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"Focus Forward films highlight exceptional people and world-changing ideas that are impacting the course of human development, changing our lives for the better. We are looking for professional quality 3-minute stories about visionaries and thinkers and in some cases everyday folks who have brought a quantum leap to human progress by their efforts and inventions. Your film may encompass anything from jaw-dropping medical advancements to renewable energy breakthroughs; open-source architecture to the development of wireless technologies in Third World countries; computer programming wizardry to sci-fi-worthy robotics; or any other sphere of art and knowledge that inspires you. We're especially interested in the accomplishments of inventors, engineers, educators, surgeons, scientists, techies, artists, programmers, backyard tinkerers-i.e. anyone making a difference, utilizing their skills and vision to innovate, share their work, and help sow the seeds of a brighter future."

"A recent blog by Grant Wiggins affirmed what I have long believed about creativity: it is a 21st-century skill we can teach and assess. Creativity fosters deeper learning, builds confidence and creates a student ready for college and career. However, many teachers don't know how to implement the teaching and assessment of creativity in their classrooms. While we may have the tools to teach and assess content, creativity is another matter, especially if we want to be intentional about teaching it as a 21st-century skill. In a PBL project, some teachers focus on just one skill, while others focus on many. Here are some strategies educators can use tomorrow to get started teaching and assessing creativity -- just one more highly necessary skill in that 21st-century toolkit. "

"Educational technology companies and entrepreneurs may face the risk of a "tech bubble," similar to the massive boom-and-bust that rocked the technology market in the late 1990s, according to market analysts and a recently released paper. A relatively new focus on K-12 educational technology as an investment vehicle, a surge of investors looking to cash in on the latest innovations, and fewer barriers to developing an ed-tech business have merged in ways that have some market observers wary of what's ahead. The flurry of activity is prompting comparisons to the dot-com crash of the late 1990s, which brought the failure of many technology-related businesses that had drawn huge sums of money from investors. "

"The Predictive Analytics Reporting (PAR) Framework is a multi-institutional data mining project that brings together 2 year, 4 year, public, proprietary, traditional, and progressive institutions to collaborate on identifying points of student loss and to find effective practices that improve student retention in U.S. higher education. Current efforts focus on removing barriers to student success in online and blended programs. With sixteen WCET member institutions, over 1,700,000 anonymized student records and 8,100,000 institutionally de-identified course level records, the PAR Framework offers educational stakeholders a unique multi-instituional lens for examining dimensions of student success from both unified and contextual perspectives. More benefits of PAR Framework participation."

"Amid the attention stemming from President Barack Obama's focus on early-childhood education in his State of the Union address, some advocates are wondering what the proposal will mean in the way of expectations for teachers."

"All Our Ideas is a research project that seeks to develop a new form of social data collection by combining the best features of quantitative and qualitative methods. Using the power of the web, we are creating a data collection tool that has the scale, speed, and quantification of a survey while still allowing for new information to "bubble up" from respondents as happens in interviews, participant observation, and focus groups. "

"Our interests centre around creating and conducting inquiry on learning environments. This focus includes both formal school settings, non-school settings (museums, science centres, public spaces, and the Internet), and the points of intersection between these environments. These interests combine work in both real and virtual, on-line and off-line spaces. For us, an understanding of the nexus of learning and community relies upon analysis of each context to ascertain the expectations of participants and the task demands of the environment. We accordingly recognize the diversity of virtual environments, and also the interconnections that exist between on-line and off-line communities. What connects communities, virtual or otherwise, are the possibilities offered for learning; it is not just "school-based" or specifically an educational institution's private preserve. "