January 27, 2012 | 11:02 AM | By

What Does Your School Know About You?

Flickr: Spree2010

More schools are collecting data about students, but to what end?

In the information age, data will follow us from the time we first walk into kindergarten to well past retirement. As data is used to guide us in making all kinds of decisions, from what we consume to what health plan we follow, it’s also becoming a powerful tool in education.

As more schools and colleges use algorithms to determine a student’s path, the Amazon- and Netflix-style practice of data mining will soon be the norm in how schools and students operate.

But that might not be such a bad thing. Just as the two online behemoths — Amazon and Netflix — are able to use software to predict books, music, and movies you might like based on your past preferences, schools are using data to place students not only in their appropriate learning level, but even to recommend what subject to major in.

“What we’ve seen in the consumer and healthcare world that’s made such a huge impact is what happens when you get data to the front lines.”

In K-12 education, it’s happening in classrooms and computer labs in both rich and blue-collar schools. In Covington Elementary, for example, the affluent Silicon Valley community where each fifth-grade student has a laptop and is learning math using Khan Academy videos and quizzes, teachers can track each student’s progress in real time on their iPads. When a student is stuck in one subject area, teachers can help the student one-on-one.

Likewise, at Rocketship’s Los Suenos Elementary school in a working class neighborhood in San Jose, teacher Alana Mednick can track her students’ progress based on how they score on their online computer games in their Learning Lab. And these examples are hardly rare these days.

On the college level, student data is being used for everything from recommending courses to picking majors. Austin Peay State University in Clarksville, Tenn., rolled out a program last year Continue reading →

FILED UNDER: Culture, Tech Tools, data, Higher Education
January 26, 2012 | 4:00 PM | By

Quick Look: No More Résumés, Say Some Firms

Your Tumblr blog and Twitter account are more important to some employers.


Union Square Ventures recently posted an opening for an investment analyst. Instead of asking for résumés, the New York venture-capital firm-which has invested in Twitter, Foursquare, Zynga and other technology companies-asked applicants to send links representing their “Web presence,” such as a Twitter account or Tumblr blog.

Read more at: online.wsj.com

January 26, 2012 | 2:19 PM | By

New Startup Launches High-Tech Math Program

School of One

The folks behind The School of One, famous for creating daily playlists as lesson plans for students, have launched a non-profit that will allow any school to use its high-tech, personalized learning model.

New Classrooms, a non-profit launched by Joel Rose and Chris Rush who launched the School of One, will design new products that can be used by traditional public, charter, and independent schools. Their first product is a middle-school math model called Teach to One: Math, with which students can learn in small groups, one-on-one with teachers, with math software and with online tutors, very much like students do at the School of One.

“We are just at the earliest stages of understanding the full potential of personalized learning in classrooms,” Rush said in a press release. “We believe the next few years will be a critical time for the development of next generation learning models and are excited to be a part of those efforts.”

As with most adaptive software programs, the model will allow teachers to collect real-time data Continue reading →

FILED UNDER: Tech Tools, New Classrooms, School of One
January 26, 2012 | 10:02 AM | By

How to Embrace the Wild, Wild Web

Flickr: Andronicusmax

By Kyle Palmer

There are more than a trillion Web pages on the Internet. This incredible abundance of information and the ease with which it can be searched sometimes fails to counteract the confusing chorus of anonymous sources.

In his new book Too Big to Know, Harvard researcher David Weinberger articulates this ambivalence while celebrating the Internet’s ability to change the way we come to know things. “We are in a crisis of knowledge,” he writes, “at the same time that we are in an epochal exaltation of knowledge.”

Society is evolving towards a system of knowledge that values uncertainty, freedom, and sheer volume.

Weinberger argues that society is evolving towards a system of knowledge that values uncertainty, freedom, and sheer volume, where knowledge is “the property of the network rather than that of individuals who know things.” (This process becomes more apparent as more data Continue reading →

FILED UNDER: Culture, Learning Methods, Tech Tools, search
January 25, 2012 | 4:02 PM | By

Quick Look: Motivating the Next Generation to Design and Build

Next year, high schools students in California schools will have the opportunity to design and build projects thanks to the Makerspace program developed by O’Reilly’s MAKE division, the folks who brought us Maker Faire. One of the goals of Makerspace, which was just granted an award from the federal Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), is to find low-cost options for places to make things, like at middle schools, high schools and community centers. Eventually, the goal is to reach 1,000 high schools in four years.


There is a lot of interest in how making can transform education and many of us are working to take advantage of the momentum of the maker movement and seize the moment to bring much needed change to education.

Read more at: blog.makezine.com

January 25, 2012 | 9:53 AM | By

How to Create Your Own Textbook — With or Without Apple

Flickr: Marquette La

By Dolores Gende

Apple’s announcement last week about its new iBooks2 and authoring app created big waves in education circles. But smart educators don’t necessarily need Apple’s slick devices and software to create their own books. How educators think of content curation in the classroom is enough to change their reliance on print textbooks.

As the open education movement continues to grow and become an even more rich trove of resources, teachers can use the content to make their own interactive textbooks. It might seem daunting, but the availability of quality materials online and the power of tapping into personal learning networks should make it easier.

Here’s how to create a digital textbook and strategies for involving the students in its development in three steps.

1. AGGREGATION. Gather all your sources of information. The best way to aggregate content is through social bookmarking with great online tools like Delicious and Diigo, which allow you to bookmark sites that can be seen and shared online. As Diigo’s web site explains it, the site “allows teachers to highlight critical features within text and images and write comments directly on the web pages, to collect and organize series of web pages and web sites into coherent and thematic sets, and to facilitate online conversations within the context of the materials themselves. (Watch this video to see how to do this step-by-step.)

Teachers can work with colleagues within their subject area departments and beyond the walls of the classroom to aggregate resources through social bookmarking. Invaluable sources of Continue reading →

FILED UNDER: Tech Tools, digital textbooks, open education resources, open textbooks
January 24, 2012 | 3:00 PM | By

Lack of Funding Creates Barrier to Using Tech in Class

Lenny Gonzalez

Although most teachers have access to computers in their classes, only one in five say they have the right level of technology, according to a recent PBS national survey of teachers grades pre-K-12.

Limited budgets were cited as the biggest barrier to accessing technology, according to 63 percent of teachers. In low-income communities, lack of funding was cited for 70 percent of teachers as the biggest obstacle.

Not surprisingly, educators who work in affluent school districts have more support from parents and school boards for providing tech tools for classrooms compared to those in low-income neighborhoods — 38 percent versus 14 percent said they received lots of parental support; and  38 percent versus 21 percent said the same for school board support.

PBS is leveraging the report to call attention to its library of free digital media available for use by teachers. The PBS Learning Media is a repository of more than 16,000 digital assets, including lesson plans, background essays, and discussion questions for pre-K-12 educators that align with Common Core State Standards.

Here’s more from the report:

While the vast majority of teachers have access to computers, less than two-thirds (59 percent) have access to an interactive whiteboard, a newer technology that can be used more broadly Continue reading →

FILED UNDER: Tech Tools, PBS Learning Media
January 24, 2012 | 1:00 PM | By

Quick Look: How to Debunk Enduring Myths for Science Students

Annie Murphy Paul writes: “In order to persuade students to embrace new and more accurate ideas about how the world operates, science teachers need to find out which “alternative conceptual frameworks” — myths — they already hew to. To that end, researchers have developed student surveys that can help instructors identify the beliefs their pupils have when they walk through the classroom door.”


Seasons are caused by the earth’s distance from the sun. Motors and other machines use up energy. A heavier ball falls faster than a lighter one. If these propositions sound right to you, that’s only natural — they’re examples of folk science, widely-shared but faulty assumptions about how the phy…

Read more at: ideas.time.com

January 24, 2012 | 7:00 AM | By

Watch Out, Facebook: A New Social Network Targets Alumni

Dave Herholz

There has been a lot of excitement about bringing social networking tools into the classroom in recent years. These technologies have been touted as ways to encourage students to collaborate and communicate — both with teachers and with one another. It’s a way for students who might feel too shy to speak up in class to actually get to fully participate in class discussions. These tools also offer an important way to bridge school and home, particularly if students (and in some cases, their parents) can log in at any time to monitor school activities.

But is there a way to take what we’ve seen with educational social networking and extend that community into a life-long relationship with a school? That’s the hope, in part, of a new education startup called Alumn.us that is tackling an important, but largely unrecognized problem faced by many schools: there is no alumni network. There is no connection to a school once you’ve graduated.

Sure, you might be able to find the folks you went to school with on Facebook now. Indeed, there have been suggestions that Facebook will soon replace the traditional ways by which we connect with the people we went to school and graduate with.

But those Facebook connections — as interesting as though they might be — really do not fulfill the same sort of role of an alumni network. Connecting alumni from the same graduating class is only Continue reading →

FILED UNDER: Culture, Alumn.us, alumni, Facebook
January 23, 2012 | 2:01 PM | By

Study Shows Algebra iPad App Improves Scores in One School

Lenny Gonzalez

Students at Presidio Middle School use the HMH iPad algebra app.

As Apple pushes out its new education products, new information about whether using the iPad gives students an advantage over using print books is starting to surface.

Results from Houghton Mifflin Harcourt’s year-long study comparing students using the publisher’s iPad algebra app are in from Amelia Earhart school in Riverside, Calif., and it’s largely positive, according to the company.

The study showed that 78 percent of students who used the HMH algebra iPad app scored “proficient” or “advanced” on the California Standards Test, compared to 59 percent of students who used the textbook version. “As students were randomly assigFuse, the results indicated that use of the app was the chief cause behind the improvement in student test scores,” the report states. Continue reading →

FILED UNDER: Learning Methods, Tech Tools, HMH-Fuse Pilot Study, iPad