EdTech
Personalized Learning

iPrep: The Miami Flex

Tom Vander Ark

There are lots of Reasons Districts Should Open Flex Schools. Flex schools, asclassified by Innosight Institute are small individualized schools with an online curriculum. Students move at their own pace and augment online work with projects, tutoring, and work-based learning. Flex schools create personalized options for students and an example of competency-based learning for educators to visit.

EdTech

10 Cool EdTech Incubators Aiming to Change Education Forever

Guest Author

While there are more than 7,000 business incubators around the world, very few focus specifically on education technology. In fact, only in the past few years has there been major growth in the number of these highly-focused incubators. Part of this increased attention is an outgrowth of a mission to genuinely help education.
Personalized Learning

NCTAF Learning Studios: The Future of Learning

Tom Vander Ark

Every once in awhile, we see pictures of the future -- a graphic image, a set of relationships, new tools at work, the buzz of a culture that feels remarkably productive. For me, site visits to Big Picture and Edvision schools were really influential 12 years ago -- and why I'm still enthusiastic about flex school models that engage and empower students.
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

Staff Picks: Learning Design, Digital Education

Getting Smart Staff

Tom Picks “The Learning Design Opportunity of Our Time” Tom says, “Blended learning opens such interesting opportunities to combine learner-centered anywhere/anytime learning with clear common standards for college/career readiness.” Karen Picks “The Flipped Classroom Turns Around  An At Risk, Failing School” Karen says, “Stories like this which give real…