Group items tagged

Now ability grouping has re-emerged in classrooms all over the country - a trend that has surprised education experts who believed the outcry had all but ended its use. A new analysis from the National Assessment of Educational Progress, a Census-like agency for school statistics, shows that of the fourth-grade teachers surveyed, 71 percent said they had grouped students by reading ability in 2009, up from 28 percent in 1998. In math, 61 percent of fourth-grade teachers reported ability grouping in 2011, up from 40 percent in 1996. "These practices were essentially stigmatized,"

"The Delaware Department of Education (DDE) recently joined a national movement to use high-quality, openly licensed educational resources in schools. In support of the #GoOpen campaign, launched by the United States Department of Education's Office of Education Technology, Delaware will build a statewide repository of open educational resources (OER). "

"The Global Education Conference is a collaborative, inclusive, world-wide community initiative involving students, educators, and organizations at all levels. It is designed to significantly increase opportunities for connecting classrooms while supporting cultural awareness and recognition of diversity and educational access for all. Last year's conference featured 300 general sessions and 20 keynote addresses from all over the world with over 13,000 participant logins. "

"It was two years ago, give or take a week, that the MOOC mania started. Think about the effects on higher education of this seminal event and how short a time it has been. In the past two years online education and ed tech have moved into the front pages, being discussed in the front pages of leading newspapers, popular media magazines, and in president's cabinets and board meetings for most institutions. Previously, online education was discussed in small circles and specific contexts, but not as a dominant theme whenever higher education was the topic. Below is a brief (and incomplete) timeline of the national media articles as MOOC mania started in August 2011"

This is a course for educators who want to learn about US copyright law in the education context. P2PU also offers a similar courses for Australia, if that content is more appropriate. Educators who are not in the US are welcome to sign up, too, if they want to learn about copyright law in the US.

"There is strong, if not overwhelming evidence that behaviour patterns of students, educators, employees and professionals are moving towards the use of social tools for learning, working and teaching. Collaborating seamlessly face-to-face and at a distance, bringing the human element to virtual interactions, and personalized learning will prevail in 2014; each facilitated by technology. But it's not going to be about the technology, it will be about making connections by voice and/or visual, contributing to new knowledge, and learning with and from others-all mediated through social media. It will be the behaviours of students, lifelong learners and educators-their use of technology, specifically social media applications that will influence education in the upcoming year."

ECAR has surveyed undergraduate students annually since 2004 about technology in higher education. In 2013, ECAR collaborated with more than 250 higher education institutions to collect responses from more than 112,000 undergraduate students about their technology experiences and expectations. The findings are distilled into four broad themes to help educators and higher education institutions better understand how students experience technology on their respective campuses and the ways in which new, better, or more technology can impact students' relationship with information technology.

"The National Center for Educational Statistics (NCES) and its Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS) provide the most official data on colleges and universities in the United States. At long last they have started to include data fields for online education (technically distance education, the vast majority of which is online) starting with the preliminary data released through Fall 2012 term. Despite all of the talk about data and measuring online programs, we can only now start to get official information from a central source rather than relying on surveys or institutional data."

""My entire critique of higher education started with curricular reform at Penn," he says. "General education is nonexistent. It's effectively a buffet, and when you have a noncurated academic experience, you effectively don't get educated. You get a random collection of information. Liberal-arts education is about developing the intellectual capacity of the individual, and learning to be a productive member of society. And you cannot do that without a curriculum.""

"Beyond traditional social media platforms, learning management systems that have a social media component, including Blackboard and Moodle, are also common in online learning, says Bethany Smith, director of the media and education technology resource center at North Carolina State University's College of Education. "We mimic kind of what Facebook is doing, but in a learning environment," Smith says."

"NROC's Connected PD project launched in March 2011 in response to a collective Aha! among many of us at the time: educators need to embody connected learning in order to support students today. The NROC Network's uniquely diverse group of K20+ educators share a commitment to integrate high-quality, digital open educational resources into their curricula."

"This interview covers: Kristen's educational path How Edcamp started (and how it has grown) Why Edcamp is for every educator and how to get involved Her book "Professional Learning in the Digital Age" The future of professional development in education Please watch and leave your feedback in the comments below!"

"An education is more. People moving through their education learn from the all of people they encounter. The relationship of the student and the teacher is intertwined. Teachers become a team of mentors, tutoring not just in a subject but in the world around them."

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.

"I'm not a radical, or anti-establishment - I've loved and respected working at every university I've joined. I just happen to have moved into a different learning delivery model because I knew it would give me greater flexibility to continue with my academic interests and spend more time with my family. It's a model that fits around my life. That's something I share in common with my students. They aren't unusual either. They just choose to study online because the flexibility suits them. Online higher education means students can combine education with employment - often fast-tracking their careers as a result - or fit study around family commitments."

"China just began a major education reform effort that is aimed at reducing the importance of standardized testing in determining school quality and including factors such as student engagement, boredom, anxiety, and happiness. It also seeks to cut back on the amount of school work students are given. As scholar Yong Zhao notes in the following post, the approach is the opposite of the education reform path in the United States, which in recent years has increased the importance of test scores for accountability purposes."

NetSmartz Workshop is an interactive, educational program of the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children® (NCMEC) that provides age-appropriate resources to help teach children how to be safer on- and offline. The program is designed for children ages 5-17, parents and guardians, educators, and law enforcement. With resources such as videos, games, activity cards, and presentations, NetSmartz entertains while it educates.

"Put another way, in ten or fifteen years' time, students may expect to find educational nuggets on demand whenever they need them. Some will have had many years' experience of creating and sharing content, perhaps quite complex, perhaps to do with education. Will they be happy to accept timetabled classes and sit through lectures?"

As I'm reflecting on the #eci831 experience and actually thinking about something like a grade for my participation, I realize that I may not have been as good a student as I thought. Not that I didn't do a lot of wandering around the interwebs, connecting myself, exploring spaces of education, learning about digital learning theories, examining how others were using these theories, and determining what, of all of this, would be useful to me and to the analogue educators I am closest with. I certainly did that, but I didn't capture all that here. Why is that a problem? Because if you didn't blog it, it didn't happen.

This must be the educator in you talking. Metacognitively speaking => the ability to discuss what you have learned is one of the great opportunities of the web 2.0. And a great way to reinforce your learning, so this idea of "if you didn't blog it, it didn't happen" is an interesting idea for educators. I have a link to post about this.

"In collaboration with a wide range of educational organizations and educators, the Connected Educators project is increasing the quality, accessibility, and connectedness of existing and emerging online communities of practice."