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In Pennsylvania, the issue is primarily addressed at the local level with districts setting policy. For the most part, the use of such devices is banned during the school day. Some districts ban possession of such devices altogether while others allow students to bring them to school as long as they remain out of sight during the regular school day. Steel Valley School District officials are examining a policy already on the books that allows students to bring devices to school but requires the devices be turned over to school officials. A district committee recently discussed allowing students in secondary grades to stow their devices in their lockers rather than check them in each morning.

"When we started using Google Apps in our elementary district a few years ago, we figured it was time to test out electronic ways to present a year's worth of work, instead of the traditional binder. Our fourth, fifth and sixth grade students love using Google Sites to create their own portfolio as a web site. They can be creative, show their personality, and present an easy to navigate body of work to their parents . We continue using those portfolios each year and when it's time to update their portfolios, students get excited to see where they started. "

""You may not be aware, but this can actually have a massive effect on the performance of the [student] cohort," he said. "If the wrong students set up [the most popular] group, and that's the one everyone goes on, the amount of control they have…is massive." He continued: "If the group is set up by students so that only they can post and nobody else, they can censor discussions."

"Writing learning outcomes is very difficult for faculty who were never trained to think about their teaching in such terms.  We are great at describing what content our course will cover; we are pretty good at knowing that we expect our students to master a certain amount of content or skill set by the end of the semester.  We are terrible at framing our expectations for student learning in terms of learning outcomes, with all of our learning activities in the course aligned to those learning outcomes.  We are even worse at measuring learning outcomes.  We conflate grades with learning outcomes on the regular."

"The first type of 'Domain' took audience into account, considering the implications of public scholarship, representation, and student agency. The second, in many ways, mirrored the traditional pedagogical structure by assigning papers or short answer assignments to be posted online through blogs. This is not necessarily bad, but also doesn't necessarily empower."

Completion rates and grades were worse than for those who took traditional campus-style classes. And the students who did best weren't the underserved students San Jose most wanted to reach. It wasn't really proving to be cheaper, either, says Peter Hadreas, the chairman of San Jose State's philosophy department.

"According to data from the Delaware Department of Education, the newly-created ninth grade class at Newark Charter School consists of 15 percent Hispanic and African-American students, with representation of low-income students also at 15 percent. This contrasts starkly with the freshman class at Newark High School which is composed of 64 percent African American and Hispanic students and 70 percent low-income students."

"What do you want for your graduates (whether they leave you in 5th, 8th or 12th grade)?"

"Google Forms makes peer evaluation possible and simple. I collect the names and email addresses of both students: evaluator and evaluatee. I use the "grid" style question type to allow peers to rank each criteria on a scale of 1-5 against the rubric. I can include a URL to the grading criteria in the help text, so all students have access to the standard assessment guide. "

The result, should the trend continue, might not be a learning management system, but what analysts call a "learning ecosystem." Not a black hole where content is dumped at one end of the semester and grades at the other, but an open platform where faculty members are free to browse and embed the tools they want to use -- for example quizzes from Khan Academy, plagiarism detection from Turnitin or a homegrown solution -- regardless of whether they logged into Learn or Sakai, and regardless of whether their system has its own, similar tool.

"Young has reduced the number of students failing, withdrawing or performing below average in Bio 208: Human Anatomy from 50 percent to fewer than 20 percent in about four years, and poorly performing students have watched their grades climb, with continued improvement on the horizon."

"Girls often don't get those counterbalancing messages. In fact, girls have their good-student behaviors reinforced as feminine norms in the media and the stories they consume. In short, we're in danger of raising girls who strive hard to find the right answer and know how to get good grades-but who don't know how to trust their own voices."

""The whole NCLB era, and really back to the first Elementary and Secondary Education Act in the 1960s, was about getting kids to grade level, to minimal proficiency," says Peters. "There seems to be a change in belief now - that you need to show growth in every student.""

"Nelson says the new version of the system lets professors quickly divide a large class into groups of up to 12 students. Those break-out groups of students can then participate in a small-group discussion while each student fills out a "structured worksheet" that can be graded later by a TA following a rubric to make sure each student was following along and participating. During the live class, the professor can peek into any of the breakout sessions, either by appearing as one of the participants, or lurking in the background so that he or she can see and hear the students but they don't know the professor is there. The requirement of filling out the worksheet, or doing some other activity like a poll or quiz, makes sure students in breakout groups stay on task, Nelson says."

"It may have been the (AI-recommended) Microsoft Kool-aid1, but it appears Google and Microsoft are edging their way into the LMS space. Their presence at a K-12 focused show suggests they are finding traction at the younger grades. But as their education offerings grow in sophistication, and their ecosystem advantages start to accelerate, I believe a more concerted push in the higher ed space is inevitable."

"The number of distance education students grew by 5.6% from Fall 2015 to Fall 2016 to reach 6,359,121 who are taking at least one distance course, representing 31.6% of all students."

"This is absolutely awesome for managing student work in Google Apps. Doctopus allows you to share a document with your entire class without having to share individually and without having to place it in the Template Gallery. Plus, it collects all of the data in one spreadsheet! You can share the document for the whole class to work on it, for group work, or for individual work."

"I had expected that people signing up for a course like this, a non-traditional course where we work mostly on our own or together with other students in the class, would be students who embrace that kind of learning, students who feel a sense of independence and self-determination as learners. What I've learned, though, is that this is not the case for at least some students in the class, who are very much expecting the teacher to function as the voice of absolute authority in the class."

Isn't that the nature of humans? We want freedom for creativity and original thinking, but ultimately it makes us uncomfortable when people actually do achieve it; ultimately it seems that humans instinctively cling to rules, tradition and order.

Good point Tammy. Still, the "grading" paradigm is a strong one. We should expect today's students to start being a little more autonomous in their learning process.

"A new study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences addressed this question by conducting the largest and most comprehensive review of the effect of active learning on STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) education. Their answer is a resounding yes. According to Scott Freeman, one of the authors of the new study, "The impact of these data should be like the Surgeon General's report on "Smoking and Health" in 1964-they should put to rest any debate about whether active learning is more effective than lecturing.""