Posts by Guest Author
Five Things Students Want Their Teachers to Know about Online Learning
Kids love having the opportunity to learn online but it’s not merely the medium or the technology that students enjoy. At the recent iNacol Virtual Schools Symposium I listened to high school students who have experience learning this way as well as teachers who have experience with these students, share some advice for making this type of learning even better.
How Technology Can Improve Online Learning—and Learning in General
As president of a nonprofit, online university I am often asked about the quality of online learning. The answer is that the quality of education is largely independent of the mode of delivery. Other variables are far more important. There is high-quality online learning, and there is high-quality classroom learning, just as there is low-quality learning in both settings.
The race to platform education
Across the full spectrum of education – primary, secondary, and higher – we are witnessing a race to develop platforms for content, learning, teaching, and evaluation. As liberating as the web is, tremendous centralization of control is occurring in numerous spaces: Google in search/advertising/Android, Amazon in books/cloud computing, Facebook in social networks, etc. I use a smaller range of tools today than I did five years ago. And the reason is simple: companies are in a landrush to create platforms that will tie together previously disconnected activities and tools.
Finance For Future Generations
Brian Page By Brian Page “All the perplexities, confusion and distress in America arise not from defects in their Constitution or Confederation, nor from want of honor or virtue, so much as downright ignorance of the nature of coin, credit, and circulation.” – John Adams On the…
Review: Mindjet Releases Mindjet Connect
About two weeks ago Mindjet, Inc. a leader in the field of mind mapping and knowledge mapping released Mindjet Connect a free online mind mapping tool. Now anyone with a browser and a connection to the web can take advantage of the power of mind mapping for free, using this unique service.
Jobs’ passing: Who will bring our 1984 moment to learning?
Steve Jobs passing and the outflow of feelings says this is more than a mere corporate titan's death. In the flood of remembrances, we can see how different he was from many technology-industry peers. Although he never turned his relentless design sensibility on the building of full learning environments, there are lessons we can take away for what a “Jobs-like” focus in learning would be like.
Communication Barriers: Keeping the Walls Down in the Online Classroom
The Wall Street Journal recently discussed communication difficulties between foreign doctors and patients in Iowa. The article emphasized the communication barriers that can exist between doctors and patients who come from different cultures. It made me think about communication between online students. Distance learning peers rarely live in the same geographic area (and become quite excited when they discover someone who does live in the same region), but generally communicate quite well.
Critiquing Diane Ravitch’s Parent Trigger Critique
[Sigh]...Diane Ravitch launched another attack on the Parent Trigger. One of America's best known reformers is now an apologist for an overpriced and failing education bureaucracy.
School Will Change, With or Without Following Rules
Public education is, by its very nature, tangled with policy, dependent on rules and regulations set by federal, state, and district mandates. What most students do in school at any given moment has been prescribed by legislation passed years before they — or their parents — entered kindergarten.
Get out the blender, kids
I think I have just glimpsed the future, or at least what could be the future, of public education. I’m talking about the effective use of today’s technology to enhance learning, or what insiders are calling ‘blended education.’ Michael Horn, a co-author of Disrupting Class, provided a definition: Blended learning is any time a student learns at least in part at a supervised brick-and-mortar location away from home and at least in part through online delivery with some element of student control over time, place, path, and/or pace.