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educators are sellers of ideas

Games have the potential to make math more relevant or engaging, Pink said, but if they lead to standardized thinking about getting to the one right answer, that can be problematic

If the only aim of a game is for points and badges, the game has little benefit for the player. For a game to be compelling and a good source of learning, it should be capable of providing rapid, robust, regular, and meaningful feedback.

According to research cited in the book, high-school seniors who worked 20 hours per week had annual earnings as young adults that were 25 to 30 percent higher than those seniors who didn't work.

Increased chance of being hired More hours of work over the year Higher hourly or annual earnings Increased benefits offerings, such as health insurance Greater employment stability Better upward mobility Increased chances of employer-supported training

four key issues that need to be addressed in high school to help set students up for career success.

Homework only boosts student scores in the final three years of high school, says Walker, and only these older high school students should be doing a couple of hours of homework a night. Younger students only benefit from small assignments, if they’re getting help at home.

findings consistently show that homework has very limited value in the elementary grades

Today robotics and artificial intelligence call for another education revolution

working lives are so lengthy and so fast-changing that simply cramming more schooling in at the start is not enough. People must also be able to acquire new skills throughout their careers.

lifelong learning that exists today mainly benefits high achievers—and is therefore more likely to exacerbate inequality than diminish it.

Younger grades could create scripts for implied scenes in stories they read or films they watched together.

Other subject areas could benefit from encouraging students to think about what they can show on a screen to demonstrate understanding: from a documentary on rain in environmental science to historical interpretations of events, students can show their learning (reading screenplays is a nice break from reading essays, too).

We need to tear apart the school day, the high school timetable, the school year, the four-year diploma. We need to rethink credit- and diploma-awarding authority, which need not be the sole purview of the high school.

Q. What would you say is the most promising technology for teachers? A. What technology does is it enables collecting a very rich set of information about student behaviors. So you have a digital curriculum that is designed to be highly interactive. As students interact, there's a time-stamped record of everything they're doing that lives on a server. And if you have a system that's set up to analyze that kind of information, it can provide very valuable diagnostic data for the teacher to personalize instruction. If I'm a teacher, and 70 percent of the class is benefiting from what I'm saying in class now—which is a pretty good number—then I'm losing the 15 percent at the top end who are bored, already know this stuff, and are just being warehoused. And I'm losing the 15 percent at the bottom end who have no clue what I'm talking about. That's a lot of people to lose. Now I'm able to have different instructional streams, so instead of a one-size-fits-all strategy, I've got enrichment opportunities that the top group can participate in, and I've got remedial activities that the bottom group can participate in. And I still have activities for that big middle group, and they're all happening at the same time because of this digital teaching-platform idea.

academia is just scratching the surface about the implications of social networking and what exactly it is, what it means, and how it happens

scholarly speculation

"Has social networking technology (blog-friendly phones, Facebook, Twitter, etc.) made us better or worse off as a society, either from an economic, psychological, or sociological perspective?"

children from low-income families spend more time handling technology -- across platforms -- than their wealthier counterparts, and across class, kids mainly use their "handling skills" for entertainment. They play games, watch videos, and visit social networking sites.

there's scant evidence that anyone but the companies who make, sell, and advertise on these new technologies benefit from the time young children spend with them, there's plenty of reason to be worried about it.

studies showing that the bells and whistles of electronic books actually detract from reading comprehension.

Is there a model out there, or an institution/student mix that could effectively utilize MOOCs in such a way as to get around this flaw? It’s hard to tell. Recent articles on Inside Higher Ed have suggested that distance education providers (like the University of Maryland’s University College – UMUC) may opt to certify the MOOCs that come out of these elite schools and bake them into their own online programs. Others suggest that MOOCs could be certified by other schools and embedded in prior learning portfolios.

The fatal flaw that I referred to earlier is pretty apparent:  the very notions of "mass, open" and selectivity just don’t lend themselves to a workable model that benefits both institutions and students. Our higher education system needs MOOCs to provide credentials in order for students to find it worthwhile to invest the effort, yet colleges can’t afford to provide MOOC credentials without sacrificing prestige, giving up control of the quality of the students who take their courses and running the risk of eventually diluting the value of their education brand in the eyes of the labor market.

In other words, as economists tell us, students themselves are an important input to education. The fact that no school uses a lottery system to determine who gets in means that determining who gets in matters a great deal to these schools, because it helps them control quality and head off the adverse effects of unqualified students either dropping out or performing poorly in career positions. For individual institutions, obtaining high quality inputs works to optimize the school’s objective function, which is maximizing prestige.