about a viewpoint or two. In college and graduate school, though, expectations will get higher as classes get more advanced.
Education Entrepreneurship and Reflections on LearnLaunch
Anthony Kim, Education Elements, keynoted the inaugural LearnLaunch event in Boston last week. He discussed blended learning and challenged edtech companies to show growth similar to other sectors.
A Digital Toolkit for the Common Core
The new Common Core State Standards, which are being phased in by school districts in most states, are designed to reflect the skills and knowledge that will be most critical to success beyond high school. The benchmarks focus on developing skills in reading, writing, speaking and listening, language, and media and technology.
Taking the Classroom Out of Physics With Mobile Devices
Despite the ever-growing penetration of mobile devices and wider acceptance of BYOD, I feel that a lot of the potential of mobile learning is being underexploited. Many of the solutions are focused on wrapping up content and disseminating it to students. As important this is, we should demand more.
Magical Transformation to Digital is not Magic
Huntsville City Schools deployed 1:1 access to technology this year in partnership with Pearson. Scott Drossos leads Pearson's 1:1 team and visited Huntsville on Digital Learning Day.
Assessment All the Time? Why Not?
When talking with people who are not educators, I often think of Fannee Doollee, a character from the Zoom television series, which ran on PBS in the late seventies, who has a fascination with double letters. Fannee Doollee loves one thing but hates something very similar. For example, she loves swEEts but hates candy (notice the double EE in sweets). Similarly, in my conversation with parents and community leaders, I am always amazed at how they can advocate for one thing while mocking a possible solution.