Grading schools A – F
Louisiana will begin grading schools A- F with the intent of giving parents and others a clearer measure of how a school is performing.
Competition, Civil Rights, and Change Theory
Civil rights advocates are split on the competitive nature of $10 billion in grant programs from the US Department of Education. Some, like Education Equality Project, view it as an opportunity for states and districts with competent leadership to make important performance-promoting and gap-closing advances. Others, like the…
MasteryConnect Eases Common Core Alignment, Instruction & Tracking
Three years ago Doug Weber and Mick Hewitt had left a web design agency and were consulting on a social network in Japan. During that same time, Cory Reid was CEO of Instructure. Trenton Goble, a school principal, and Mick were training for a marathon and discussing Trenton’s frustrations around tracking progress of formative assessments in a mastery learning approach.
DigiPen prepares gamers for jobs
My wife and I visited DigiPen Institute of Technology in Redmond today. It’s a private college located between Microsoft and Nintendo in Redmond WA. They offer associate, bachelor, and masters degrees in game development. The curriculum is no game–it’s packed with math and science. An MS degree requires 154…
Not Welcome Sign = No R&D
When states ban or limit the role of private enterprise in public education, they dampen investment in R&D and perpetuate the status quo. Instead, they should frame opportunities and invite investment partners.
Edmodo Listed as Essential Teacher Tool
Edmodo gets some link love at Socratech Seminars prior to an important learning conference.
Making MOOCs Teacher-Centered, Competency-Based and Personalized
The Learning Differences team at the Friday Institute is employing a modified take on the “traditional” MOOC structure, for their MOOCs for Educators, or MOOC-Eds, which is allowing them to meet the unique learning styles of teachers participating in the new course.
Integrating College Learning with Real World Application
Remember the days of heated debates about face-to-face vs. online instruction in higher education; the questions about the quality of online instruction and digital delivery? What a long way we’ve come!
Make Early College Available to All Students
National Journal takes up the subject of Early College High Schools today. Here’s my entry: Call it coincidence, but in one week in 2002 I had a bus ride with Cece Cunningham, a phone call from Bard President Leon Botstein and a discussion with Utah Gov. Leavitt that…
Systems of Survival
A board dinner discussion about scaling educational impact reminded me of Jane Jacobs’ Systems of Survival. The Library Journal summarized it this way: Jacobs argues that modern societies utilize two distinctive moral systems–one being suited to the world of commerce, the other to the world of politics. Commercial morality…