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Adding a digital device to the classroom without a fundamental change in the culture of teaching and learning will not lead to significant improvement.

“one-to-world.”

The planning considerations now evolve from questions about technical capacity to a vision of limitless opportunities for learning.

Research examining student achievement in block-scheduled schools compared to traditional schools showed mixed and inconclusive results

Most research about block scheduling and classroom instruction, as with research on school climate, used student, teacher, and parent questionnaires and surveys.

Conscientiousness and Openness have the biggest influence on academic success.

people learn better when using multiple, short training episodes rather than one extended session

participants who held jobs with higher levels of complexity with data and people, such as management and teaching, had better scores on memory and thinking tests

The challenges and opportunities confronting higher education pedagogy will not be adequately addressed by platforms designed to provide answers

Criteria for a Meaningful Classroom Assessment To address these requirements, I ask myself the following guided questions: Does the assessment involve project-based learning? Does it allow for student choice of topics? Is it inquiry based? Does it ask that students use some level of internet literacy to find their answers? Does it involve independent problem solving? Does it incorporate the 4Cs? Do the students need to communicate their knowledge via writing in some way? Does the final draft or project require other modalities in its presentation? (visual, oral, data, etc...)

So how can high-stakes assessments be meaningful to students? For one thing, high-stakes tests shouldn't be so high-stakes. It's inauthentic. They should and still can be a mere snapshot of ability. Additionally, those occasional assessments need to take a back seat to the real learning and achievement going on in every day assessments observed by the teacher. The key here, however, is to assess everyday. Not in boring, multiple-choice daily quizzes, but in informal, engaging assessments that take more than just a snapshot of a student's knowledge at one moment in time. But frankly, any assessment that sounds cool can still be made meaningless. It's how the students interact with the test that makes it meaningful. Remember the 4 Cs and ask this: does the assessment allow for: Creativity Are they students creating or just regurgitating? Are they being given credit for presenting something other than what was described? Collaboration Have they spent some time working with others to formulate their thoughts, brainstorm, or seek feedback from peers? Critical Thinking Are the students doing more work than the teacher in seeking out information and problem solving? Communication Does the assessment emphasize the need to communicate the content well? Is there writing involved as well as other modalities? If asked to teach the content to other students, what methods will the student use to communicate the information and help embed it more deeply?

Another way to ensure that an assessment is meaningful, of course, is to simply ask the students what they thought. Design a survey after each major unit or assessment. Or, better yet, if you want to encourage students to really focus on the requirements on a rubric, add a row that's only for them to fill out for you. That way, the rubric's feedback is more of a give-and-take, and you get feedback on the assessment's level of meaningfulness as soon as possible.

The promise of the Common Core is dying and teaching and learning are being distorted.  The well that should sustain the Core has been poisoned.

Whether or not learning the word ‘commission’ is appropriate for second graders could be debated—I personally think it is a bit over the top.  What is of deeper concern, however, is that during a time when 7 year olds should be listening to and making music, they are instead taking a vocabulary quiz.

Real learning occurs in the mind of the learner when she makes connections with prior learning, makes meaning, and retains that knowledge in order to create additional meaning from new information.  In short, with tests we see traces of learning, not learning itself.

Hirsh-Pasek found that the second group—the ones engaged in what she calls guided play—came up with the most creative solutions. The same idea applies to scientists, she says: They do their best work when they’re free to play around with a known set of problems.

“Scientists actually are the few people who as adults get to have this protected time when they can just explore, play, figure out what the world is like.”

“We know each other so well that it makes for a really effective combination,” Erik says. “He’s always trying to reinject some playfulness into my serious work. It lets us do things that neither of us could do.”

It doesn't solve anything. It is a great first step in reframing the role of the teacher in the classroom. It fosters the "guide on the side" mentality and role, rather than that of the "sage of the stage." It helps move a classroom culture towards student construction of knowledge rather than the teacher having to tell the knowledge to students.

We must first focus on creating the engagement and then look at structures, like the flipped classroom, that can support.

If the flipped classroom is truly to become innovative, then it must be paired with transparent and/or embedded reason to know the content.

Residential poverty tends to be concentrated, and successful school integration requires either a district with enough socioeconomic diversity within its boundaries or a group of neighboring districts which, when combined, have enough diversity to facilitate an interdistrict integration plan.

At each level of advancement, students need to “kick it up a level.”

The professor is excited about the subject. Students learn more when the professor is engaged and excited about the course. Professors who modify and switch their courses around, learn along with the students and keep the course interesting

atmosphere in the classroom that is not just about subject matter. College is really about teaching the student how to think and self learn.

Children are influenced by everything around them, the way their parents act, what their parents say and do, and increasingly as they spend more time ‘with’ celebrity figures how these role models act.

Engagement: media that grabs attention Motivation: encouragement to go deeper Persistence: capturing more learning hours per day Production: ability to publish high quality work product Presentation: professional quality presentations Personalization: customized learning experiences Access: 24/7 access to great teachers and content Collaboration: instant interest and subject groups Acceleration: more and faster performance feedback Options: many new pathways to mastery We could add convenience—the ability to vary rate, time, and location

More writing More thinking More motivation More automaticity More time on higher order teaching More higher order practice (using games & sims) More publishing to wider audiences More investigating More collaborating More making, inventing, & creating

One of the best decisions our team made last summer was to pre-install Casper (5) profiles on all of our iPads. We pulled the student IDs from our ASPEN (6) student information system, logged each student into Casper and installed the four profiles needed for our plan. The profiles took Safari web browser off the iPad.

As we progressed through the year, we discovered that these tools took a lot of time to create something we were trying to move away from in the first place. The reason for moving away from textbooks is that they offer a myopic vision of a world that is ever-changing. Simply viewing a textbook on an iPad does not change or innovate learning, nor does it use the iPad to its full potential. If your plan is to digitize a standard textbook, save your money and renew your textbook licenses.

This year we are incorporating K-12 digital portfolios along with revised information and digital literacy standards. Every BPS student will have a Google Apps for Education account that they will use in conjunction with the Blogger (15) application to begin creating their Life of Learning portfolio

Open education seeks to reduce barriers to learning for everyone while providing tools and resources that facilitate success. Initiatives in open education include open sharing of high-quality educational materials (Open Educational Resources), flexible and free learning formats that make use of open content, alternative pathways to assessment and certification of learning, and projects that support improvements in educational systems.

Employment: The borrower must be employed full-time in a public service job for each of the 120 monthly payments. Public service jobs include, among other positions, emergency management, government (excluding time served as a member of Congress), military service, public safety and law enforcement (police and fire), public health (including nurses, nurse practitioners, nurses in a clinical setting, and full-time professionals engaged in health care practitioner occupations and health care support occupations), public education, early childhood education (including licensed or regulated childcare, Head Start, and State-funded prekindergarten), social work in a public child or family service agency, public services for individuals with disabilities or the elderly, public interest legal services (including prosecutors, public defenders and legal advocacy on behalf of low-income communities at a nonprofit organization), public librarians, school librarians and other school-based services, and employees of tax exempt 501(c)(3) organizations. Full-time faculty at tribal colleges and universities, as well as faculty teaching in high-need subject areas and shortage areas (including nurse faculty, foreign language faculty, and part-time faculty at community colleges), also qualify.