Career & Technical Ed
EdTech
Personalized Learning
Creating Authentic Jobs For Student Learning Teams
I think students have wised up to us. We’ve meant well as we’ve given them small jobs and empowered them with assigned roles for classroom activities. We’ve asked them to be note-takers and time-keepers. They’ve pounded our erasers in the previous century, just as they clean our whiteboards today.
Personalized Learning
5 Instructional Shifts to Promote Deep Learning
Technology is a powerful tool for learning that can be used effectively to help students develop the skills necessary to succeed in school and beyond. Students can develop transferrable knowledge and skills as they engage in learning experiences that require them to construct knowledge. In order to facilitate these types of deep learning experiences, an adjustment in traditional instructional practices is necessary. These ideas are supported by the Common Core State Standards.
EdTech
Rise Above Classroom Walls On the Wings of a Bird
Ronald Reagan once said, “There are no constraints on the human mind, no walls around the human spirit, no barriers to our progress except those we ourselves erect.” This quotation has huge educational implications. I remembered these inspirational words the other night when participating with my students in our first-ever tweetup, a Twitter chatroom using a specific hashtag to discuss rhetorical strategies witnessed during the second presidential debate. Although a small minority of my students chose to attend the virtual classroom, I was overwhelmingly struck by the enormous potential.
Personalized Learning
Use Google Drive as a “Stepping Stone” to 3D Learning
Craig Roberts, assistant director of education at the Duke Institute for Brain Sciences, believes his students learn better when they explain things visually. So, he has them build fruit fly brains out of Play-Doh, and construct human brain cells out of miscellany from The Scrap Exchange, a local nonprofit creative reuse center. More often, he sends them to the whiteboard to illustrate core concepts using a splash of color and lots of lines.
EdTech
11 Essential Tools For Better Project-Based Learning
The rise of technology used in classrooms has made learning much more interactive. The emergence of iPads to browser-based tools in project-based learning, take teaching to a new level in the 21st century. Even the current trends in education include the use of new technology, from collaborative projects to blending traditional textbook teaching with innovative tools.
EdTech
Pacific Metrics Acquires Prize-Winning Automated Scoring Software
Pacific Metrics announced this week that it has acquired the prize-winning Automated Student Assessment Prize (ASAP), which means that states will now have access to a new era of automated scoring that will in turn improve student writing outcomes.
Personalized Learning
The Shift Is On: iNACOL Conference Attendees Inventing the Future of Learning
When I joined the iNACOL board three years ago, I was hoping to see a shift in emphasis from virtual schools to a focus on helping all schools incorporate online and personal digital learning. That shift was evident in the name, Inventing the Future of Learning, and content of the Virtual School Symposium program this week in New Orleans.
Personalized Learning
Internships to Entrepreneurships
It’s great to be alive today! I don’t mean today specifically, but today in general. If you don’t like today or don’t find today particularly pleasing, don’t worry, it will be different tomorrow. I mean that both specifically and generally. Not only will the calendar be +1, but some amazing, forward-thinking, edgy entrepreneur will change the way we live, demonstrating our mercurial existence.
Personalized Learning
The Case for Authentic Learning
It was John Dewey who created the notion of “learning by doing.” His famous line was, “Education is not preparation for life: Education is life itself.” And years later it was Jerome Bruner who stated that it wasn’t enough to learn, say, history. The more successful approach would be to teach students to think like a historian. The ideas of these education philosophers, and others such as Johann Pestalozzi, are making something of reappearance in the call for more authentic learning experiences in an age of extensive testing. Authentic learning could be defined as learning that involves real-world tasks and problems.