Posts by Guest Author
Personalized Learning
Q&A: College Guidance Counseling, For Free!
By: Jaclyn Norton. College Mapper, an online college counseling service, recently launched to provide support for students and parents in the college application process. CEO Susanna Cerasuolo sets out to increase access to higher education for all people through this free service. See below for Cerasuolo’s thoughts on the current-day process of college admissions, and ever changing nature of higher education.
Leadership
Playing the Teacher Evaluation Game – A Race to Nowhere
For the past two years, the Department of Education, state departments of education and education foundations have proffered “teacher effectiveness” initiatives focused on evaluation systems, but none has truly moved the needle when it comes to closing the student achievement gap. Are evaluation systems the answer to poor academic achievement in the classroom?
EdTech
Braincandy: Healthy Food for Ill Conceived Minds
Even experienced teachers lack good resources for discovering and documenting the common scientific misconceptions held by learning minds. Braincandy.org, a nonprofit born from a Stanford research study, aims to change that.
EdTech
What Money, Biking & Psychology Have In Common
Personal finance has a lot in common with riding a bike. Think back, how did you learn how to ride a bike? In my case, somebody told me what to do and how to move. However, that wasn't enough to really learn how to bike. I had to try, fall, stand up again, practice and eventually, I was able to hold the balance and biking became intuitive.
EdTech
60+ Top Articles On Blended Learning
Blended learning buzzed at conferences this year and across the education market. iNACOL, the leader in the blended learning space, created a new definition for the term. We've seen it in classrooms, heard it from teachers, and talked about it at Getting Smart. Featured in the articles below, Getting Smart highlights the new ideas and innovations surrounding blended learning.
EdTech
Integrating Computer Science Into Everyday Subjects
Information technology is the fastest growing field of our age and is predicted to remain so for decades to come. Unfortunately, computer science teaching is not keeping up. Increasingly, schools and colleges are teaching students how to use particular pieces of software, but neglecting to teach them about how computers actually work or how they are programmed.
Personalized Learning
Online Learning Studies Must Evaluate Individual Student Trajectories
The “gotcha” research on charter schools and innovation continues, with the latest aimed at K12 Inc.’s online schools. There are plenty of important policy and oversight research questions around the performance of charter schools and online schools, but unsupported claims like the latest from the National Education Policy Center (NEPC) are frustrating and unproductive.
Personalized Learning
What the PGA Can Teach Us About Value-Added Modeling
Value-added modeling, or VAM, is an analogous method of attempting to gauge teacher effectiveness. Technically, SGP is most similar to a variation of VAM known as Student Growth Percentiles (we’ll distinguish the two as SGPGolf and SGPEd). Like SGPGolf and unlike more traditional VAMs, SGPEd does not attempt to explicitly account for the myriad drivers of results such as peer effects, poverty, gang involvement, or home life.
EdTech
10 Apps That Combine Learning With Fun
From traditional games, such as Scrabble, which can be used as a vocabulary-building incentive, to Foldit, a game designed by scientists to use crowdsourcing to better understand proteins, to apps that help identify plants and wildlife that are useful on hikes and field trips, here are 10 apps that combine learning with fun, and give you one less reason to have to take that phone away when it's time to learn.
Personalized Learning
Virtual Classrooms Supersize Hunger to Learn
With more organizations looking for more innovative approaches than traditional teaching methods, blended learning is becoming increasingly popular. With the ‘perfect blend,’ companies can combine self-based learning, assignment tasks and classes, which can be attended virtually or over the phone. These learning tools can then be customized to suit staff learning needs and level of skill.