Archive
element:for-whom
School Systems Sitting on Piles of Disruptive Data that Needs to be Exposed
By: Nasha Fitter. Parents need more data points that impact student success, easier ways to find information important to them, and effective tools for creating change. The opportunity lies in big data. For this to occur, we must gather, index, standardize, and surface millions of currently unsearchable variables on schools.
Why Should We Teach Storytelling? 5 Reasons to Start Today
Students, now more so than ever, need to be telling their stories. If we wish to prepare students to mobilize and take action on our most pressing issues, we need to be training students to tell stories that speak to shared values to generate collective action.
How New Schools, Tools and Policies Will Bring an End to the Big Test
We are beginning to see the end of the current era of standards-based reform and for people that care about equity, we are wondering what’s next? So what is next? There have been eight important developments since NCLB was enacted. The most important sign of things to come is the trend towards personalized, blended, and competency-based education systems
Welcome to the Wonderful World of Self-Blended Learning
By: Bernard Bull. A form of blended learning that was led and designed by the students instead of the teachers. You’ve heard of blended learning. You’ve probably read about self-directed learning. Put them together and you get self-blended learning,
Getting Smart Podcast | Rethinking Educator Professional Development with Micro-credentials
Tom Vander Ark sits down with Jennifer Kabaker, Director of Educator Micro-Credentials at Digital Promise and Jason Lange, Bloomboard CEO, to talk specifics about what micro-credentials look like, how research can be used to support personalization of teacher development, and why this will impact the future of educator development.
EdTech 10: It’s a Small World
It's been a fun few days hanging out with Mickey and 3,000 of our friends at the iNACOL Blended and Online Learning Symposium. Here's 10 big updates in EdTech.
The Perks of Personalized Pathways & Playlists
The most exciting aspect of personalized learning playlists is how easy it is to share or build them with colleagues anywhere in the world. Teachers gain opportunities to learn new approaches from others and be more productive by spending less time building and more time adapting and implementing.
Nine Ways States Can Create Competency-Based Education Systems
By: Dale Frost. Our public education system needs to enable competency-based learning through an alignment of both policy and practice. Moving from a time-based system to a learner-centered system requires systemic transformation.
Beyond Badges: Why Personalized Learning Advocates Need to Care about Blockchain
By: Doug Levin. While digital badging and its underlying technical approach points a way forward to solving some of the issues associated with a ‘distributed proof of learning’ system, there has emerged another approach that might hold even more promise: blockchain technology.
Multiple Pathways to Competency-Based Education?
Competency education is a paradigm shift – it is a change in the underlying assumptions. This means there has to be a way to shake off the old assumptions, which is tricky to do when all of us have grown up in the traditional education system.