EdTech

One Giant Leap For Humanity, Now Education

The first time a kid said that his DREAM was to score in the top quintile on a standardized test, that was when we became the dystopian, near-future, cold world where dreams die that SyFy movies have been promising us since the 1950s.

EdTech

Puget Sound Districts Share Electronic Records to Personalize Learning

Seattle area districts are personalizing learning using sharing expanded electronic student records. Facilitated by the Puget Sound Educational Service District (PSESD), seven districts between Seattle and Tacoma won a $40 million Race to the Top Grant and fundamental to their work is what Data Quality Campaign calls data portability.

EdTech

Data, Evidence and Digital Learning

Have you noticed lately that MOOCs are all over the news? It’s hard to imagine that just a year ago, most people had never heard of Massive Open Online Courses—courses that hundreds of thousands of people all over the world take online, free of charge and that are rapidly growing in number.

Personalized Learning

Five Free Online Courses (MOOCs) to Help Your Career

Massive open online courses, or MOOCs, have become all the buzz among higher-education experts. The idea is that anyone, anywhere can sign up to take a course from the nation’s top institutions like Harvard, MIT, Princeton, and Stanford. This is undoubtedly an exciting idea. With tuition costs rising and student loan debt topping $1 trillion, the future of our higher education system will rely on innovations like MOOCs.

Personalized Learning

Ouchi is almost right and late to the party

Bill Ouchi, back in EdWeek, is still pitching decentralization a decade after a bunch of us showed that it was a thin theory.  In nearby districts, John Stanford and I both did the 100 flowers approach with pretty thin accountability.  We assumed that people knew what to do and would…

EdTech

Rodel-Backed Plan Wins in DE

There were lots of people scratching their head about Delaware’s phase one Race to the Top win yesterday.  It was not a last minute consultant generated application, it was the result of a decade of leadership from the Rodel Foundation–one guy that leveraged a small checkbook and a lot of…

EdTech

This Ed System Needs a Boost

Guest blogger Dan Maguire has a background in computer technology training and teaches 3rd and 4th grade at Marcy Open School in Minnesota. He says that the public school system is not geared for tech, but it could be. Tech and learning go together.