June 2015 Archives

According to The University of Chicago Consortium on Chicago School Research, Young adult success requires agency, an integrated identity, and competencies. The report says, children need four qualities that parents, teachers, after school professionals and other adults can help shape: Self-regulation, knowledge and skills, mindsets, and values. A key problem, according to the report, is that disadvantaged youth often face extra challenges, including fewer opportunities for consistent, positive developmental experiences and relationships.

Today's educators have an unprecedented opportunity to use technology to understand how students learn. With innovative teaching models and new assessment capabilities brought about by technology, students and teachers will have greater access to information about levels of understanding, remediation can decrease, and personalized learning at scale will become reality. And, ultimately this will mean that students will get the skills they need to succeed in education and in their careers.

Despite schools with classrooms full of technology, many students don't have computers or connectivity at home. Given the opportunity to extend and personalize learning, there is simply no excuse for not providing take home tech, at least for students that don't have access at home. We've known the answer to this question for nearly 20 years, it's take home technology.

Next Generation Learning Challenges (NGLC), an initiative of Educause, announced today that, through six regional programs, 49 school teams received grants as part of a $25 million K­-12 initiative to create new and transformed secondary schools. This includes 29 new or redesigned K­-12 schools that will open this fall. When these regional fund schools open, there will be more than 100 schools serving 50,000 students with transformed teaching and learning models.

Todd Rose points out that no student is "average." School designs based on average destroy talent because advanced students aren't challenge and students with specific weaknesses don't have their strengths nurtured. Student-centered models and comprehensive learner profiles are addressing this with benefits for students that are customized.

Leading adaptive platforms like Fishtree and Realizeit, make it easy to create competency-based systems full of little assessment gateways that ensure progress based on demonstrated proficiency. Declara takes a very different approach to personalization, it auto-generates ontologies rather than relying on engineered sequences. Core features include content collections, curation, annotation and measures of content efficacy, and collaboration.

This year the charter school movement turns 24. Currently more than 6,000 public charter schools serve 2.9 million students. Here's a look back at the last two dozen years, highlighting 10 noteworthy trends and developments.

Innovation is sustained by advocacy and policy, and that makes the role of state leadership and policy essential. In this blog we explore how governors, education chiefs, and policy makers should go about creating conditions that could help more young people develop critical think, communication, collaboration, creativity, and competitiveness.