Place Based Education
Posts by Marie Bjerede
EdTech
Infographic, Mobile Learning: Avoiding Common Pitfalls
An updated “Administrator’s Guide for Mobile Learning,” which provides guidance, a graphic on how to avoid the most common pitfalls, and first-hand insights from school district technology leaders.
Personalized Learning
Testing: Why We Need More of It. Lots More.
Let’s give testing back the power to enrich and improve learning. And if the role if high-stakes testing is to ensure equity, let’s focus on making the tests equitable. Or are we too addicted to a simplistic view of tests, to causation/correlation fallacies, and to outdated metaphors of school to make abundant access to tests available to all students, parents, and teachers?
EdTech
How Can Data Increase College Access for All?
What is particularly powerful about the Datapalooza, and indeed the overall approach of the current administration towards open data and innovation, is that it sets audacious goals while fostering an environment for entrepreneurial solutions that together provides the tools to achieve them.
Personalized Learning
Teaching and Learning at Acton – Without the Teaching
Acton Academy has evolved over time from a few homeschooling families to a one room schoolhouse (well, two rooms now) teaching 37 students in a primary and a middle school with plans for a high school in 2016.
Personalized Learning
Disrupting Pedagogy – Part 2
And only if, innovators develop digital content that supports authentic pedagogy – and that provides sufficient context for students to understand, not just memorize – and then make that available for adoption and co-evolution within on-line schools and other smaller markets.
Personalized Learning
Disrupting Pedagogy – Part 1
The Clayton Christensen Institute recently published a paper that goes much further, describing the unique characteristics of the education system as a market and introducing us to the theory of hybrid innovation. Michael Horn explains that a key characteristic in the education market that changes how disruptive innovation will work for education is a lack of non-consumption – nearly all kids go to school and the market for schooling outside the system is comparatively small.
EdTech
A New Breed of Apps Puts Joy Back in Math Learning
Wuzzit Trouble is a true game, not a rote practice application or the so-called chocolate-covered broccoli that places a veneer of gamification over traditional drill. The game is not a reward for correctly answering math problems, the game is it’s own reward and math skills are a mere side effect of play.
Leadership
The Metaphor of Disruptive Innovation
Metaphors are how we, as humans, explain one thing in terms of another, for example understanding a logical argument as a building: “That argument has a strong foundation,” or “That argument crumbled under my assault.”
Personalized Learning
What are Teachers Responsible For?
Where does the current emphasis on accountability come from? I think it comes from a desperate need for equity and justice – from the awareness that has been raised by the national high-stakes testing of students that there is a very real and tragic difference in the outcomes of poor students versus those that are more affluent.
Uncategorized
Education Standardization: Essential or Harmful?
In my previous post, I described how much of the standardization that exists in our current system of schooling is harmful to students and should be eliminated, but made the argument that not all standardization is harmful - that, in fact, in some cases it is essential to enable innovation and transformation.