Group items tagged

adaptive learning will adjust every question based on a student’s previous answer.

Knewton is working on having educational content tagged so it can be placed into a “Knowledge Graph.” This system determines what concepts need to be learned before a student can move on to others, and how they all fit together.

The company recently parterned with Pearson to tag every textbook under their imprint work with the Knewton Knowledge Graph.

traditionally collected input measures — class size, per pupil expenditure, the fraction of teachers with no certification, and the fraction of teachers with an advanced degree — are not correlated with school effectiveness.

frequent teacher feedback, the use of data to guide instruction, high-dosage tutoring, increased instructional time, and high expectations — explains approximately 50 percent of the variation in school effectiveness

A Web-browser-based tutoring platform called ASSISTments. Developed at Worcester Polytechnic Institute, ASSISTments, as its name suggests, performs tasks that extend the teacher’s reach in and beyond the classroom. As it generates sets of practice math problems geared to a range of skills, ASSISTments provides hints to students when they cannot answer problems correctly and then furnishes teachers with updated assessments of each student’s progress, as well as aggregated data on the entire class’s performance. The system prompts students to describe the logic they employed in answering specific problems, and teachers can communicate weekly or even daily with parents about their children’s work.

The rankings stem from a desire by policy makers to find an objective way to distinguish between effective and ineffective teachers, untainted by the subjective judgment of individual evaluators, like school principals.

Critics also say there are aspects of a child’s life — or distractions on test day — that the numbers cannot capture: supportive parents, a talented principal, the help of a tutor, allergies or a relentlessly barking dog outside the classroom.

there are schools where students are taught by multiple teachers, making it difficult to figure out the weight of their individual contributions

most cutting-edge tool under development is the “teachable agent” — a computerized character who learns, tries, makes mistakes and asks questions just like a real-world pupil.

Stanfor

Education, particularly K-12 education, remains relatively untouched by advances in our understanding of how people learn, how to design instruction that incorporates those insights, and the explosion in information technologies such as low-cost smartphones and tablets, cloud computing, broadband networks, speech recognition and speech synthesis, predictive analytics, data mining, machine learning, intelligent tutors, simulations, games, computer-[supported] collaborative work, and many other technologies.

Invite students using their University e-mail addresses; also invite the course administrator and another tutor (so that the Diigo work doesn’t get lost if you fall ill). Create a link from Diigo to the VLE (using the HTML code that Diigo provides) so that updates are posted to the VLE (I got the idea of using widgets found in Mason and Rennie’s on E-learning and Social Networking Handbook, 2008:83) – and possible show your Diigo ‘education pioneer’ badge too… See the screenshot from my Blackboard VLE below.

But these cases — typical ones, according to writing tutors and officials responsible for discipline at the three schools who described the plagiarism — suggest that many students simply do not grasp that using words they did not write is a serious misdeed.

Digital technology makes copying and pasting easy, of course. But that is the least of it. The Internet may also be redefining how students — who came of age with music file-sharing, Wikipedia and Web-linking — understand the concept of authorship and the singularity of any text or image.

“When you’re sitting at your computer, it’s the same machine you’ve downloaded music with, possibly illegally, the same machine you streamed videos for free that showed on HBO last night.”

Report: Education, Teens The Digital Disconnect: The widening gap between Internet-savvy students and their schools

Sophia is the perfect place for anyone to share what they know. Whether an educator, tutor, professor, parent or subject expert, Sophia makes it easy to share your knowledge and make it available to anyone, anywhere, at anytime.

Test scores are an inadequate proxy for quality because too many factors outside of the teachers’ control can influence student performance from year to year — or even from classroom to classroom during the same year.

there’s a far more direct approach: measuring the amount of time a teacher spends delivering relevant instruction — in other words, how much teaching a teacher actually gets done in a school day.

Thirty years ago two studies measured the amount of time teachers spent presenting instruction that matched the prescribed curriculum, at a level students could understand based on previous instruction. The studies found that some teachers were able to deliver as much as 14 more weeks a year of relevant instruction than their less efficient peers.