Posts by Tom Vander Ark
Personalized Learning
Flipped Foreign Language
Moss Pike was raised in Las Vegas, studied Physics at Cornell University, and after a summer class in the classics found himself working on an M.A. in Classics at UCLA. He teaches Latin at the Harvard-Westlake School (HW), is the Middle School Dean of Faculty, and a regional leader in Greek and Latin linguistics and pedagogy.
Leadership
Smart Cities: San Diego
Running the San Diego County Office of Education seems pretty tame after tours of duty as state administrator in Oakland and Compton, but Randy Ward argues that county offices are more relevant than ever. With half a million kids and 42 districts there’s plenty to worry about.
Leadership
JFF Reports on Competency-Based & Blended Learning
Job's For The Future is a Boston-based intermediary and policy design shop. Since Hilary Pennington opened the place two decades ago they've been advancing the sector with great papers and direct support to partners.
Ed Policy
7 Ways States & Districts Can Use Authorizing to Boost Quality & Innovation
Performance contracting is a services agreement with clear outcomes. States and districts have been using performance contracts for public charter schools, private school special education placements, information and business services, and for energy efficiency partnerships.
Personalized Learning
Making Room for Innovation
Despite steady progress on achievement and graduation rates, big gaps remain. Earlier this month Ted Kolderie, Education Evolving, addressed state charter school leaders. He made six important points addressed in this blog.
Personalized Learning
Strive for College Recognized as CNN Hero
As a college freshman, Michael Carter realized that many students had survived a more circuitous route to college than he had. He did some digging and found out that many prepared low income students don't enroll in four year college.
Personalized Learning
Every State Should Run A Next-Gen Learning Challenge
Last month, I ran a three part series about the Next Generation Learning Challenges (NGLC) outlining how they took on the turnaround challenge, leveraged higher education partnerships, and improved the performance and sustainability of school networks (as outlined in part one of this three-part series); illustrated how blended learning supports and extends experiential…
Ed Policy
Writing Across the Curriculum With The Literacy Design Collaborative
The Literacy Design Collaborative is a network of teachers and partners “building out a template-based approach to the literacy demands of college and the workplace, as defined by the Common Core State Standards.” The concept is to give teachers tools (mostly offline but soon to be online) that enable them to transform the Common Core into classroom action by giving teacher the literacy resources to build student’s college ready literacy skills through their existing content lens.
Personalized Learning
New CompetencyWorks Paper: Reengineering IT for Competency Education
CompetencyWorks releasing a briefing paper on IT for for competency-based environments, Re-Engineering Information Technology: Design Considerations for Competency Education.
Personalized Learning
NPR Fails The Online Learning Test
NPR ran a misleading story about online learning. Blake Farmer, a Nashville reporter, has been beating this drum and today invited disreputable and uninformed critics of a new statewide online school to pile on. Yes, a low percentage of students scored proficient on state tests, but when most…