Is Your State Keeping Pace?
Here's our highlights from the 2014 Keeping Pace Report launched at iNACOL 2014. Is your state keeping pace?
A Global Education Challenge
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt has created a Global Education Challenge that seeks to find creative ideas for tools to improve educational outcomes for students around the world – and they’re giving away $250,000 in cash and prizes for the best ideas.
Hacking Leadership: Rethinking EdTech Impact and Research
By: Jason Ribeiro. Massive, multi-million dollar educational technology projects in North America’s largest school districts are not having the impacts senior leaders and stakeholders expect. Why?
4 Lessons For Today’s Education Leaders
By: Karen Cator. Digital Promise's League of Innovative Schools is working to close the Digital Learning Gap by designing new ways to engage students in deeper learning experiences. When selecting schools and districts for participation, strong leadership was a "must-have" criterion.
New Ideas On What Colleges Want to See Out of Prospects
We all remember the students from our own graduating classes who did it all. Their GPAs were at the top of the class, or very near to it. They might have played two or three different sports, and served as captain in one or two of them. They were members of two or three clubs, with a leadership position in student government or National Honor Society. They were the ones who we viewed as “well rounded,” likely to get into a highly selective college.
Authentic Learning At Tech Forum-Austin 2012
Recently, I posted an entry here on authentic learning. In that post I defined authentic learning as learning that involves real-world tasks and problems as opposed to school-specific tasks or problems, such as learning how to put a heading on a paper or how to outguess a test writer. Students seem to enjoy work that is authentic.
Jobs’ passing: Who will bring our 1984 moment to learning?
Steve Jobs passing and the outflow of feelings says this is more than a mere corporate titan's death. In the flood of remembrances, we can see how different he was from many technology-industry peers. Although he never turned his relentless design sensibility on the building of full learning environments, there are lessons we can take away for what a “Jobs-like” focus in learning would be like.
Addressing the Placement Gateway With Diagnostics & Instruction
For many young people, placement exams are a hidden gateway in the system. Students often assume that with a high school diploma they can walk on to a community college campus and start working on a degree but they flunk the placement exam and end up in non-credit developmental education courses. That spells the beginning of the end of college for many young people. But that placement trap is beginning to close as states make the exams and preparation available in high school.
Student-Centered Learning Need Not Cost Districts More
A new study of the financial implications for public schools embracing student-centered learning (SCL) models reveals that districts don’t need to spend more on these schools if they fund all schools fairly, and then allow schools to make choices about how they use their resources.
5 Ways to Build Student Agency in the Digital Age
As educators and parents, we have to re-visit how our students spend their time. We need to increase their opportunities for unstructured play, independent thinking, creative expression, and meaningful contribution. We need to help them build their sense of agency.