Group items tagged

“It’s almost like they want to find the content by themselves,”

Ms. Morgan borrows the phrase “free-range learning” to describe students’ behavior, and she finds that they generally shop around for content in places educators would endorse. Students seem most favorably inclined to materials from other universities.

They “don’t want to ask librarians or tutors in the study center or stuff like that,” she says. “It’s more the informal networks that they’re using.”

1. It has been predicted that 44 percent of college textbooks will be digital by 2017. 2. Florida is making K-12 textbooks completely digital by 2015. 3. Even the federal government is taking a strong stance — it released the “Digital Textbook Playbook” to show districts why and how they should make the move toward e-textbooks. 4. The transition to digital content is undeniably taking place in classrooms and on campuses, and will only accelerate in coming years.

2012 Q2 Special Report: The Textbook Reformation & Digital Content

Converge 2012 Q2 Special Report Supplement: Funding and Professional Development

i-Ready.com from Curriculum Associates, is a great K-8 adaptive assessment with engaging content.

Dreambox.com is a K-3 game-based adaptive math product.

ST Math from MIND Research Institute is a visual game-based approach used with great results in over 1,200 schools; ST Math is now available on iPad. They are launching their Seattle Math Initiative this Wednesday

The 2014 List The Top 100 Tools for Learning 2014  – the results of the 8th Annual Learning Tools Survey –  has been compiled by Jane Hart from the votes of 1,038 learning professionals from 61 countries worldwide and published on 22 September 2014. 

53 - Explain Everything NEW

81 - Kahoot NEW

Very low level of development of learning assets specifically for mobile devices.

Just-in-time knowledge: Short bursts of information and learning assets that can be consumed anywhere in just a few minutes.

Moderate to high levels of technology frustration in making learning assets fully viewable and optimized on devices — Flash on an iPad, for example.

make sure your learning technology platform can launch a mobile course.

You want to spur the adoption of mobile learning. So direct users to a course that’s only available in a mobile format. Make the course easy to access. 

The goal is delivering a lot of instructional value in a small package.

The best way to teach with digital content

aggregation—curating the most relevant information distillation—pulling out the most simple and important messages elevation—curating by identifying a larger trend mashups—unique, curated juxtapositions where content is merged to create a new point of view chronology—brings together historical information to show an evolving understanding.

Share.

Sense.

Thirty percent of those reading electronic content and 40  percent of those who have owned an eReader device for a year or more say they read more.

Big data policy:  more measures for improvement and accountability.  Specific issues: school accountability, teacher evaluation, instructional improvement, and student matriculation.

Customized learning: emerging strategies for adaptive, personalized and social learning.  Specific issues: role of curriculum architects, mixing open and proprietary content.

Improving conditions & careers: how blended learning is improving the teaching profession. Specific issues:  evaluating in a team-based differentiated environment, managing a distributed staff with dynamic scheduling, and a really big issue–providing rich JIT PD during the shift.

The student-centered classroom harnesses the flexibility of new media to provide a diverse range of students with multiple means of representation, expression, and engagement. The student-centered classroom harnesses the flexibility of new media for the teacher, providing a rich set of tools and resources to elevate and differentiate teaching. In that rich environment, the teacher can be both a content provider and the classroom’s most experienced and savvy teacher/learner, a model of the kind of expert learner students can emulate.