Another major US foundation aims to transform education through technology, this time with the help of Twitter cofounder Biz Stone. Others foundations with this aim include The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation (through the Next Generation Learning Challenge) and The George Lucas Educational Foundation (creator and sponsor of Edutopia.com).

New Nonprofit Aims at Tech Collaboration, Social Change

by Grant Gross, IDG News / PC World Business Center / 23 February 2011

A new nonprofit launched Wednesday by a tech advocacy group and a cofounder of Twitter will focus on using technology to drive improvements in the U.S. education system and other social changes.

One goal of ConvergeUS, the brainchild of the TechNet IT CEO network and Twitter cofounder Biz Stone, is to convene diverse groups to work on a “technology innovation blueprint,” a plan for using technology and social media to drive social change, its founders said. ConvergeUS will work with three other groups each year to work on social issues, with a summit every year where top thinkers in technology and social issues will gather in Silicon Valley, said Rey Ramsey, TechNet’s CEO.

To read more…

image source

Formative Assessment­—A Process, Not a Test

by W. James Popham / Education Week / 22 February 2011

note: Popham is the author of Transformative Assessment (ASCD 2008)

[...] For today’s educators to get clear-headed about what is meant by the formative-assessment process is particularly important. This is because the formative-assessment process, when used by teachers, leads to substantial gains in students’ learning. If teachers are confused about the meaning of this potent process, then the likelihood of their using it properly will surely be diminished. It’s tough for teachers, or anyone else, to employ something correctly when they don’t fundamentally understand it.

Happily, we now have available about four decades’ worth of empirical evidence attesting to the instructional dividends of the formative-assessment process.

Recent reviews of more than 4,000 research investigations show clearly that when this process is well implemented in the classroom, it can essentially double the speed of student learning. Indeed, when one considers several recent reviews of research regarding the classroom formative-assessment process, it is clear that the process works, it can produce whopping gains in students’ achievement, and it is sufficiently robust so that different teachers can use it in diverse ways, yet still get great results with their students.

To read more…

Study: Educators Back Personalized Learning

Scholastic Administrator Magazine / Winter 2011

More than 9 out of 10 education officials agree personalized pacing for students could help raise achievement levels, according to a recent poll by Blackboard. The same ratio also say teachers need additional professional development to use individualized instruction effectively. Six out of 10 say their district wants to deliver virtual courses, while nearly half say students are not able to take all the courses they want or need because of conflicting schedules or lack of available staff.

To read more (including the poll results for curriculum specialists)…

by Paula Smith /Huffington Post / 17 February 2011

We’re in the midst of a profound and far-reaching educational revolution that spans two centuries and bridges the industrial and information ages. And, when it’s completed sometime over the next decade, I believe that this sweeping transformation will be known as the one that redefined what schools look like in the 21st century.

[...] There are many conflicting theories about why our children are not expanding and enriching their knowledge horizons — and lots of finger-pointing about what’s holding them back, too.
But there’s also a new and growing consensus that could lead to sensitive and fresh educational standards, benchmarks, models and teaching styles designed to help students discover the joys of meaningful and responsible learning.

To read more (including Smith’s 5 key elements of the new learning accord)…

The Learning Society’s Global Ambitions

by Sara Bernard / Mind/Shift / 17 February 2011

If we want our education system to adapt to the 21st century, we need to re-imagine the entire thing — not just build more of the same. So claim the thought leaders behind The Learning Society, a concept launched as part of Cisco Systems’ Global Education initiative at the 2010 Learning and Technology World Forum in London last year.

Their big idea is this: Education can no longer be isolated from the rest of society. Learning is no longer confined to the hours of the school day, the walls of the school building, or even the duration of our time “in school.” It’s everywhere, all the time, involves everyone from all walks of life, and requires constant tinkering and improvement.

The Learning Society project, led by Richard Halkett, Cisco’s director of Strategy & Research for Global Education, is, so far, just a white paper and a video. Their hope, however, is that its recommendations will generate enough buzz to get a global foothold.

To read more (including listed recommendations)…

Skipping Rote Memorization in Indian Schools

by Vikas Bajaj / New York Times / 17 February 2011

The Nagla elementary school in this north Indian town [Pantnagar] looks like many other rundown government schools. Sweater-clad children sit on burlap sheets laid in rows on cold concrete floors. Lunch is prepared out back on a fire of burning twigs and branches.

But the classrooms of Nagla are a laboratory for an educational approach unusual for an Indian public school. Rather than being drilled and tested on reproducing passages from textbooks, students write their own stories. And they pursue independent projects — as when fifth-grade students recently interviewed organizers of religious festivals and then made written and oral presentations.

That might seem commonplace in American or European schools. But such activities are revolutionary in India, where public school students have long been drilled on memorizing facts and regurgitating them in stressful year-end exams that many children fail.

Nagla and 1,500 other schools in this Indian state, Uttarakhand, are part of a five-year-old project to improve Indian primary education that is being paid for by one of the country’s richest men, Azim H. Premji, chairman of the information technology giant Wipro.

To read more…

Report: Blended learning could hit or miss

Policy makers, ed-tech companies need to help blended learning reach its full potential
report-blended-learning-could-hit-or-miss

by Meris Stansbury, Associate Editor / e-School News / 10 February 2011

Blended learning has the ability to transform education, according to a new report—but if certain guidelines and practices aren’t ensured, blended learning could become just another add-on to an archaic system on its way out, the report warns.

The report, titled “The Rise of K-12 Blended Learning,” by Michael B. Horn, co-founder and executive director of education at the Innosight Institute, and Heather Clayton Staker, a senior research fellow for education practice at the institute, describes how blended learning can affect education, but why it also could fall short of its potential.

According to the report, blended learning, which it defines as “any time a student learns at least in part at a supervised brick-and-mortar location away from home and at least in part through online delivery with some element of student control over time, place, path, and/or pace,” has grown exponentially over the past decade.

To read more (pp. 2 & 3 limited to subscribers)…

To read the Innosight Institute report on the Rise of K-12 Blended Learning…

6 Top Tech Trends on the Horizon for Higher Education

by Ben Wieder / Chronicle of Higher Education Wired on Campus / 8 February 2011

Mobile devices are one year away from transforming education. For the third straight year.

The 2011 Horizon Report, an annual look at technology trends affecting higher education, points to mobile devices as one of six technologies to watch. Of the other five trends, game-based learning and learning analytics—using data to track student progress—are new additions for 2011.

The report, produced by the New Media Consortium and Educause, notes that mobile devices have been listed before, but it says that resistance by many schools continues to slow the full integration of mobile devices into higher education.

To read more…

The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has announced finalists for the first wave of its Next Generation Learning Challenges, which were announced in October 2010. The NGLC are “aimed at dramatically increasing college readiness and completion through applied technology.” The first wave addressed the deployment of open core courseware, scaling of blended learning programs, encouragement of deeper learner engagement, and mobilization of learning analytics in postsecondary education.

The Gates Foundation created this program out of the belief that the “potential for success in applying technology to solve educational challenges has already been demonstrated in many places, in many ways.” Their goal “is to seek solutions with proven potential and to expand their reach to many more students so that meaningful improvements in college readiness and completion can be achieved. The NGLC mission spans secondary and postsecondary education (grades 6-16).”

Here is an example of a Wave I finalist project with a New Learning design:

Anoka Ramsey Community College

Jenni Swenson

Connecting Learner Analytics to Developmental Math Redesign: Providing Intervention Strategies to At-risk Students

This state-wide project with Minnesota State Colleges and Universities (25 two-year Community and Technical Colleges and 7 Universities) will scale-up modularized developmental math courses based on a newly redesigned NCAT model, and will use initial and on-going assessment to reinforce concepts leading to a mastery-based curriculum. The project will also include companion learner analytic capabilities through a student “dashboard” of progress and, utilizing institutional data mined from system-wide sources, will identify performance markers and apply predictive modeling to trigger intervention strategies that proactively engage at-risk students in behaviors to encourage persistence and completion.

For the complete list of finalists (with project descriptions, scroll down for these), see here.

Jane McGonigal on Harnessing the Power of Games for Change

by Sara J. / Spotlight on Digital Media and Learning / 9 February 2011

In her new book “Reality is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World,” game designer Jane McGonigal argues that video games can help improve our lives and solve real world problems.

McGonigal says games offer meaningful social experiences that can translate into the real world. Playing games make us happy, she argues, because they fulfill important human desires to work with others and to have “epic wins” in our lives.

When we play games, McGonigal told Stephen Colbert in an appearance last week, “We are tapping into our best qualities, our ability to be motivated, to be optimistic, to collaborate with others, to be resilient in the face of failure.”

But it doesn’t stop when “game over” appears on the screen. The skills we learn playing games, McGonigal explains, need to be harnessed for the social good. And the book offers compelling evidence of how games are being used today to do so.

To read more…

Lessons for Online Learning: Charter schools’ successes and mistakes have a lot to teach virtual educators

by Erin Dillon and Bill Tucker / Education Next / Vol. 11 No. 2 Spring 2011

Advocates for virtual education say that it has the power to transform an archaic K–12 system of schooling. Instead of blackboards, schoolhouses, and a six-hour school day, interactive technology will
personalize learning to meet each student’s needs, ensure all students have access to quality teaching, extend learning opportunities to all hours of the day and all days of the week, and innovate and improve over time. Indeed, virtual education has the potential not only to help solve many of the most pressing issues in K–12 education, but to do so in a cost-effective manner. More than 1 million public-education students now take online courses, and as more districts and states initiate and expand online offerings, the numbers continue to grow. But to date, there’s little research or publicly available data on the outcomes from K–12 online learning. And even when data are publicly available, as is the case with virtual charter schools, analysts and education officials have paid scant attention to—and have few tools for analyzing—performance. Until policymakers, educators, and advocates pay as much attention to quality as they do to expansion, virtual education will not be ready for a lead role in education reform.

To read more…

Views: Toward a Science of Learning

by Diana Chapman Walsh / Inside Higher Education views column / 14 February 2011

In travels around the country, I’ve been seeing signs of a trend in higher education that could have profound implications: a growing interest in learning about learning. At colleges and universities that are solidly grounded in a commitment to teaching, groups of creative faculty are mobilizing around learning as a collective, and intriguing, intellectual inquiry.

This trend embraces the advances being made in the cognitive sciences and the study of consciousness. It resides in the fast-moving world of changing information technology and social media. It recognizes and builds upon new pedagogies and evolving theories of multiple ways of knowing and learning. It encompasses but transcends the evolution of new and better measures of student learning outcomes.

As more and more institutions sign on to administer the National Survey of Student Engagement and the Collegiate Learning Assessment, some see the resulting data as sufficient to close the books on the question of student learning, while others see them as no more than a rudimentary beginning. The advent of new instruments reflects in part the desire to unseat the commercial rating systems that wield enormous influence despite their well-known shortcomings and distortions. The new measurement regimes are responding, as well, to demands from accrediting and regulatory agencies for convincing data on “value-added educational outcomes.” But educators know that assessing what students have learned is far less valuable than finding out how they learn.

To read more…

Wikipedia: Information Source and Knowledge Community

by John Jones / Digital Media and Learning blog / 10 February 2011

One of the challenges facing the digital media and learning community—in fact, all educators—is the rapid pace of technological development that makes necessary the constant evaluation and investigation of new information and communication technologies. As a writing researcher, I am fascinated by the way in which knowledge communities shape writing, and these knowledge communities are often effective means of orienting students to new information sources. One of the most fascinating of these communities is Wikipedia, and Colleen A. Reilly of the University of North Carolina, Wilmington, has just written an interesting new article on how students can be taught to understand and participate in Wikipedia.

Building on Jay David Bolter and Diane Gromala’s Windows and Mirrors, Reilly argues that students should not be taught to view Wikipedia as a simple window on information; that is, as a technology that they look through in order to view the facts and histories contained on the site. Reilly identifies—correctly, I think—this windowed approach to the online encyclopedia as being the source of many individual objections to it, such as the quality of its writing or the tendency to vandalism. Viewing Wikipedia as a simple presentation of information, one which is to be accepted uncritically (i.e., to treat it as one might be tempted to treat other reference works), is to miss the point. Instead, Reilly argues that students should be taught to read Wikipedia—and all reference works—as mirrored technologies; that is, to understand how these communication technologies, as she puts it, “allow and encourage users to see, simultaneously, a reflection of the media’s use in context, helping users to be aware of the technologies’ designs, their status as constructed media, and the mechanisms through which they function.”

To read more…

To improve reading skills, many teachers are harnessing the technology they already have

by Katie Ash / Education Week Digital Directions / 4 February 2011

Instead of investing in prepackaged software programs, many teachers are harnessing the technology they already have—such as webcams, audio recorders, blogs, and other Web 2.0 tools—to boost literacy in students.

“With schools being so cash-strapped, we can’t go around and buy a new program all the time,” says Adina Sullivan, a 4th grade teacher at the 720-student San Marcos Elementary School in California. “You can go with something that you can find a lot easier at no cost and make it work for what you need, rather than [using pre-packaged software.]”

Sullivan, who is a lead technology teacher at her school, works with English-language learners to help build vocabulary and fluency.

To read more…

Newsletter / The Forum on the Future of Public Education, U Illinois College of Education / February 2011

“Research” Continuously Cited by Politicians

In recent months the media (and politicians) have turned their focus to the debate over school choice; “Waiting for ‘Superman’”, “Race to the Top”, and the Rhee, Klein Manifesto all support the expansion of charter schools throughout the United States. As media outlets continue coverage of this issue, school choice has become a hotter topic amongst politicians. Included in the political discourse about charter schools is the accuracy of references to empirical evidence, and one claim that keeps surfacing is that teacher quality is the most important factor in determining a student’s success. [...]

The Charter School Experiment Symposium

The Forum on the Future of Public Education is sponsoring a symposium on The Charter School Experiment: Expectations, Evidence, and Implications, Harvard Education Press, 2010, edited by Christopher Lubienski, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and Peter Weitzel, University of Illinois at Springfield. The symposium features a presentation of the book’s main themes and conclusions by the editors as well as presentations of select chapters by contributing authors [...]

“Gainful Employment” Debate Continues for For-Profit Colleges

On June 18, 2010, the Department of Education released a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (NPRM) regarding for-profit and proprietary colleges. Specifically, the NPRM laid out guidelines surrounding federal aid to postsecondary institutions based on the debt that graduates accrue and their achievement of “gainful employment,” a term that is getting much scrutiny from supporters of for-profit education and others. [...]

To read more…

Three Trends that Define the Future of Teaching and Learning

by Tina Barseghian / MindShift / 5 February 2011

In today’s dynamic classrooms, the teaching and learning process is becoming more nuanced, more seamless, and it flows back and forth from students to teachers. Here’s a look at current trends in teaching and learning, their implications, and changes to watch for.

The Three Key Trends

1. Collaborative.

If Web 2.0 has taught us anything, it’s to play nicely together. Sure, there are times for buckling down and working alone, but in most cases, the collaborative process boosts everyone’s game. In progressives schools across the country, students and teachers are learning from each other in all sorts of ways.

Sharing information and connecting with others — whether we know them personally or not — has proven to be a powerful tool in education. Students are collaborating with each other through social media to learn more about specific subjects, to test out ideas and theories, to learn facts, and to gauge each others’ opinions.

To read more, including other posts in the series…

Social Emotional Learning in Schools Lifts Student Grades, Says Loyola University Chicago Study

by AP News / Huffington Post / 7 February 2011

According to a study led by Loyola University Chicago professor emeritus Joseph A. Durlak, learning about social skills in the classroom may increase students’ academic success. The report specifically focused on the effects of social and emotional learning (SEL) initiatives in K-12 classrooms. The study concluded:

“[It] appears that SEL programs are successful at all educational levels (elementary, middle, and high school) and in urban, suburban, and rural schools… Results from this review add to a growing body of research indicating that SEL programming enhances students’ connection to school, classroom behavior, and academic achievement.”

SEL programs focus on social themes rather than academic study, letting students role-play and take part in problem-solving activities to learn how to react to and process emotions.

To read more…

Teachers’ Colleges Upset By Plan to Grade Them

by Trip Gabriel / New York Times / 8 February 2011

Grades are the currency of education — teachers give them to students, administrators grade teachers and states often assign grades to schools. Now U.S. News & World Report is planning to give A through F grades to more than 1,000 teachers’ colleges, and many of the schools are unhappy, marching to the principal’s office to complain the system is unfair.

Numerous education school deans have protested that the ratings program’s methodology is flawed since the program was announced last month. In a letter last week, officials from 35 leading education colleges and graduate schools — including Columbia, Harvard, Michigan State and Vanderbilt — denounced an “implied coercion” if they do not cooperate with the ratings.

To read more…

The Children Must Play

by Samuel Abrams / The New Republic / 28 January 2011

While observing recess outside the Kallahti Comprehensive School on the eastern edge of Helsinki on a chilly day in April 2009, I asked Principal Timo Heikkinen if students go out when it’s very cold. Heikkinen said they do. I then asked Heikkinen if they go out when it’s very, very cold. Heikkinen smiled and said, “If minus 15 [Celsius] and windy, maybe not, but otherwise, yes. The children can’t learn if they don’t play. The children must play.”

In comparison to the United States and many other industrialized nations, the Finns have implemented a radically different model of educational reform—based on a balanced curriculum and professionalization, not testing.

To read more…

Connected They Write: The Lure of Writing on the Web

by Raquel Recuero / DML Center / 24 January 2011

The massive adoption of digital media in the everyday life of teens has reshaped social and educational practices in Latin America. A digital divide persists but youth are increasingly more connected. In Chile, for example, more than 96 percent of all students have Internet access. In Brazil, almost 80 percent of the population between 16 and 24 years and almost 70 percent of those aged 10 to 15 accessed the Internet in 2009. With that kind of penetration, digital media is creating new ways to understand literacy, learning, reading, and especially, writing. Far from hurting the writing practices for youth, digital media seems to be creating a far more complex and compelling space for them to flourish.

To read more…

Challenging the Gifted

by June Kronholz / Education Next / Spring 2011 Vol. 11 No. 2

[...] What’s a school to do with youngsters like Alex Wade and Taylor Wilson, kids who are intellectually years ahead of their age group, their textbooks, the curriculum, and usually their teachers?

When the National Association for Gifted Children (NAGC) surveyed states in 2008 about what they provide in the way of gifted education, it found the answer to be “not much.” At least a dozen states don’t let children start kindergarten early, even if they’re already reading The Aeneid. Two states bar a middle schooler from taking high-school classes. At least 30 states allow only those in 11th and 12th grade to also enroll in college classes. And almost no one will waive mandatory-attendance laws for the 15-year-old who has gotten everything she can out of her high school and itches to move on.

“That’s a mistreatment of students,” says Bob Davidson who, with his wife, Jan, founded, developed, and then sold the company that marketed the hugely successful Math Blaster and Reading Blaster computer software. So, in 2006, the Davidsons started a public school—a public school like no other—on the University of Nevada campus.

To read more…