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Equal education is not all students getting the same, but all students getting what they need.

first step is to find out as much as you can about her educational history and anything else. This includes learning about her interests, cultural background, learning style, and something about her home life (The youngest? Foster care? Single parent home?)

UDL means many things, depending on which group of researchers and advocates you are speaking to, but the general idea is to create learning environment which can be individually adapted to learner needs. In other words, the environment adapts rather than forcing the learner to.

educational institutions, content delivery systems, assessment systems, and ICT should be flexible enough to meet the diverse needs of the learner population.

And school ends in graduate school with them telling you that you are making your citations wrong - not that they can't tell where you got your information from, you're just not conforming absolutely to whichever nonsensical citation system your particular department has chosen to embrace."

proponents claim, the methods “work,” as represented by higher test scores.   Because, they add, the methods are efficient, meaning you can produce results with brutal economic efficiency and large classes.  And, in ed policy-speak, the systematized, highly structured methodologies are “scaleable,” easily replicated and exported to other schools. 

Anyone intensely “drilled” in facts or simple algorithms will demonstrate superior performance when tested on short-term retention.   The students in programs like that at Williamsburg Collegiate are being trained to give the “right” answers, but they are learning little or nothing.   Other evidence exposes the folly of these practices, as test score gains among younger students are not holding as the same students move into older grades. But the policy response in most places is reflexive, not reflective.   Drill them more and test ‘em again! 

Perhaps the greatest tragedy of this approach to education is that it disregards, often punishes, the qualities that most characterize real learning.  Children are discouraged from expressing a point of view – no time for that and it isn’t on the test.  Creativity is irrelevant.  Children who are sensitive and poetic are devalued, forced into quick, aggressive responses by a drill sergeant teacher.   Critical thinking is not welcome.  Where is the space for empathy and imagination?  What about the child whose unique intelligence is the ability to visualize something beautiful, to see another possible way to solve a problem, to turn a history assignment into a song?

The idea that students are digital natives is a myth

they need to be taught to see the web as a learning tool

helping student and teachers make sense out of an ever-growing, ever-diversifying web.

When a curriculum is defined by a pre-packaged text, teachers and students are relegated to content consumers.

Any process used to "learn" the material is overshadowed by the means of assessment that defines the experience, and defines one's success or failure within that experience.

Ironically, the quest for efficiency in assessment has occurred at the expense of efficiency in learning.

Education is sharing. Education is about being open.

The Internet now makes it possible for digital expressions of knowledge to have the same magical, nonrivalrous quality as knowledge itself.

Information technology is sometimes turned against itself and is made to conceal, restrict, withhold, and delete. For example, a course management system like Blackboard theoretically has the potential to greatly improve educators' capacity to share. Instead, many CMSs take the approach of hiding educational materials behind passwords and regularly deleting all student-contributed course content at the end of the term. If Facebook worked like Blackboard, every fifteen weeks it would delete all your friends, delete all your photographs, and unsubscribe you from all your groups. The conceal-restrict-withhold-delete strategy is not a way to build a thriving community of learning.

Packard claims the evolution of Web technologies such as streaming video, social networking and interactive gaming have made for a more collaborative and classroom-like experience online.

Then the company spent $116 million in July to acquire Wimba and Ellmuniate, two companies that apply synchronous learning technologies such as online audio, video and digital whiteboards to distance-learning classes.