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Free Webinar Raise Student Achievement via Formative Assessment 10/17/12 at 2pm ET

"How does academic achievement vary across the US? While stereotypes and prejudices invariably exist, the only way to the answer that question is with some cold, hard data. Here it is."

"Big data is everywhere-even in education. Researchers and developers of online learning, intelligent tutoring systems, virtual labs, simulations, and learning management systems are exploring ways to better understand and use learning analytics to improve teaching and learning."

We face a critical need to prepare children and adolescents to thrive in the 21st century-an era of rapidly evolving technology, demanding and collaborative STEM knowledge work, changing workforce needs, economic volatility, and unacceptable achievement gaps. This report takes a close look at a core set of noncognitive factors-grit, tenacity, and perseverance-that are essential to an individual's capacity to strive for and succeed at important goals, and to persist in the face of an array of challenges encountered throughout schooling and life.

This 12 week course, starting September 10, 2012 will explore openness in education - its roots, its growing influence, and economic and systemic impact. We have adopted an open online format (massive open online courses, sometimes referred to as MOOCs...though we expect this course won't hit that "massive" target achieved by initiatives like Coursera and EDx. For a quick introduction to connectivist courses and how they work, please view the videos below.

"The success of San Jose State University's (SJSU) incorporation of a Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) into their curriculum is indisputable: in side-by-side comparisons of two traditionally-taught sections of an introductory electrical engineering course with an edX-provided MOOC variant, the pass rates went from 55-59 percent to 91 percent.[1] This mirrors results that the Open Learning Initiative (OLI) at Carnegie Mellon University has been achieving for years. However, interestingly, SJSU incorporated MOOCs as a course supplement in a flipped classroom. If you think about that, it is the beginning of disaggregation of MOOCs into technological (big data), content and pedagogical (peer learning) components."

Badges represent a way of acknowledging achievements or skill acquisition more granular than a college degree. The resources below provide an overview of the uses of badges and their implications for how individual accomplishments can be awarded, recognized, and shared.

To award grants to encourage State educational agencies, local educational agencies, and schools to utilize technology to improve student achievement and college and career readiness, the skills of teachers and school leaders, and the efficiency and productivity of education systems at all levels.

"the key reasons include: 1. branding and affiliation with elite institutions and professors, 2. well established courses with rich support on resources and assessment (grading/peer assessment), 3. granting of certificates of achievement or statements of attainment (in recognition), 4. degrees of difficulties - xMOOCs are much easier compared to cMOOCs, 5. perceptions of learners - xMOOCs are based on 1,2,3 above, and 4 - learners - cMOOCs would have to curate resources and create blog posts/join forums, 6. pedagogy, 7. assessment."

"This book, initiated by the UNESCO/COL Chair in OER, is one in a series of publications by the Commonwealth of Learning (COL) examining OER. It describes the movement in detail, providing readers with insight into OER's significant benefits, its theory and practice, and its achievements and challenges"

""Work backwards. Write the performance goals, decide how you will assess those, and then design the program. The content and activities you create should support eventual achievement of those goals.""

New York-based Adafruit is working to help reverse that trend, and to make it so that people aren't afraid of what's inside their devices, and instead become more comfortable with electronics components and the concepts behind how gadgets actually work. Adafruit founder and CEO Limor Fried was on stage at TechCrunch Disrupt NY today, and talked about how her company is going about achieving that goal. The mission helps the company generate revenue, by priming an audience early on to become buyers of the components, DIY kits and open-source devices Adafruit sells through its online store. The key is to start young, Fried says, and to take advantage of urges that children already have around exploring their environment and the things around them.

San Jose State has already achieved remarkable results with online materials from edX, a nonprofit online provider, in its circuits course, a longstanding hurdle for would-be engineers. Usually, two of every five students earn a grade below C and must retake the course or change career plans. So last spring, Ellen Junn, the provost, visited Anant Agarwal, an M.I.T. professor who taught a free online version of the circuits class, to ask whether San Jose State could become a living lab for his course, the first offering from edX, an online collaboration of Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Mobile Commons is the technology behind today's most effective mobile messaging campaigns. We empower brands to increase sales and consumer engagement, and enable organizations to achieve unprecedented results in fundraising, social action and behavior change.

"Third, remember that all first year employees out of college (or two year school) have more potential than productivity. Today's US education system is not developing job skills, but it is attracting ambitious, hard-working people. Hire for "potential" not only for "achievement" and remember that over the first few years young people will dramatically improve their contributions to your business if you build the right environment."

"Last year, based on our departmental assessment procedures, I determined that I wanted a more subjective way to give feedback to my students. To me, programming is more than just right or wrong code; I want students to develop good habits and styles of programming that use the tool to communicate the process of problem solving, not just the final answers. And I felt that that would be better achieved by giving students consistent verbal feedback, in addition to simple rubric scoring of their work."

"As edtech expert, Tony Vincent, would say, "Date the tool, but marry the ability." There will always be multiple edtech tools, programs, and products that provide similar principle functions to support student engagement. However, to achieve engagement that exceeds the element of surprise or novelty, which is often necessary as an instructional "hooking" tool, it is imperative that we place the brunt of our instructional design efforts towards building thinking skills and cognitive growth within students."

"Teachers see themselves as consumers, putting lawmakers, publishers, and administration in control. However, teacher are designers. Teachers hold an incredible amount of decision-making power. According to Marzano's work, teachers are the number one school-level factor relative to student achievement. So, stop choosing off the shelf. Design-- with your end users in mind."

EverFi, Inc. the leading education technology company for critical skills, today announced that it has built Sash, the first open-source badging platform that enables education companies to use badges to encourage and recognize student achievement. EverFi launched t open-source badging technology across its K-12 learning platform in the 2012-2013 academic year. The technology behind Sash allows organizations to integrate badge creation, management, and display into their own products. The badging platform follows the metadata format established by the Mozilla Open Badge Infrastructure.

"We force our youth into taking virtually all the same classes, subject them to the same standardized tests, and judge their future worth and potential off an average. In doing so, we bring smart students down to an average level, ignore average students, make under-achieving students feel absolutely hopeless, and leave brilliant students unchallenged and completely unmotivated. By destroying this natural variation we suppress the best parts of our human condition; the unique strengths and individualistic tendencies that lie within all of us."

A one-hour program for new students that is called a "difference-education intervention." In the program, college juniors and seniors from a range of backgrounds talk about how they adjusted to college, and how they sought out resources and people to help them with decisions, issues they didn't understand and so forth.