Many of the shifts pushed for by ed-tech advocates are indeed occurring, according to the fourth annual K-12 edition of the Horizon Report series from the Austin, Texas-based New Media Consortium, or NMC.

The report, pre-released to several partnering organizations and selected media outlets today, finds many of these changes have transitioned from the exception to the rule in schools.

For example, online and blended learning models are gaining a much stronger foothold within the nation's schools, thanks in part to financial pressures, the report finds. The bring-your-own-device technology model is also gaining steam in K-12 schools, as is the expectation of students and educators "to be able to work, learn, and study whenever and wherever they want," it adds.

In its report, the NMC also continued its practice of naming what it considers the six emerging technology trends in K-12 education. Tablet computing this year joined mobile device use, a holdover from last year, as a trend to focus on during the coming year. Game-based learning and personal or adaptive learning environments were tabbed trends set to explode during the next 2-3 years, and augmented reality and natural user interface technologies during the next 4-5 years.

The NMC, a nonprofit collaborative of ed-tech experts from around the world, plans to make the report available for public download on June 14 during its annual summer conference at MIT. More information on how this particular issue in the series was crafted is available on the report's wiki page.

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Although virtual schools continue to grow each year, more research and accountability is needed to foster and support effective online educational environments, says a new report from the National School Boards Association's Center for Public Education.

"We want to harness all the benefits of technology to really propel student learning ... but at the same time we find the lack of really good information about results and accountability really troubling," said Patte Barth, a co-author of the report and the director of the Center for Public Education, which provides data and research for school board members and other educators, in a conference call with the media.

Full-time online schools have gained 50,000 more students in the past year alone, bringing the total number of students participating in such virtual learning environments up to 250,000, the report said.

However, the research on how successful those schools are is mixed, with the majority of research finding higher dropout rates and lower test scores for full-time online students than their counterparts in brick-and-mortar schools. On the other hand, two small scale studies found that online students actually had higher rates of academic growth, suggesting that online learning can be an effective way of educating students.

One reason behind the low completion rates could be because of the way that online schools are monitoring student participation and progress, said the report. While almost all schools look to final grades as a way to track student progress, only about half of districts with students in online courses track their time spent online or log-in activity. "It's hard to imagine a classroom where they don't take attendance every day," said Barth.

The report also looked at how virtual schools receive funding, which varies from state to state. In some cases, the report said, the funding follows the student from his or her district. In other cases, the student receives funding based on the district where the virtual school operates.

Either way, the report argues, the funding model is not actually based on how much it costs to educate the student in a virtual learning model. "The absence of accounting for the true cost of virtual education leads to a lack of accountability for many virtual schools," said the report.

In addition, keeping track of how many students are in virtual education, and where the funding for that student is going, is difficult to determine, the report said, citing Colorado as an example. In that state, schools receive per-pupil funding based on where each student is on October 1st of each year. However, reports have found that between 30 and 50 percent of students in virtual charter schools leave those schools after October 1st, transferring the cost of their education to their home schools while the virtual schools retain the funding.

Overall, the report offered three recommendations for school board members, educators, and policymakers when pursuing virtual education as an option. Those leaders should demand more information about virtual learning before moving forward with it. Secondly, virtual schools should put systems in place to closely and frequently monitor student progress. And lastly, educators should demand better research and information about how much money it takes to provide a virtual education, how virtual schools are funded, and where that money is going.

Despite the words of caution regarding online learning, Barth insisted that NSBA's Center for Public Education was a supporter of that type of education. "We are very much in favor of it," she said. "It will happen, and it needs to happen. ... What we're trying to do as a center is to send out a note of caution that because something is working in one high school somewhere doesn't mean you can rapidly expand it and expect the same results, and you certainly can't expand it without data collection systems in place."

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Remember when the folks from the Consortium for School Networking invited us to Montivideo and Buenos Aires last November to explore some of the world's most progressive 1-to-1 laptop programs and enjoy seasonal high temps in the low 70s?

Yeah, me neither.

But after a week-long visit to observe Uruguay's Plan Ceibal, the world's first nationwide educational laptop program, and some similar developing initiatives in Argentina, CoSn has released a new report detailing the travels and observations of about a half-dozen top officials.

In all seriousness, the document is a good introduction to the giant undertakings going on in Uruguay and Argentina, as well as an explanation of the motivations behind them, and the political realities that make them possible. A central theme is the ability of a more centralized government than our own to enact change more swiftly, as well as a cultural perception of laptops and Internet connectivity as tools in the war against poverty that goes beyond education.

It's also free, unlike most CoSN reports that are generally available only to members. Then again, after not inviting us down to South America, it's the least they could do, right?

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The Innosight Institute this week released a new white paper in which it takes the previous six categories it created to differentiate blended learning models and, well, blends them.

The 22-page document called "Classifying K-12 Blended Learning" simplifies the work of a previous paper from the institute and emerges with four new models of blended learning: the rotation, flex, self-blend, and enriched-virtual models. That's two down from a previous document released in January of 2011, indicative of a purposeful effort to create a less rigid taxonomy that might not account for the diversity of some blended models.

This new document also includes a new definition of blended learning that makes the stipulation that face-to-face instruction in any blended model must occur outside of a student's residence. This differentiates blended models from fully online models where a student may receive supplemental instruction from a parent or caregiver.

Since the Internet is awesome, there's no need to go over the previous taxonomy. But here's a summary of the refined one:

• the rotation model includes all blended learning models in which students rotate between modalities that include an online component within a singular course;

• the flex model connotes models where instruction is delivered primarily online and students rotate between online and face-to-face study on a customized schedule that varies based on each student's individual needs;

• the self-blend model stipulates any arrangement where students alternate between fully online and fully brick-and-mortar courses; and

• the enriched-virtual model represents models where students on a school-wide model alternate between studying remotely and studying at a brick-and-mortar location.

The classifications represent differences in the structure of blended learning models, but do not have implications by themselves for relative quality, the white paper says.

"Just as a hybrid car can be either efficient or a clunker and still be a hybrid car, blended learning can be both good and bad," the paper reads.

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The 2012 SIIA Ed Tech Industry Summit wrapped up on Tuesday, but I am only just now getting a chance to catch my breath and jot down a quick wrap-up of the two-day conference, which was a whirlwind of speakers, sessions, and awards. A couple of notes:

• The CODiEs weren't the only awards bestowed during the event.

Through its Innovation Incubator program, the SIIA awarded its "Most Likely to Succeed" award to Language Express, an initiative to build interactive digital products that teach life skills to 3- to 21-year-olds. The company most recently released The Social Express, a game that uses video modeling to help students learn social skills. Its "Most Innovative" award went to Filament Games, which has produced a series of online games designed to teach students science.

The winners in each category were also the first runners up in the other, and were chosen from a pool of 73 applicants, which was pared down to 10 finalists and two alternates that were subjected to a vote from conference attendees.

In addition, Smart Science Education Inc. won a complimentary year-long membership as a Blackboard Building Blocks partner, which grants the organization access to thousands of clients using the Blackboard Learn software.

• I closed my conference by attending a working group discussion about the Shared Learning Collaborative, an initiative funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the Carnegie Corporation of New York, in partnership with the Council of Chief State School Officers, as well as nine participating states. (The Gates Foundation and Carnegie Corporation of New York also fund Education Week coverage.)

The SLC aims to create a large datastore where schools and districts could input student, teacher, school, and district information, as well as content and applications, aligned to the Common Core. The SLC will be built on open source technology with an open applications program interface (API), allowing an infrastructure where multiple systems and databases can interact with each other. The hope is that having the technology infrastructure in place will encourage and enable vendors and developers to create products that work with the infrastructure and use the data available to continually improve themselves. The alpha pilot will launch in nine districts in different states on June 16th.

"We aim to create a shared infrastructure that works with existing technology and saves money," said Stephen Coller, a senior program officer of Next Generation Models at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. "This is about community contribution and ownership. We want to foster a broad market with the best technology."

Representatives from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation say they have been very clear about defining what their role in the SLC will be.

"We designed services to fill in the gaps," said Sharren Bates, a senior program officer for College Ready - Next Generation Models with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. "We want to build just enough to spark innovation at the product and user experience level."

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The Universal Service Administrative Company holds its annual compliance meeting this coming weekend for telecommunications companies who supply services to schools and libraries that participate in E-rate. That gathering will likely include an important discussion of the program's Lowest Corresponding Price, or LCP rule.

The rule stipulates that companies supplying services to participants must give a price comparable to that offered for private customers receiving similar services, and was the subject of an investigative Pro Publica earlier this month. The report found that companies had long ignored the rule, and that the Federal Communications Commission, which oversees E-rate, had done little to enforce it.

Now, at a meeting in Atlanta beginning tomorrow, The Universal Service Administrative Company—a private company that oversees the program for the FCC—is expected to present a PowerPoint presentation that includes twelve pages elaborating upon the LCP rule. A follow-up story from Pro Publica suggests the move is in direct response to initial story, despite a statement released by an FCC spokesperson insisting it was the result of discussions dating back to last August.

E-rate is a federal program, funded at about $2.3 billion annually, that helps subsidize school and library purchases of Internet connections and related services. It is funded through the Universal Service Fund, which in turn is funded through a tax fee charged to telecommunications providers that is typically passed on to individual customers. Generally, schools and libraries have all funding requests for projects establishing a connection to an outside service provider approved. Projects enhancing internal connections and infrastructure are typically only approved for E-rate funding in schools with high-need student populations.

The 69-page presentation includes a 12-page section on the LCP rule that explains its definition and purpose, along with an elaboration on a provider's responsibility to offer the lowest corresponding price to any institution it knows to be participating in E-rate. The presentation also describes methods of recourse both for schools and companies who feel the law is being ignored or abused, respectively.

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The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation announced the winners of its Automated Student Assessment Prize, or ASAP, essay grading competition on Wednesday, after issuing a report last month that found automated essay-graders capable of replicating scores of their human counterparts.

Three teams split the $100,000 in prize money from the Hewlett Foundation, with the trio of Jason Tigg (United Kingdom), Stefan Henß (Germany), and Momchil Georgiev (United States) collecting the $60,000 top award. The 11 contestants comprising the first-, second-, and third-place teams have backgrounds in particle physics, computer science, data analysis, and even foreign service work. But none have educational backgrounds, a departure from the report, in which participants were companies or nonprofits with experience in the educational market.

The Hewlett Foundation, which is underwriting the competition as part of its work to improve assessment methods along with the implementation of Common Core State Standards in English/language arts and mathematics, also funds Education Week's coverage of deeper learning.

The concept of using artificial intelligence to grade student writing has long been a polarizing one, even though the practice remains quite limited in K-12 education. Supporters of automated essay-graders say that, when incorporated correctly, they can allow students significantly more writing practice by scoring essays far more quickly than a human evaluator. Opponents contend such tools are still very weak when it comes to evaluating the validity of students' arguments and that they grade essays based mainly upon structure and grammar.

Tom Vander Ark, an educational consultant who is the co-director of the study and competition, said an important differentiation among the three winners is that they used a combination of predictive analytic strategies to drive their software, and not just natural language processing, the field of computer science studying the interaction between human and computer language.

"We think this is important because it's an advancement in the field, [and] it is further demonstration of smart scoring to contribute to state tests that incorporate lots of writing," Vander Ark said in an email.

Developers of the tools themselves at times appear divided over just how contemporary automated essay-graders should be used. For example, British particle physicist Tigg said in a press release that the technology could potentially transform educational delivery methods. But the same press materials also indicated that the winning trio expressed a belief that the technology is still in an early stage of its development.

Hewlett is also planning a competition for automated graders of short answer questions this summer, according to a press release. Like the essay-grading competition, it will be hosted by Kaggle, a platform for data prediction competitions that allows for transparency and discussion of competitors' work.

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So how big is the K-12 education marketplace, really? Depends on who you ask, according to several researchers here at the SIIA Ed-Tech Industry Summit who presented data they'd collected about the question.

Robert Resnick, president of Education Market Research, said through surveys of educators as well as education companies, his company found that the K-12 education market, including textbooks, technology, supplemental materials, and assessments, totals about $18.3 billion, up from $17.3 billion last fiscal year. Resnick estimates that the market at this point for digital content is about $2 billion.

While the education market generally is a "slow and steady" on, without wild yearly changes, several sub-segments of the market have increased over the past year, including reading and mathematics intervention products, online/digital content, instructional software, and productivity tool software, Resnick added. He also singled out the interactive whiteboard segment of the market, which totals about $2.2 billion, the majority of which are SMARTboards.

John Richards, the president of Consulting Services for Education, presented the results of his company's survey of the K-12 education market, which found that the technology segment of the market totaled around $7.5 billion in 2009-10, which includes content, instructional support, platforms and administrative tools, and "special markets" such as special education. This year's version of the survey is still collecting data for those of you reading this who work managing ed-tech companies.

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In conjunction with its annual Ed-Tech Industry Summit this week in San Francisco, the Software & Information Industry Association today announced the winners in the educational technology category of its 2012 CODiE Awards, which annually recognize some of the best new product development in the industry.

This of course leaves us observers scouring the names on the winners list in an attempt to identify some trends. And after looking at this year's 29 winners in all, the best analogy I can come up with is a primitive explanation of the Big Bang Theory. (And no, not the sitcom that has seized unilateral control of the airwaves on TBS and UPN).

If you think of the ed-tech industry like the universe, what began as the big bang of computers entering the classroom has become increasingly disparate and fragmented. That's not to say that the industry's diverse players don't work together, but the industry itself is expanding and decentralizing. And if you look at the three biggest awards given—those for best overall education solution, best K-12 solution, and best post-secondary solution—you'll find five different companies offering five unique services (there's a three-way tie in one category).

But at the same time, as the universe expands, it organizes itself into galaxies of stars, planets, moons, and other matter circling around a hub of mass. Similarly, it appears more winners this year are coming from major players like Discovery Education, Blackboard, Pearson, and especially McGraw-Hill, as innovators from the fringe are courted or absorbed by bigger competitors. (McGraw-Hill took three categorical awards, the only company this year to secure more than one.)

So what happens next? Some say the universe will expand forever, with galaxies speeding apart from each other at increasing rates. Others suggest it will slow, stop, reverse, and eventually collapse in on itself, leading to a new big bang and a new universe. And still others believe there are parallel universes similar to our own, perhaps even coexisting in the same space but another dimension, but with no crossover between their reality and ours. Kind of like Mac and PC users.

While you're pondering that, be sure to check back here for more of Katie Ash's live SIIA coverage from San Francisco.

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To kick off the second day of the SIIA Ed Tech Industry Summit, keynote speaker Tom Luna, the superintendent of public instruction in Idaho, spoke about the myriad of education reforms passed last year that is re-shaping everything from what classrooms look like to how teachers are compensated in that state.

"I believe that there's an inseparable link between a high-quality education system and a growing, robust economy," said Luna. "You cannot have one without the other."

Looking at the education statistics in Idaho before the reform, 92 percent of the state's students graduated from high school, but only 46 percent continued on to postsecondary education. Of that 46 percent, 40 percent needed remediation upon entering higher education, and only 38 percent went on to a second year of postsecondary education. As it is, only 34 percent of Idahoans have a postsecondary degree, while 60 percent of jobs require one. That, said Luna, was one of the main impetuses for the comprehensive reform.

In addition to the economic and academic reasons for reform, the fiscal climate of education funding in the state required a change, said Luna. "We had to make deep cuts, and we realized we were in a recession that was deeper and longer than any of us had ever been in before," he said. "We had to be willing to spend the money that we have differently. That is a hard call to make for education."

So what is changing in Idaho? For one, in three years, every high school in the state is scheduled to be a 1-to-1 computing environment. Whether that will be laptops or tablets is yet to be seen, but every high school teacher and administrator in the state is supposed to receive a laptop this year to undergo a year's worth of professional development. Next year, those devices will start rolling out to high school students. The initiative is fully funded, said Luna, but how it will be implemented is still being worked out. The state has set aside $4 million per year for professional development, and $100 million to be spent on technology over the next 10 years.

In a controversial turn of events, the education reforms also eliminated tenure and collective bargaining for teachers, while implementing a pay-for-performance system. "We know that the most important asset is the quality of the teacher in the classroom," said Luna. "And we must have a system to make sure that every student has the highest quality teacher every year in every classroom." Eighty-five percent of teachers are supposed to receive some kind of bonus, either for working in a hard-to-fill position, taking on a leadership role within the school, or for hitting academic targets. Each teacher is eligible for up to an $8,000 bonus per year.

Luna wrapped up his comments by emphasizing that while technology is an important part of the reforms, it is not a silver bullet for education. "Technology is not replacing teachers," he said "Technology is replacing chalk."

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