Archive
component:for-whom.reports
A New Bumper Sticker: My Student is More Proficient Than Your Student!
How do we serve the parents like my neighbor who want to be involved in their student’s education but don’t understand the changes that are occurring? Some say it will take a minimum of three generations before the changes we are proposing become the expected classroom culture. Regardless of whether it takes a single school year or several generations, what we need to remember is that we are on this course for a long time.
Braincandy: Healthy Food for Ill Conceived Minds
Even experienced teachers lack good resources for discovering and documenting the common scientific misconceptions held by learning minds. Braincandy.org, a nonprofit born from a Stanford research study, aims to change that.
Online Learning Studies Must Evaluate Individual Student Trajectories
The “gotcha” research on charter schools and innovation continues, with the latest aimed at K12 Inc.’s online schools. There are plenty of important policy and oversight research questions around the performance of charter schools and online schools, but unsupported claims like the latest from the National Education Policy Center (NEPC) are frustrating and unproductive.
Why Aren’t There Any Next Gen Learning Platforms?
The education sector is in the early stages of transitioning from learning management systems (LMS) to learning platform ecosystems. In fact, a lot of U.S. schools will skip the LMS phase and go straight from print to platform.
3 Signs of Quality You Should Look For In Instructional Content
The future will bring amazingly better instructional content for teacher and student use. If the market notices key signs of this, then more effective, comprehensive content will be broadly and rapidly adopted, to the benefit of teaching and learning. I believe there’s three signs the market should be looking for.
NMC, CoSN, and ISTE Release the K-12 Horizon Report Toolkit at ISTE 2012
The New Media Consortium (NMC), the Consortium for School Networking (CoSN), and the International Society for Technology in Education have released the NMC Horizon Report > 2012 K-12 Edition and are releasing the accompanying CoSN Horizon Report: 2012 K-12 Edition Toolkit in a special session at the ISTE 2012 Conference.
Q&A: How to Create Custom Courses & Improve Grade Management
CompassLearning, a K-12 educational software provider, recently launched Odyssey 2012 to empower educators with new custom courses and grade management solutions. Updates include more than 400 new activities for reading, Language Arts, math and science across the K-12 curriculum.
K-12 Center Releases Summary of Findings at Assessment Symposium
The Center for K-12 Assessment & Performance Management at ETS (K-12 Center) released a summary of its Tech Enhanced Assessment (TEA) Symposium, co-sponsored by the K-12 Center and CCSSO, this May in Washington D.C. as a supplement in the June edition of Education Week.
NYTimes: Online Scoring Will Lead to More & Better Writing
The Hewlett Foundation sponsored a study of automated essay-scoring engines now offered by commercial vendors. The researchers found that these produced scores effectively identical to those of human graders. Barbara Chow, education program director at the Hewlett Foundation, says: “We had heard the claim that the machine algorithms are as good as human graders, but we wanted to create a neutral and fair platform to assess the various claims of the vendors. It turns out the claims are not hype.”
10 Must-Haves to Lift Us from the Grading Quagmire
Converting existing schools to a competency-based environment can be a monumental challenge. At the top of the list of controversial items is grading—the old A-F system imprinted in our brains. There are 10 edtech advances that will help make the competency-based environments easier to manage.