Career & Technical Ed
EdTech
EdTech
3 Ways to Maximize Instructional Time With Screencasts
As educators in the 21st century, one of our goals should be to design student driven experiences that offer flexible learning paths, using a variety of tools to meet the diverse needs of all students. Of course, with limited instructional time, loads of content to uncover and varying comfort levels with the technology itself, implementing…
Personalized Learning
High School Wind Energy Project Inspires College Careers in STEM
Wind is the fastest growing source of renewable energy in the world today and the students at Camden Hills Regional High School in Rockport, Maine, have learned that first hand. Six months after the commissioning of the school’s NPS 100 wind turbine, the students, teachers and community have grown accustomed to the 121-foot-tall, sleek white tower that stands next to the athletic fields.
EdTech
Q&A: Patrick Supanc Wants Students to Score with Alleyoop
Too many young people are entering their post-high school college and career worlds woefully underprepared, particularly in the areas of math and science. Despite all of the investment of time, effort and money they make to get into college, they are at high risk of dropping out or graduating late.
Personalized Learning
8 Examples of Classroom Musical Magic
I believe it was J.K. Rowling's Albus Dumbledore who said, "Ah, music. A magic behind all we do here!" This quotation comes to mind so many times when I witness the effect of catchy tunes and powerful lyrics on our creative students in Studio 113. Whether the classroom malady is a group of lethargic, uninterested students, a bulky reading assignment of seemingly ancient pages, or the misunderstanding of key literary characters, a solution often lies at the intersection of a crafty jam and a thematically connected excerpt of literature. The result? Classroom musical magic.
EdTech
Staff Picks: Gaming, OER, Big Data
Tom Picks “All the World’s a Game“ Tom says, “Adam Renfro’s insightful look at the benefits of game-based strategies predicts expanded time on task with visual progress monitoring (intrinsic) and reward systems (extrinsic) expands.” Karen Picks “14 Open Resources For High School“ Karen says, “Slowly but surely it’s happening. I’ve…
Personalized Learning
iPrep: The Miami Flex
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
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
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
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?
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.