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Personalized Learning

Progress: 3 EdReform Stories, 3 Blended Learning Stories

Here's six interesting stories from the week. ExNext covered the rise of Khan, EdWeek featured Newfound High, and KIPP Empower has a great blended learning video. On the reform front, New York and New Haven adopt new evaluation rules, and the Common Core gets some scrutiny

EdTech

Can Your Cloud App Really Do Business Intelligence?

The cloud has been targeted as the next Big Thing in technology and organizations are migrating more and more of their data to the cloud. This migration is done for several reasons, not the least of which is the saving of expenses that would normally be allocated towards an on-premise infrastructure and operational costs. One federal institution, the General Services Administration (GSA), was so confident in their financial savings decision that they abandoned their entire internal email and collaboration system in favor of Google Apps.

Personalized Learning

CTB Helps States Shift to Online & Common Core Assessment

It’s a tough time to be a state or district testing director: your budget has been cut, you’re supposed to align with the Common Core State Standards (CCSS), and you’re trying to get your state ready for new online assessments from PARCC or SBAC but they won’t be out for three years. CTB McGraw-Hill has a three prong strategy to help states make the transition to online assessments aligned with the Common Core.

Personalized Learning

All About Relationships: CRM in EDU

There are a handful of big companies that really understand customer relationships in a deep way. A couple of them sell this expertise in the form of customer relationship management (CRM) software and related consulting. Wikipedia says:

Leadership

Good Work: Coming to Grips With Standards of Quality

When I was a superintendent, a group of 40 students ranging from six to eight years old asked me to visit their classroom for a presentation on quality. One after another, teams of students described quality teachers, quality schools, and quality students.

Personalized Learning

Review: No Excuses Works But There Are Some Lousy Charters

The National Study of Charter Management Organization (CMO) Effectiveness released their final study, Diverse Strategies and Diverse Student Impacts. The factors that differentiate high performers from the dirt bags are behavior policies and teacher coaching--the high expectations, no excuses culture.

EdTech

Nation Earns a C in Education Week’s Annual Quality Counts

Education Week released today its annual Quality Counts 2012: The Global Challenge - Education in a Competitive World, which takes a critical look at states' performance in policy, standards, assessments, school accountability, and more in the United States education system among a competitive world. Quality Counts awarded the entire nation a C while Maryland leads with a B-plus, the highest score among all 50 states. This year, nearly half the states scored a C or lower.

EdTech

Infographic: Consequences of Teaching to the Test

Learning today has become highly standardized. We ask students to reach a learning standard and test it with statewide tests that identify whether we successfully taught them what they needed to know to clear the bar. Yet, are we only teaching students to pass a standardized test? Best Masters in Education published some compelling data recently that makes us think twice about "teaching to the test."