Posts by Tom Vander Ark
Creative Cities: Oakland
Social justice advocates have been working in Oakland for 20 years. Recently, they've been joined by reformers, talent developers, school networks, and investors seeking an affordable Bay Area hub.
Common Sense Media: Making Sense of the Learning App Explosion
Common Sense Media aims to provide "trustworthy information to parents and teens about technology and media." Founder and CEO Jim Styer has been working on this mission for 20 years. He's the author of a new book, Talking Back to Facebook: A Common Sense Guide to Raising Kids in the Digital Age , a look at how digital media affects the development of young children.
iPrep: The Miami Flex
There are lots of Reasons Districts Should Open Flex Schools. Flex schools, asclassified by Innosight Institute are small individualized schools with an online curriculum. Students move at their own pace and augment online work with projects, tutoring, and work-based learning. Flex schools create personalized options for students and an example of competency-based learning for educators to visit.
Utah Digital Learning Summit: Blending Learning, Penguins & Dopamine
There would be more and better education options in this country if every state had a Robyn Bagley. She sat on the board of two online schools and is working on a blended high school. She was instrumental in the development and passage of SB65, the nation’s most innovative online learning bill. Bagley’s Parents for Choice in Education and Digital Learning Now! (DLN) co-hosted a summit in Utah this morning bringing together local and national experts in online and blended learning.
NCTAF Learning Studios: The Future of Learning
Every once in awhile, we see pictures of the future -- a graphic image, a set of relationships, new tools at work, the buzz of a culture that feels remarkably productive. For me, site visits to Big Picture and Edvision schools were really influential 12 years ago -- and why I'm still enthusiastic about flex school models that engage and empower students.
Getting Ready for Online Assessment
The Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium released about 50 representative items and tasks today in an effort to showcase the variety of items being developed and to assist teachers to begin to plan for the shifts in instruction required by the new demands of assessments aligned to the Common Core State Standards.
Good Work: Building a Community Leadership Pipeline
Advancing Leadership brings together emerging leaders “for in-depth examination of key community components, intensive leadership training and a chance to work with over 100 local change agents.” My daughter Caroline (who runs Getting Smart) is participating in the program this year. She’ll join about 600 alumni are making Federal Way a better place to live, learn, work, and play.
What Does it Mean When a College Kid From Ecuador Beats the Best?
Yesterday the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation awarded $100,000 to the top five teams in an assessment scoring competition. The goal was to build software systems that could grade short answer responses on state standardized tests as accurately as trained experts—a more difficult challenge than the essay competition held in the first quarter of this year where the winning algorithms equaled experts.
A New Approach to Developing Educational Leaders
Anyone thinking about building the pipeline of educational system heads has a new opportunity set. The explosion of anywhere/anytime learning resources suggests it's time to rethink the institutional time-bound cohort model of leadership development (as discussed in the " Learning Design Opportunity of our Time ").
Leaning Forward: 13 Conversations
another 13 reasons I'm optimistic about the future of learning #url#