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Einstein's students were developing too many shortcuts and not enough understanding.

While 71 percent of its fourth graders meet state math goals, only 17 percent of its 11th graders do.

At Einstein, the problem became clear when teachers gave fifth graders a simple test. They told them to put down their pencils and estimate answers to simple questions, different ones than they were used to.

A growing number of schools across the nation are embracing the iPad as the latest tool to teach Kafka in multimedia, history through “Jeopardy”-like games and math with step-by-step animation of complex problems.

The iPads cost $750 apiece, and they are to be used in class and at home during the school year to replace textbooks, allow students to correspond with teachers and turn in papers and homework assignments, and preserve a record of student work in digital portfolios.

“IPads are marvelous tools to engage kids, but then the novelty wears off and you get into hard-core issues of teaching and learning.”

Twenty participants in 14 states, including districts, individual schools and town libraries, were chosen to receive a portion of a $9 million grant from the FCC to fund their mobile learning initiatives that will provide students Internet access during after-school hours on mobile learning devices.

Participants for the program, officially known as the E-Rate Deployed Ubiquitously Wireless Pilot Program, were chosen based on how innovative and comprehensive their mobile plans were.

San Diego will receive support to integrate 24/7 online learning into its entire curriculum to serve 6th graders in 10 middle schools. Each student will receive a laptop with wireless connectivity, providing them access to the online curriculum beyond school hours.

PBS program "Design Squad Nation" has announced it will partner with Rocket21 to engage its community of tweens in the show's content and activities to help meet the demand for engineers in the job market in the years to come.

The use of social media is important to the venture, both through the Design Squad Nation and Rocket21 sites and through other social media sites. More information on Rocket21 can be found by liking Rocket21 on Facebook at facebook.com and by following Rocket21 on Twitter at twitter.com. Viewers also can follow Design Squad Nation on Facebook at facebook.com and through Design Squad Nation’s Twitter feed at twitter.com.

The MIND Research Institute has received a $250,000 grant from the Cisco Foundation to provide its visual math education program, ST Math, to 4,000 students in Arizona.

The failings of a rote-memorization system are well-known: lack of social and practical skills, absence of self-discipline and imagination, loss of curiosity and passion for learning.

According to research on education, using tests to structure schooling is a mistake.

Students lose their innate inquisitiveness and imagination, and become insecure and amoral in the pursuit of high scores.

The four most common strategies were counting fingers, verbal counting, retrieval (quickly stating an answer and describing they “just remembered”), and decomposition (describing that they solved the problem by decomposing one addend and successively adding these smaller sets to the other addend; e.g., 17+8 = 17+3+5).

Many of the methods Winn uses were the brainchild of Carl Munn, a Crawford math teacher who saw that teens were baffled and demoralized by their math tests as early as algebra. So instead of barreling through the state standards, Munn slowed down and focused on fewer topics. He gave teens a chance to fix their mistakes on pre-tests and emphasized how math related to real life. Winn expanded on what Munn designed, spending his Saturdays crafting lessons for calculus at a coffee shop.

He has the fervor of an evangelist

mathematicians might worry that they're just teaching steps, not understanding. But Winn found teens liked steps. They wanted consistency and stability, things they might otherwise lack in their lives.

This new teaching and learning style, often called “flipped” or “inverted” learning, makes the students the focus of the class, not the teacher, by having students watch a lecture at home and then apply the lesson with the teacher in the classroom.

they should be able to leave my class knowing how to question, research, and test scientific claims regardless of what they choose to do afterwards

At the same time, I also feel that those students who do excel in STEM fields need to have classes that push them and challenge them with real-world problems, and not just memorized facts from a textbook.”

These are the addition problems and method we all learned in school.

This app has you adding from left to right instead of starting in the ones place, which goes against everything I learned.

This one is unusual, dividing up some of the numbers into their parts (whole ones, whole tens, etc.), and subtracting the parts.

In kindergarten,

by focusing kindergarten work on the number core: learning how numbers correspond to quantities, and learning how to put numbers together and take them apart

high school standards

In a small grove at the entrance to the school, first graders acquire the rudiments of addition and subtraction by collecting pine cones and stones and solving problems contained in notes attached to trees. Another group plays a memory game, using cards with arithmetic exercises whose solutions are found on a game board painted on the playground. The second grade is engaged in a treasure hunt, with arithmetic exercises that send children scurrying from one location to another. The third graders are at the seashore, researching the sand 0f(and not one of them has run into the water 0f). An arithmetic class for the fourth grade is underway in the gym: Small groups of children are scattered charmingly across the floor, playing games with boxes. Here the major attraction is the group standing in a line opposite the teacher, who holds up signs showing numbers that are the result of multiplication. The children’s task is to say which two numbers were multiplied to produce this result. Those who give the right answer also get to shoot a basketball.

“Make sense of problems and persevere in solving them. Mathematically proficient students start by explaining to themselves the meaning of a problem and looking for entry points to its solution.”

“Reason abstractly and quantitatively. Mathematically proficient students make sense of quantities and their relationships in problem situations.”

“Use appropriate tools strategically. Mathematically proficient students consider the available tools when solving a mathematical problem.”

Sixth grade: Sixty-nine students, 1-2 hours a week, 45 percent passed. Of those who did not pass, four students gained more than a year’s progress in math on the TAKS test. Sevents grade: Twenty-six students 1-2 hours a week, 65 percent passed. Of those who did not pass, 3 students gained more than a year’s progress in math on the TAKS test. Eighth grade: Sixty students 1-2 hours a week, 63 percent passed. Of those who did not pass, 12 students gained more than a year’s progress in math on the TAKS test. After the second administration of the TAKS test, the total eighth grade pass rate rose from 74 percent to 86 percent. The only real difference was the use of Ascend Math for three weeks, where students worked six to nine hours a week before the second administration of the test. We had a few eighth grade students who have never passed a TAKS math in middle school or their entire academic lives until this year. We attribute this to the use of Ascend Math.

A major aspect was getting students to work on the program with fidelity. After meeting with students and parents, a rigorous schedule was implemented, along with automatic daily reminder phone calls and second calls to parents to inform them of the next day’s schedule. Students who missed a tutorial session are assigned a makeup day.

Parental buy in was important!