Group items tagged

Texas schools are using technology to enable their attendance tracking. Like always, parents are fired up about it.

Coursera announced Signature Track, a new option that will give students in select classes the opportunity to earn a Verified Certificate for completing their Coursera course. 30-100$ per course. Signature Track offers: Identity Verification. Verified Certificates. Sharable Course Records.

Identification badges for some students in both school districts now include tracking devices that allow campus administrators to keep tabs on students' whereabouts on campus. School leaders say the devices improve security and increase attendance rates.

In general, these systems consist of a school photo ID card affixed to a lanyard that is worn around the student's neck. The ID has a RFID chip embedded in it. The tag includes a digit number assigned to each student. As a student enters the school or pass beneath a doorway equipped with an RFID reader, the tag ID is read, recorded and sent to a server in the school's administrative office. The captured data not only provides an attendance list (sent to the teacher's PDA), but tracks the student's movement throughout the day.

I like that it makes attendance easier to monitor but still seems kinda creepy...and there's always a way around those systems....

A great example of a new immersive interface that Microsoft is developing

Business still early in development. They are trying to provide solution for this problem: 'it's extremely difficult to track, quantify and contextualize the diversity of experiences in informal lifelong learning." Too early to say if this is even a sustainable business model but we will see. 

This startup, Clever, has a platform to enable the easy integration of other ed tech into the classroom--it stores student data in a single location. Maybe this will also help track student information as they move up grade levels and enable things like mastery-based learning instead of seat-based? They already have 2000 schools and a waiting list!

Great overview on current efforts to improve assessment, particularly the idea of "stealth assessment". Strongly emphasizes the role of technology in building assessments that track the entire problem solving process - and how these tools can evaluate both hard and soft skills. Last sentence nails it: "That's the promise of a better test: By drawing a map that more accurately reflects our world, we may discover far more promising paths to get where we want to go." Chris Dede gets a big shout out!

I'd say this is the best piece of writing on education and technology for a general-readership that's been posted thus far. (Thanks for tracking it down, Harvey.) It made me think that someone needs to write the education world's version of "Moneyball"--who will be our Billy Beane?

A Stanford University group tracked students in eight virtual schools and found that "in every subgroup, with significant effects, cyber charter performance is lower." K12 Inc. made large profit, but at what cost?

It is sad that every good idea gets hijacked for 'profit-maximizing'

"What accounts for the high attrition rates? Maybe some of it has to do with aptitude, or encouragement, or good role models and mentors. But Philip Babcock, an economist at the University of California, Davis, suggests that a lot of it has to do with homework. Professor Babcock has written extensively about college students' evolving study habits (or lack thereof) over the last 50 years. He found that in 1961, full-time students spent about 40 hours each week in class and studying. By 2003, they were investing about 27 hours a week". But then, we did not have Facebook, Twitter and Videogames in 1961 :-)

This article describes a new early detection method that uses eye-tracking technologies to gauge babies' social engagement skills and reliably measure their risk of developing autism.

just as I was wondering how I could improve "keeping track of friends in a crowd"

There could be some real potential here for use of grants beyond the television screen. I'd be interested to track how this money is allocated across platforms, especially emerging ones like apps for phones/iPads.

What rights do students and parents have to privacy? Will teacher badges be next?

In my opinion this use of technology in education doesn't add any value to the class. Are they are testing it to reduce the number of nursery school teachers?

This is an editorial discussing how emerging technologies can help eliminate the need for annual standardized testing of students by tracking their progress constantly throughout the year through technology use. IPads, Khan Academy, data analysis, KIPP schools, the achievement gap, online courses and their innovations through emerging technologies are discussed.

The US Department of Education announces the Digital Badges for Learning competition which asks for prototypes for educational digital badges that will help teachers and students keep track of what they have "mastered".

"As professors mix and match book chapters, case studies, and journal articles, the site keeps track of how much royalties are going to cost. Once the book is made, students have the option of buying it digitally or paying an extra $10 (with an additional 3 cents per page if the book is more than one hundred pages) for the textbook"