Cater to all types of learning. INTERalliance students recognized that not all of them learn in the same way. If they were to create a new system, they would consider all learning styles so everyone can thrive.
Measure mastery in other ways, besides high-stakes testing. Team members wanted choice in proving their mastery. Rather than only testing, their systems would give learners the chance to show mastery through presentations, portfolios, essays or projects.
Expose students to career opportunities. By creating partnerships with professionals from Silicon Valley to New York City, team members wondered if they could schedule video calls to allow learners to explore different fields and think more about future professional careers.
Put students in charge of their own learning. While the teams recognized the importance of teachers, guidance counselors, parents and guardians, they wanted to offer learners more control over their education experience. In their new systems, learners would have the opportunity to build individual schedules and explore interests.
Use technology as a tool to enhance learning. The teams suggested technological ideas beyond individual devices. They suggested using video calls to talk with students in other countries to learn about different cultures or study languages. They talked about an online platform to track subjects mastered, learn ways to improve learning, and choose classes.
The real scary idea is that our system of education – and the politics surrounding it – is not innovating even close to quickly enough to keep up with the reality of today, let alone the reality of 2025.
From DSC: When done well, blended/hybrid learning can be very powerful, offering students the best of both worlds:
Numerous technologies involved with education continue to get better. Still, students don’t always have the discipline to be totally on their own…and I often read that learners desire someone to help them navigate through the content. (This can be done online as well, I realize.) Those things said, the article below caught my eye.
We are on the verge of a tide of smarter innovation that, if allowed to spread, will turbocharge the learning experience for students. Here are four areas worth watching:
Using technology to learn from learners
Using technology to adapt to how students feel
Building invisible assessments that are less intrusive
Keeping pace with technology in the classroom
…
Take SimCityEdu: Pollution Challenge – developed by GlassLab Games – where students learn how city-planning is impacted by environmental issues. As they play the game, the system is capturing their actions – such as the sequence of what they do or requests for help – and interprets patterns in data to assess how well the player understands important concepts. This helps teachers better evaluate how a student solves problems, rather than just the final product of their work.
In time, learning games like this should decrease reliance on stop-and-test exams and provide more real-time and actionable information to teachers.
Also related/see:
Search for Quick, Rigorous Ed-Tech Evaluations Underway –– from blogs.edweek.org by Michele Molnar Excerpt:
Work began [in October 2015] on a federally-funded project designed to quickly determine “what works” with educational technology, so that schools and districts can make faster decisions about it.Mathematica Policy Research won the $3.67 million contract to devise tools for rapid—and rigorous—evaluation of ed-tech products. The goal is to come up with a platform where educators can choose a test that will help them determine—within one to three months—how effective a particular ed-tech product is in their schools. SRI International is a partner on the project.The idea is that the platform will have tools to walk a practitioner, school leader, researcher or app developer through the process of figuring out which research design makes the most sense, and it will ask them questions to help them set it up, said Katrina Stevens, a senior advisor at the U.S. Department of Education’s Office of Educational Technology, which is funding the so-called “rapid-cycle tech evaluation” project.
The Association of Public and Land-Grant Universities is expanding its support of “personalized learning” with the help of a new $4.6-million grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.
A note from DSC: I am not familiar with Crowdmark; but Dustin Manley, from DesignedUX, contacted me and he pointed out what Crowdmark is doing with assessments…and I like their approach. It’s innovative, sharp; and it seems like it would boost learning all around.
Crowdmark has worked with universities to introduce two-stage exams as a way to integrate collaborative learning and assessment into the traditional exam format. In a two-stage exam, students individually complete the exam and then, working in groups of three to four, immediately complete the exam again.This method provides students with immediate feedback through discussion with their peers as they deliberate the most correct response. The two-stage exam provides feedback on individual performance while increasing students’ engagement and comprehension of course content.
In this first-ever higher education “gear of the year” guide, Campus Technology has turned to hundreds of education professionals to tell us which products in 29 categories are truly the best. We cover the gamut of technology from 3D printers to wireless access points. In almost every category you’ll find the Platinum, Gold and Silver picks to help you short-list your shopping, fuel your decision-making or perhaps start a friendly debate on campus.
With support from Vulcan Inc, a Paul Allen company, Getting Smart conducted a series of expert interviews with education and philanthropy leaders, and led a design workshop, to identify and vet impact investment strategies in U.S. K-12 education. This resulting report outlines opportunities where organizations can participate in making significant shifts in the American education landscape, ultimately improving student outcomes.
Through our research and interviews, approximately four dozen impact opportunities were identified in the following 10 categories and are described within the report:
1. Microschool, big impact.We’ve seen how microschools could, in most cities, accelerate the transition to next-gen learning. That’s why we were so excited to see AltSchool highlighted in a video on CBS News This Morning.
… 4. Mind the gap.Closing the Achievement at Three Virtual Academies, is a new report from K12 that highlights the progress of Texas Virtual Academy (leaders in Course Access in the Lone Star State), Arizona Virtual Academy, and Georgia Cyber Academy in creating opportunities for low-income students.
What work will look like in 2025 — from fastcompany.com by Gwen Moran The experts weigh in on the future of work a decade from now.
Excerpt (emphasis):
Seismic Shift In Jobs
The jobs picture either delivers on technology’s promise or plunges us into a dystopian future. The same interconnected technology that will change how goods and services are delivered will “hollow out” a number of skilled jobs, Brynjolfsson says. Clerical work, bookkeeping, basic paralegal work, and even some types of reporting will be increasingly automated, contracting the number of jobs available and causing a drop in wages. And while more technology might create new and different types of jobs, so far we’ve seen more job loss than creation in these areas, he says.
…
Who wins? Specialists, the creative class, and people who have jobs that require emotional intelligence like salespeople, coaches, customer-service specialists, and people who create everything from writing and art to new products, platforms and services, Brynjolfsson says. Jobs in health care, personal services, and other areas that are tough to automate will also remain in demand, as will trade skills and science, technology and mathematics (STEM) skills, says Mark J. Schmit, PhD, executive director of the Society of Human Resource Management (SHRM) Foundation in Alexandria, Virginia.
However, this winner/loser scenario predicts a widening wealth gap, Schmit says. Workers will need to engage in lifelong education to remain on top of how job and career trends are shifting to remain viable in an ever-changing workplace, he says.
From DSC: Tell me this…do today’s standardized tests produce these “specialists, the creative class, and people who have jobs that require emotional intelligence like salespeople, coaches, customer-service specialists, and people who create everything from writing and art to new products, platforms and services?”
Nope…I don’t think so either.
Given that…what changes do we need to make in order to better prepare our kids for the future they will inherit? For the skills and mindsets that they will need?
Even as education spending is projected to inch up two percent this year to reach $67.8 billion worldwide, the way in which school districts, colleges and universities are spending that money is evolving to reflect the growing digital nature of teaching and learning, according to Gartner. In a new report, “Top 10 Strategic Technologies Impacting Education in 2015,” the business IT consulting firm ranked 10 innovations and tech trends that it believes the education CIO should plan for in 2015.
Many of the technologies aren’t emerging from within education itself, said Gartner Vice President Jan-Martin Lowendahl. They’re being “driven by major forces such as digital business and the consumerization and industrialization of IT.”
…
1. Adaptive Learning
2. Adaptive Digital Textbooks
3. CRM
4. Big Data
5. and 6. Sourcing Strategies and ‘Exostructure’
7. Open ‘Microcredentials’
8. Digital Assessment
9. Mobile
10. Social Learning
The best piece of classroom technology available still is, and always will be, a teacher with a love of learning. The way forward with technology in our future schools is remembering that it is a tool to augment the powerful human connections that are so much of a part of great teaching and effective learning. Global Digital Citizenship can help us make this happen.
Let’s Dream Brighter
Imagine future schools in which students are totally engaged in a class, totally immersed in working together to solve real world problems. Imagine that they are self-driven and that they are coming up with amazing ideas on the spot. Imagine that they are concerned with each other’s well-being as part of a team and that their concerns reache far beyond the classroom to others all over the globe. Even further, they may interact daily with those people.
While this may describe a vision of the future schools we are envisioning, you might be surprised that some of these things are already happening!
…
1. Will they even be called ‘schools’ in the future?
2. What would problem solving look like in the future?
3. What would information look like in the future?
4. What would creativity look like in the future?
5. What would media look like in the future?
6. What would collaboration look like in the future?
7. What would citizenship look like in the future?
8. What does assessment look like in the future?
What is on the five-year horizon for higher education institutions? Which trends and technologies will drive educational change? What are the challenges that we consider as solvable or difficult to overcome, and how can we strategize effective solutions? These questions and similar inquiries regarding technology adoption and educational change steered the collaborative research and discussions of a body of 56 experts to produce the NMC Horizon Report: 2015 Higher Education Edition, in partnership with the EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative (ELI). The NMC Horizon Report series charts the five-year horizon for the impact of emerging technologies in learning communities across the globe. With more than 13 years of research and publications, it can be regarded as the world’s longest-running exploration of emerging technology trends and uptake in education.
What should an undergraduate chemistry major know by the time she graduates? How can one tell if she knows it? And how can chemistry instruction be improved to ensure that more students meet those expectations?
Such deceptively simple questions—for chemistry and every other discipline—have become an important focus of higher education leaders, accrediting agencies, and government. Yet many universities have struggled to develop robust processes for assessing student learning. Even when a central administration makes a serious effort to develop such a process, faculty participation is often pro forma.
The University of Pittsburgh is an exception. At Pitt, faculty across 350 programs are deeply engaged in a systematic approach to assessing student learning outcomes, which has led to measurable results and significant changes.
…
“Making Assessment Work: Lessons from the University of Pittsburgh” delves into some of the specific practices Pitt undertook and documents the change in the university’s culture. No system is perfect, but this case study shows Pitt’s decentralized approach, targeted at the level of coherent programs of study, coupled with strong and supportive leadership, led Pitt’s faculty to make assessment an important driver of program improvement.
On a programming note, this is the first in a new series of case studies on educational transformation from Ithaka S+R. Every few weeks, we will release a new report on innovative approaches that institutions have taken to improve student outcomes and control costs. Covering issues such as online education, learning analytics, and university governance, the case studies document the ways that change happens in higher education.
…the most important factor in the development of Pitt’s culture of assessment was its decentralized, yet accountable, approach. University leaders established a timeline and general framework for assessment, offered feedback, designated degree and certificate programs as the units of assessment, and, most significantly, left the details to faculty responsible for those programs. This combination of broad oversight and localized management has fostered a sense of ownership among faculty, who have made assessment an important driver of program improvement.
How can games unlock a rich world of learning? This is the big question at the heart of the growing games and learning movement that’s gaining momentum in education. The MindShift Guide to Digital Games and Learning [PDF] explains key ideas in game-based learning, pedagogy, implementation, and assessment. This guide makes sense of the available research and provides suggestions for practical use.
The MindShift Guide to Digital Games and Learning started as a series of blog posts written by Jordan Shapiro with support from the Joan Ganz Cooney Center at Sesame Workshop and the Games and Learning Publishing Council. We’ve brought together what we felt would be the most relevant highlights of Jordan’s reporting to create a dynamic, in-depth guide that answers many of the most pressing questions that educators, parents, and life-long learners have raised around using digital games for learning. While we had educators in mind when developing this guide, any lifelong learner can use it to develop a sense of how to navigate the games space in an informed and meaningful way.
These are some of the links I saved from the webinar, which were shared by participants. This was an excellent session and I learned about several new resources I’m anxious to try with my own students in digital storytelling projects!
Creative storytelling with Storehouse — from blogs.elon.edu by Analise Godfrey (Storehouse was created by former Apple User Experience Evangelist, Mark Kawano)
Theia Introducing a new and exciting world view, Theia smart glasses naturally integrate augmented reality together with your reality using unique technology and seamless design.
The platforms that businesses most commonly use to communicate with both colleagues and clients — phone, email, face-to-face meetings and video chat — are typically only used one at a time. If it’s just a quick chat, you pick up the phone, if you need to send a document you send an email. But is there a way to make multimedia collaboration more seamless through a single platform? We recently wrote about Talko, which aims to make voice calls more like emails. Now a similar service, Blrt, is offering both real-time and anytime sharing of documents, with integrated drawing and voice commenting tools.
30 Ways Google Glass Works in Classrooms [#Infographic] — from edtechmagazine.com by D. Frank Smith From allowing student to connect virtually with peers and teachers to helping identify learning difficulties, the wearable tech has clear potential as an aid.
Regardless of whether you agree with their criteria or the general practice of creating rankings, their newest initiative is undoubtedly an impressive leveraging of Big Data, applying complex algorithms to LinkedIn’s vast database of 313 million users to derive interesting conclusions for both students and those marketing higher education.
Microsoft is rebranding it’s unified communication platform Microsoft Lync. Microsoft plans to retool their approach to unified communications, and launch under the name “Skype for Business” in 2015. Microsoft originally acquired Skype for $8.5 billion in 2011.
The Redmond, WA based software giant made significant strides into the Unified Communications space, offering a cost-competitive unified communications platform which included Telephony, Chat, Collaboration and Video Conferencing all from the desktop, laptop or tablet.
Over recent years, many great drawing and painting apps have become available for tablets and smart phones. Here’s our pick of the most comprehensive packages on the market.
While it seems likely that most will use PhotoMath to sidestep actual learning, PhotoMath includes a “Steps” button that cleverly walks you through the steps from the original equation to the final answer.
Addendum on 11/2014 — some music-related apps from the November 2014 edition of The Journal:
The question we now need to ask is: Will there be a divide between learning that continues to rely on traditional learning spaces, compared to learning that takes place largely outside the walls of the traditional classroom? Moreover, if there is such a divide, will it be delineated by its cost effectiveness, its conceptual differences, or its pedagogical impact?
Many agree that technology has a role to play in this shift in pedagogical emphasis. Students now bring their own devices into the traditional learning environment, creating their own personal networks and learning environments. They are intimately familiar with the functionality of their devices, knowing how to use them to connect to, create and organise content. They are adept at connecting to their friends and peers too, but will they be willing to power share with their professors, take on greater autonomy and assume more responsibility to direct their own learning in the future?
Assessment and learning are inseparable in any good pedagogy. If the first does not fit the second, then we see a failure of that pedagogy. Far too often assessment fails to delve deeply enough, or fails to capture actual learning. If students are relying increasingly on digital technology to connect them with content, peers and tutors, and to facilitate new, distributed forms of learning, then we should endeavour to assess the learning they achieve in a relevant manner.
