EdTech 10: What’s Trending
Even with a shortened holiday week there is plenty of news to share! This week's top 10 list shares massive changes in the ways we learn, design our schools, teach, and provide high quality education at scale.
Charter Schools Lack Autonomy to Get Stuff Done, Says Thomas Fordham Institute
The Thomas Fordham Institute has come out with their newest study on charter schools.
A proposal for a performance-based edu system
The fastest way to advance the concept of performance-based student progress and promote innovative school models would be to create several versions of a national performance-based online curriculum. Here’s a quick outline of one way this could work: ED and DOD (and partners) create a competition for a national merit…
Part 1: To Personalize Learning, First Personalize Teaching
The irony is hardly lost on anyone when at education-related professional conferences educators sit in the audience as experts lecture them about how to teach as a guide-on-the-side rather than a sage-on-the stage. A “do-as-I-say-not-as-I-do” moment that often has even the lecturer chuckling.
Making All Things New: The Work of Reconciliation
We enter this season of reconciliation with new humility, a sense of individual and communal fragility and turn to the wisdom that came before.
Why the Feds Matter Less
Despite a dysfunctional do-nothing congress, the learning revolution will march on quickly and quietly creating new options for students and families.
Indiana School District Replaces Textbooks With 1:1 Laptop Program
The New York Times published an article this week on the traditional Indiana School District's switch to a 1:1 laptop program, which replaced textbooks for 2,600 students in Muster, Ind. The school district replaced all its math and science textbooks for students in grades 5-12 with a $1.1 million project for digital learning infrastructure in a new 1:1 laptop program.
Q&A: The Future Textbook Will Merge With All Other Learning Content
David Bickford, the Vice President of Academic Affairs for University of Phoenix, joins us today to discuss the challenges, benefits, and method behind its digital textbook program.
Investment follows incentives (edu doesn't have them)
The National Journal guest hosts asked “what are the essential components of an effective innovation, research, development, and dissemination infrastructure in education?” The question begged for a bureaucratic answer and blog responses went all over the place, but I think most folks missed the boat on this one.
Vittra International: Personalized Swedish Network on a Mission
Vittra International is a network of high tech elementary schools in Sweden. Vitta has 12 schools were every student has an Apple laptop. Architecturally and academically it's clear that there is an underlying design--a clear intellectual mission that makes these schools a great place to learn and work. Vittra expresses the design principles through six promises.