Digital Learning Now
Ed Policy

Utah Digital Learning Summit: Blending Learning, Penguins & Dopamine

Tom Vander Ark

There would be more and better education options in this country if every state had a Robyn Bagley. She sat on the board of two online schools and is working on a blended high school. She was instrumental in the development and passage of SB65, the nation’s most innovative online learning bill. Bagley’s Parents for Choice in Education and Digital Learning Now! (DLN) co-hosted a summit in Utah this morning bringing together local and national experts in online and blended learning.
EdTech

Getting Ready for Online Assessment

Tom Vander Ark

The Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium released about 50 representative items and tasks today in an effort to showcase the variety of items being developed and to assist teachers to begin to plan for the shifts in instruction required by the new demands of assessments aligned to the Common Core State Standards.

EdTech

Classroom Management Software: Training Wheels for Student Technology?

Marie Bjerede

When I worked in the high-tech industry, our products sometimes included what we called “check-box features.” These were features that would never, in reality, be used by the end customer but which purchasing agents would look at when they compared our product against our competitors. In many ways I think of classroom management software as falling into this category – with the fears about technology use that absolutely do exist among parents and educators, having a checkbox that says, “Don’t worry – we can control student technology use,” feels like a must-have.

Personalized Learning

How a Prof Used 1 Tech Tool to Build 3 Co-Learning Spaces

Guest Author

Student presentations, like many rituals of teaching and learning, have changed very little over the years. But when technology transformed the way artists, entrepreneurs, and…well, anyone…presented their work and ideas, it was only a matter of time until student presentations got a similar makeover.
Personalized Learning

What Does it Mean When a College Kid From Ecuador Beats the Best?

Tom Vander Ark

Yesterday the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation awarded $100,000 to the top five teams in an assessment scoring competition. The goal was to build software systems that could grade short answer responses on state standardized tests as accurately as trained experts—a more difficult challenge than the essay competition held in the first quarter of this year where the winning algorithms equaled experts.
Leadership

A New Approach to Developing Educational Leaders

Tom Vander Ark

Anyone thinking about building the pipeline of educational system heads has a new opportunity set. The explosion of anywhere/anytime learning resources suggests it's time to rethink the institutional time-bound cohort model of leadership development (as discussed in the " Learning Design Opportunity of our Time ").
Personalized Learning

Tomorrow’s College Tackles Higher Ed’s Greatest Challenges: Grit, Funding & Tech

Getting Smart Staff

As career fields increasingly require four-year degrees, it’s more necessary than ever before to be educated. The demand is driving many to endure debt, work excessive hours, and find alternative solutions to get ahead. Yet, the landscape of higher ed is changing. You can’t just check it off your list, you have to prove how college transformed your skills, attitude, and abilities.
EdTech

Hewlett Foundation Awards $100K to Winners of Short Answer Scoring Competition

Getting Smart Staff

The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation awarded $100,000 today in a competition to develop innovative software to help teachers score student written responses to test questions. The prize was divided among five (5) teams. The competition compared the ability of software to score short-answer student essays in a way that was similar to human graders. The results showed that the software is not yet able to achieve the same scores as human graders.