Group items tagged

Are in-depth group discussions provided during class time? Are students coached to question their thinking processes and those of their classmates? Are students afforded opportunities to evaluate their progress regularly? Are students encouraged to pose questions regularly in class? Are students provided with guides to help them reflect on their thinking (such as Bloom’s Taxonomy)? Do class projects engage students in analysis, synthesis, and evaluation? Are students given opportunities to consider various opinions and to justify their own beliefs?

Table 1 Bloom's Cognitive Taxonomy Competence Description Question/Prompt Knowledge Dates, events, formulas, other facts When did the United States become an independent country from England? What is the formula for area? Comprehension Recognize meaning, sequence, events, interpret information, compare ideas, make inferences, predict ideas What is the author's purpose? How are these numbers related? Is water of sunshine more critical to plant life? Human life? Application Use of information and concepts to solve problems Using your knowledge of calories and your physical makeup, calculate how much energy you must exert to lose three pounds per month. Demonstrate your understanding of how to create a Web site. Analysis Recognize patterns, parts, components Considering the stock market, examine which investments were the most lucrative this quarter. Organize these games by level of difficulty. Synthesis Use of information to create a new system, generalize, draw conclusions When did the United States become an independent country from England? What is the formula for area? Evaluation Assess concepts, weigh opinions for subjectivity, select items, judge Which type of dog would be best suited for your family, given your lifestyle and housing? Which local newspaper is written the most objectively?

those 9 factors (called Key Implementation Factors, or KIFs in the Project documentation) that need to be present in a school to truly realize the full potential of major 1:1 investments

IT staff should participate in academic planning to develop course projects and institution-wide outcomes, and faculty should sit on technology committees to develop shared goals and values with IT staff.

Only with the insight this provides can IT staff propose systemic technological solutions that meet the specific needs, as well as the broader academic objectives, of faculty.

faculty need to know how students learn with technology and what students can create or do because of it.3

To justify their campaign, ed reformers repeat, mantra-like, that U.S. students are trailing far behind their peers in other nations, that U.S. public schools are failing. The claims are specious. Two of the three major international tests—the Progress in International Reading Literacy Study and the Trends in International Math and Science Study—break down student scores according to the poverty rate in each school. The tests are given every five years. The most recent results (2006) showed the following: students in U.S. schools where the poverty rate was less than 10 percent ranked first in reading, first in science, and third in math. When the poverty rate was 10 percent to 25 percent, U.S. students still ranked first in reading and science. But as the poverty rate rose still higher, students ranked lower and lower. Twenty percent of all U.S. schools have poverty rates over 75 percent. The average ranking of American students reflects this. The problem is not public schools; it is poverty. And as dozens of studies have shown, the gap in cognitive, physical, and social development between children in poverty and middle-class children is set by age three.

Drilling students on sample questions for weeks before a state test will not improve their education. The truly excellent charter schools depend on foundation money and their prerogative to send low-performing students back to traditional public schools. They cannot be replicated to serve millions of low-income children. Yet the reform movement, led by Gates, Broad, and Walton, has convinced most Americans who have an opinion about education (including most liberals) that their agenda deserves support.

THE COST of K–12 public schooling in the United States comes to well over $500 billion per year. So, how much influence could anyone in the private sector exert by controlling just a few billion dollars of that immense sum? Decisive influence, it turns out. A few billion dollars in private foundation money, strategically invested every year

But when the results from the first major international math test came out in 1967, the effort did not seem to have made much of a difference. Japan took first place out of 12 countries, while the United States finished near the bottom.

By the early 1970s, American students were ranking last among industrialized countries in seven of 19 tests of academic achievement and never made it to first or even second place in any of them. A decade later, "A Nation at Risk," the landmark 1983 report by the National Commission on Excellence in Education, cited these and other academic failings to buttress its stark claim that "if an unfriendly foreign power had attempted to impose on America the mediocre educational performance that exists today, we might well have viewed it as an act of war."

When it comes to showing results, he said, “We better put up or shut up.”

Critics counter that, absent clear proof, schools are being motivated by a blind faith in technology and an overemphasis on digital skills — like using PowerPoint and multimedia tools — at the expense of math, reading and writing fundamentals. They say the technology advocates have it backward when they press to upgrade first and ask questions later.

how the district was innovating.

We're going to see growing pressure on higher education to offer increasingly differentiated paths to education

the demographic bubble supporting growth—and a disproportionate investment—in higher education has moved on to health care and to end-of-life issues. That bubble is not likely to come back to higher education

the tensions around cost are not going to go away in the next five years

allow learners to solve relevant issues that matter to them

the team determined a specific goal that they wanted to accomplish by the end of the day

To guide the work time, we observed some classrooms and discussed what we noticed. Based on our goals, we set clear targets and some time boundaries to check in on progress.

The price valued the digital pin board company, which lets people save images and links from around the web, at $12.7 billion. That is a little above its last private fund-raising round, which had pegged the company at $12 billion.By selling at $19 a share, Pinterest raised $1.6 billion from big investors

In its I.P.O. prospectus, Pinterest emphasized its differences from some of those services. Pinterest is not a social media app for hanging out with celebrities or broadcasting one’s life, the company said. It is meant to be personal. The company’s 250 million monthly active users, called “pinners,” come to the site to plan their lives, including home projects, weddings and meals.

Nevertheless, in kindergarten, children are playing for fewer than 30 minutes a day

Play advocates welcome the dollars but worry that politicians eager for tangible returns on taxpayers' investment in early education, and school officials eager for better test scores, will push for more direct instruction, an efficient way to get short-term gains in literacy and math.