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Right here in our Boston area back yard. An initiative by the very high performing MATCH charter school.

It's pretty common these days to hear the term "data-driven decision-making" in education and assume it is synonymous with standardized test scores. But we all know that students are more than a set of test scores. And just like there are multiple ways to assess how a student performs, there are many dimensions to education data.

This is a link to a paper that Chris mentioned earlier today. It proposes six types of involvement with digital games: tactical, affective, narrative, shared, performative, and spatial.

Google has launched an open source course building web application for the growing list of K-12 and big-name universities developing online classes. The barebones website is a lightweight way to bring course material online, track student engagement (with web traffic and surveys), and evaluate performance.

Ipad app that teaches fractions

I tend to agree with Professor Cuban - "IPads are marvelous tools to engage kids, but then the novelty wears off and you get into hard-core issues of teaching and learning." The real challenge is to convert the initial excitement and performance improvement into sustained progress. The key may be in leveraging the increased self-efficacy of students.

This article makes me wonder about the novelty bump you get when you try anything new. In EcoMuve, they researched the effectiveness of EcoMuve vs a new ecology classroom based activity. This tactic is measuring the effectiveness of the technology. However in these studies, if they had kids using a computer game to practice fractions, did the control group practice fractions using a classroom based activity? 15% growth is not much to get excited about.

Words of wisdom from a leader in education.

I like this guy; he's wise and practical -- a great combination

I agree, great and rare combination. I like what he says about learning from others and setting yourself a benchmark based on a high performance. That is a good thing for anybody to learn and practice.

The headline promises more than the article delivers. It mainly identifies the limited effectiveness that the federal government can have. There are no specific "how to's" here and no mention of technology whatsoever, perhaps because that would be too specific a focus for the scope of the article. These are prominent figures in a prominent publication having a conversation that could have taken place in 1980. How do we change that? The absence of real civic engagement on issues about education is the missing link in education reform. I wonder if we can organize public discourse on the internet more effectively to have formal impact on civic activism and administration.

Like most Facebook users, many educators use Facebook to connect with friends new and old, but the Internet's most popular site can also be a great learning (and teaching) tool. There are many Facebook pages that have been created as a resource to collect, share, and disseminate information about education and education technologies.

10 Beneficial Facebook Pages For Educators To Check Out

Interesting article about a multimedia tool for teachers with the main goal of implementing best methodologies in the classroom. Teachers can share students' performance via text, photo, audio or video.

In Disrupting Class we explained that prosperity is a bittersweet reward. Poverty often serves as an extrinsic motivator for some students, as it causes them to endure monolithic, batch teaching of subjects like math and science. When prosperity has removed this source of motivation, the solution must be to make learning intrinsically motivating. Student-centric learning will play a key role in addressing this challenge. The purpose of this paper is to draw upon another model from our research on innovation to dive more deeply into students' motivation to learn. If children are motivated to learn and if we enable each one to learn effectively, we will have an education system with a great performance record. As the late educator Jack Frymier often said, "If the kids want to learn, we couldn't stop 'em. If they don't, we can't make 'em."

When we think about education reform, we usually focus on teacher quality. The big battleground in education revolves around holding teachers accountable for their performance. With all the focus on teachers, however, one group that is often forgotten as a key learning resource are the students themselves.

DC is keeping/firing teachers based on "grading" teachers in their successes with their students on standardized tests.

$330 million given to 44 states to design new computer-based assessments that will "measure higher-order skills...including students' ability to read complex texts, synthesize information and do research projects."

In most the world's most "successful" classrooms, technology is absent.

Thought provoking (except for that odd use the phrase "tricked-out" :-) )

The iphone brings together computer science and music at the University of Michigan. The course is titled "Building a Mobile Phone Ensemble"

Mutlisensory presentations are the way to go for future learning and gaming. Neuroscience studies show that increasing senses in learning process helps reinforce memory and improve performance.

In light of our conversation of mobile learning, this article provides insight as to the stationary nature of the use of mobile technology. Shadow Cities - a game that prizes 'on the go', 'real world' scenarios within the game, found that most people play mobile games in the spaces where they spend the majority of their time - especially the home, which means mobile games compete with traditional gaming devices. Anyway, some food for thought...

Jennifer, Thanks for sharing this. In this push for mobile, I guess it makes sense if you step back and realize that most of the gaming systems that people started using (PS3, Xbox, Wii) were not built for mobility or portability and perhaps they haven't realized they can "transfer" the gaming experience to anyWHERE? Or maybe it is that gamers are creatures of habit? or superstition (like baseball players who don't shave their face throughout the playoffs so as to not mess with the karma or mojo?) and don't want to upset the environment that they consider the best for their particular performance of the game? The commercial that Prof Dede showed with the Augmented Reality spin and where Shadow Cities is headed really is a whole new way of approaching gaming and I wonder if the same type of gamers who are traditionalists (sit at home and play) would be interested in this new type of mobile gaming or if it might just open up a whole new set of gamers - who despise the sedentary nature of traditional gaming systems - and push them to get involved?

Google has US Education in its crosshairs.... Google is name-dropping all sorts of work in the education space in its forum to help redefine American education : Harlem Children's Zone, NCLB, A Nation at Risk, Sesame Street................. Here's a snippet: "And according to McKinsey's Economic Impact of the Achievement Gap in America's Schools report, if the U.S. had in recent years closed the gap between its educational achievement levels and those of higher-performing nations, our GDP in 2008 could have been $1.3 trillion to $2.3 trillion higher. That's 9 to 16 percent of GDP!"