The Education Response to the Opportunity Gap
Robert Putnam's data is really disturbing. The Harvard sociologist is at it again. Like Bowling Alone, Putnam's new data (discussed recently at the Aspen Ideas Festival) suggests the opportunity gap is widening. More than race and poverty, class and a lack of social mobility are widening gaps that reduce opportunity.
Do You Have the Edtech Lingo Down?
When was the last time you were at an edtech conference and heard fragmented conversations laced with the latest education lingo and acronyms? Does flipped classroom, blended learning, gamification, OER, BYOD sound familiar? Here at Getting Smart, we toss around many of these words every day and work constantly to keep up with the latest trends. We understand how confusing it can be, which is why we've decided to share this great Edtech Cheat Sheet by Boundless.
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.
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.
Q&A: Hey, We Invented Blended Learning
After I described blended learning at a recent conference, Diana Frezza from Scholastic came up to me and said, “Hey, we invented blended learning with READ 180.” Having seen a lot of READ 180 classrooms over the last 20 years, I knew it was a proven multi-modal reading intervention. But I wasn’t up to date on READ 180 Next Generation so I called Scholastic president Margery Mayer.
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.
3 Market Observations of Virtual Classrooms Today
You’ve heard about them—your friend, your friend’s mom, your friend’s cousin’s neighbour—people who you’ve heard graduated from online courses. There were some who used to laugh at the idea of online courses before, given the concept’s relative new-ness as well as the unproven quality of the academic institutions behind them. Does the same still hold true today? How have virtual classrooms improved?
How to Leverage Tech to Keep Students Focused
Technology has the potential to dramatically change the role of teachers, especially when it comes to secondary and higher education. Students no longer need instructors to pass along facts when they have access to the internet and other data gathering sources that they can use to learn the essentials. Teachers, then, must transition to take on more of a “guiding” role in students’ education—they should suggest materials and assign exercises to help students think deeply about and synthesize information.
What Your MBA Teaches You (& Doesn’t Teach You) About Entrepreneurship
You want to learn how to start a business, but where do you start? Unfortunately, starting a company doesn’t come with a handy guidebook or a simple “follow these 10 steps” blog post. The typical path has been to go to school and get an MBA. But an MBA may not be for everyone – especially those looking to start a business.
3 Trends You May Have Missed At ISTE
I tend to eschew the advice of seasoned, world-weary attendees to the International Society for Technology in Education (ISTE) conference each year. “Ignore the exhibit hall,” they implore. “All the real action is in the sessions. The exhibits are just products.”