Group items tagged

Project-based learning: Games are interactive, "lean-forward," and participatory. They enable players to step into different roles (e.g. scientist, explorer, inventor, political leader), confront a problem, make meaningful choices and explore the consequences of these choices. Games can help make learning more engaging, relevant and give students real agency in ways that static textbooks simply cannot.

Personalized learning: Games are designed to enable players to advance at their own pace, fail in a safe and supportive environment, acquire critical knowledge just-in-time (vs. just-in-case), iterate based on feedback and use this knowledge to develop mastery. Games can help teachers manage large classes with widely divergent student capabilities and learning styles through embedded assessment and individualized, adaptive feedback.

24/7 learning: Games offer a delicate mix of challenges, rewards and goals that drive motivation, time-on-task and a level of engagement that can seamlessly cross from formal to informal learning environments. Given that kids spend more time engaged with digital media than any other activity (other than sleep), games can enable an increasing portion of this out-of-school digital media time to effectively reinforce in-school learning (and vice-versa).

But those schools and classrooms that have embraced mobile devices have seen them as a catalyst for change in teaching, learning, and assessment, says Julie Evans, the chief executive officer of the Irvine, Calif.-based Project Tomorrow, a national education nonprofit group that promotes technology use in the classroom. "The access of having a [mobile] device in your hand changes the way that classroom environment feels," she says. "Students are walking around with the devices, doing things to get them out of the structured environment of the traditional school."

The new way of thinking is that the point of school is to facilitate the transition from childhood to adulthood. That means designing schools based on research from the field of human development, not on research on how to raise test scores.

Academic content is important—it’s really important!—and it’s best learned by kids who are pursuing material that interests them, who are surrounded by adults they trust, who are intrinsically motivated to learn, who are mature and responsible, and who have a sense of autonomy over their education.

the first focus of school should be on creating an environment grounded in sound principles of human development. Academic learning then becomes a powerful by-product of that environment.

The focus instead can be on using the computers for teaching and for learning. Indeed, the conversations I had with Chromebooks users today quickly became about Google Apps for Education and for the collaboration that the productivity suite enables for teachers and students.

high-end video and photo editing desktop software is still superior to Web-based versions. The Chromebooks don’t work with The Fessenden School’s interactive whiteboards, and the USB interface isn’t adequate for uploading things like photos.

Policy recommendation: Immediately implement a new teacher evaluation system based 50% on student assessment data. Prohibit the use of experience or degree level as a basis for compensation.

Policy recommendation:  Set in place a strategy to turn over all host district schools, across all grade levels to the charter operator.

Conclusions & Implications: The strongest correlate of true teaching effectiveness was the estimate of teacher contribution to student achievement on the same test a year later. However, this correlation was only modest (.30). All other measures including effectiveness measures based on alternative tests and student, parent and administrator perceptions of teacher effectiveness were less correlated with the original value-added estimate, thus raising questions about the usefulness of any of these other measures. Because the value-added measure turns out to be the best predictor of itself in a subsequent year, this estimate alone trumps all others in terms of usefulness for making decisions regarding teacher retention (especially in times of staffing reduction) and should also be considered a primary factor in compensation decisions. Note that while it may appear that school administrators, students and their parents have highly consistent views regarding which teachers are more and less effective (note the higher correlations across administrator ratings of teachers, and student and parent ratings), we consider these findings unimportant because none of these perception-based ratings were as correlated with the original value-added estimate as the value-added estimate was with itself (which of course, is the TRUE measure of effectiveness).

pedagogical practices and the curriculum may need to change in order to prepare students to participate meaningfully in the knowledge-based and globally interconnected world of the 21st century.

focus less on teaching and more on learning

transformative strategies include teaching less and encouraging students to learn by undertaking projects, doing away with textbooks, and replacing the entire curriculum (math, science, social studies and language arts) for a particular grade wtih a set of technology-based activities designed to ensure the same learning outcomes.

“Children’s starting point is one step ahead of ours,” Sakaria says. “They are beginning their lives in a world where the Internet is integrated into their everyday experiences – not only through mobile technologies – but soon through the mainstreaming of RFID, NFC and other ‘Internet of things‘ based developments. As a result, digital natives allow us to see unrestrained possibilities for Web-based developments.”

The more you give, the more you get. The more you share, the more you are shared.” Today’s children understand that intuitively. They’re also comfortable with shifting between multiple virtual identities via online games and virtual worlds. Meanwhile, ‘mixed reality’ environments like those you experience while playing with a Nintendo Wii or Xbox Kinect, are no novelty to today’s children – they’re just an obvious way to interact with technology.

Secretary Duncan said, U.S. educational reform policy is motivated by a belief that the U.S. educational system is particularly failing disadvantaged children. Yet an analysis of international test score levels and trends shows that in important ways disadvantaged U.S. children perform better, relative to children in comparable nations, than do middle-class and advantaged children. More careful analysis of these levels and trends may lead policymakers to reconsider their assumption that almost all improvement efforts should be directed to the education of disadvantaged children and few such efforts to the education of middle-class and advantaged children

A re-estimated U.S. average PISA score that adjusted for a student population in the United States that is more disadvantaged than populations in otherwise similar post-industrial countries, and for the over-sampling of students from the most-disadvantaged schools in a recent U.S. international assessment sample, finds that the U.S. average score in both reading and mathematics would be higher than official reports indicate (in the case of mathematics, substantially higher).

Disadvantaged and lower-middle-class U.S. students perform better (and in most cases, substantially better) than comparable students in similar post-industrial countries in reading. In math, disadvantaged and lower-middle-class U.S. students perform about the same as comparable students in similar post-industrial countries.

Discovery’s Techbook series is cloud-based, meaning students can access the materials from wherever they have an internet connection; the company says that’s because not all school districts have the funds to give every student his or her own device. The Techbooks are also platform-agnostic to work with whatever hardware a district or student might have—iPads, tablets, mobile devices, laptops, or desktops.

But here are the solutions that this challenge brings to mind. Eliminate paper from the budget and remove all copiers and computer printers from schools and the central office (with exceptions of essential need). “On this date, everything goes digital.” Create a professional development plan where all faculty and staff learn to teach themselves within a networked, digital, and info-abundant environment — it’s about Learning-Literacy. Although workshops would not completely disappear, the goal would be a culture where casual, daily, and self-directed professional development is engaged, shared, and celebrated — everyday! Then extend the learning-literacy workshops to the greater adult community. Establish a group, representing teachers, staff, administration, students, and community. Invite a “guru” or two to speak to the group about the “Why” of transforming education.  Video or broadcast the speeches to the larger community via local access, etc. The group will then write a document that describes the skills, knowledge, appreciations and attitudes of the person who graduates from their schools — a description of their goal graduate. The ongoing work of writing this document will be available to the larger community for comment and suggestion. The resulting piece will remain fluidly adaptable. Teachers, school administrators, and support staff will work in appropriately assembled into overlapping teams to retool their curricula toward assuring the skills, knowledge, appreciations and attitudes of the district’s goal graduate. Classroom curricula will evolve based on changing conditions and resources. To help keep abreast of conditions, teachers and support staff will shadow someone in the community for one day at least once a year and debrief with their teams identifying the skills and knowledge they saw contributing to success, and adapt their curricula appropriately.

The district budget will be re-written to exclude all items that do not directly contribute to the goal graduate or to supporting the institution(s) that contribute to the goal graduate. Part of that budget will be the assurance that all faculty, staff, and students have convenient access to networked, digital, and abundant information and that access will be at least 1 to 1. A learning environment or platform will be selected such as Moodle, though I use that example only as a means of description. The platform will have elements of course management system, social network and distributive portfolio. The goal of the platform will be to empower learning, facilitate assessment, and exhibit earned knowledge and skills to the community via student (and teacher) published information products that are imaginative, participatory and reflect today’s prevailing information landscape. Expand the district’s and the community’s notions of assessment to include data mining, but also formal and informal teacher, peer, and community evaluation of student produced digital products. Encourage (or require) teachers to produce imaginative information products that share their learning either related or unrelated to what they teach.  Also establish learning events where teachers and staff perform TED, or TELL (Teachers Expressing Leadership in Learning) presentations about their passions in learning to community audiences. Recognize that change doesn’t end and facilitate continued adapting of all plans and documents. No more five-year plans. Everything is timelined to the goal graduate.

to make all of the politically unpopular choices that had been put off for decades

year after year, our schools have been run for the benefit of the adults in the system, not for the benefit of the kids.

first time someone dared to question an entrenched practice that had only served the interests of adults.

During the Great Recession, employment dropped much less steeply among college-educated workers than other workers. 

highly educated populations

Sun Belt